Remember

     As we were walking to our car right after Good Friday service this morning, I almost made a detour to the Jaro plaza to catch some bibingka hot off the coals.  I've always loved Iloilo bibingka as it seems something like a flatter, more orange version of Pangasinan's tupig.  Besides, this was the closest thing to ginat-an that my late grandfather used to make for us when my sister and I were kids and we would ladle the hot stuff off the pot the minute we walked into the house right after the church service.

     So right after the Catholic procession wound past our street, my sister and I went to our district plaza which was a stone's kick away from our house for a bibingka-and-balut fix.  We were met by a couple of brightly-lit across on their way back to sponsors' houses.  The lines to the church for viewing the image of the dead Christ were unsurprisingly serpentine.

    But what caught my attention was the equally long queue right across the church.  A mini fair had been set up in the district plaza and the lines for the rides snaked like Medusa's tail.  I gulped.  It was like the district fiesta - complete with the staple ferris wheel and coin toss games.

     That brought me back to a conversation that my uncle and I had a long time ago.  This uncle was now a pastor of a Baptist church in Batangas.  "It is finished," he told me, referring to Christ's completed work in Calvary, the death which atoned for the sins of mankind.  That is true, there is nothing more we can do to wash ourselves any cleaner than Christ's death.  Our purest, noblest, most altruistic works would mean nothing to the King of Kings.

     So on a day like Good Friday, what is to be expected of us who have received this gift of salvation?  At the very least, I daresay, would be remembrance.  This is not meant to add to what is already finished work but as a way of renewing one's commitment to the Savior by reflecting on our daily walk with Christ and juxtaposing it with his walk to Golgotha.  After all, there is great pain in being waylaid and forgotten and a sacrifice as great as that deserves more than just merely being committed to memory.

     No, I do not point a finger on fairs and games in the town plaza on Good Friday.  I do not know their hearts nor I do know their personal circumstances.  That would be judgmental and I, of all people, have no right to judge.  Besides on Good Friday, here I was thinking of food and satisfying my rumbling gastric acids!

     However I dare pray: "Remember."  With all sincerity and gratitude, remember.  A person can very well be in a Good Friday service or mass and miss out on that very important aspect whereas one staring at the ferris wheel go round can very well have completely absorbed the enormous impact of Christ's death.  All I am saying is that I hope that we do not forget what that sacrifice made more than two thousand years ago meant and still means today.