6.2. Minahasan Christology: Jesus Christ as Our Empung
The
Lokon
Telu (the
three peaks of the sacred mountains: Empung, Tatawiran, and Kasehe)
has long been adopted to represent God the Father, God the Son, and
God the Holy Spirit. In the trinitarian context, as it is translated
into the Apostle's Creed in the Tondano language, the Christ is
“UrangNa
Pengesan”
(His Only Child). Jesus as an urang
(a
child)
is
in a familial relationship with the Father in Minahasan linguistic
terms. This represents the closeness of the two, which speaks to
Christ's obedience to the Father and the Father's love to the Son.
This relationship is an ideal in Minahasan society, although it poses
a challenge to the Minahasan narrative of bravery. For within this
relationship, the Christ exemplified a different kind of bravery, a
bravery marked by humility and obedience “to the point of death,
even the death of the cross” (Phil 2:8). But for Minahasans,
Christ's suffering has also opened a way that may confer to us
courage, bravery and even compassion; this is no longer by way of
inflicting anyone with pain and death, because we as Minahasans also
laid hand on Him, making Him a sacrifice, yet this was a way to bear
our sins (kaselokan,
kalewo'an).1
For if we are no sinners, we have no story in Him.
One
more significant expression is Empung
or Opo'
Yesus.
The use shows that Jesus Christ has been adopted into our ethnic
consciousness, although this should be differentiated from the
traditional understanding of ancestorship. It is true that Jesus, as
a fellow human being, lived a virtuous and exemplary life in
Judea-Palestine when the land was occupied by the Romans, but in this
particularity, Jesus was a Judean, and He cannot be regarded as our
opo'
or
empung
or kasuruan
(ancestor).
For the Minahasans, only Minahasans can be regarded in those terms.
Yet, Jesus is an Opo'
or Empung
or Kasuruan
to us because He Himself is the incarnated Opo'
Empung timaliaka en ataran wo lawanan
(LORD God who created the land and the sea). Jesus is He who brought
the knowledge paripurna2
of
the One we worship from time immemorial,
and through the Holy Spirit revealed God's love and grand plan of
salvation to the Minahasans as to the rest of the nations.
Jesus
also is our Empung
who
shares
our suffering (The One who suffers with us). The Christ experienced
the cruelty of Roman imperial/colonial oppression, with a plot made
by His own kawanua
(compatriots). However, this was done not outside of God's
redemptive action. According to the gospels, this was the cup that He
drank for our salvation. In this history of salvation, we find
ourselves sharing the scars of colonial oppression with the Christ,
and thus to live in freedom of such oppression, we may behold the
freedom offered to us in His resurrection and glorification.
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1 See
the posan of bravery in Chapter Four, under Minahasan Ethnic
Religion.
2 Bahasa,
“complete,” “perfect.”
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