Bayani: A Filipino postcolonial heuristic device in understanding the Messianic role of Jesus of Nazareth

• Main Author: Pedregosa, Lawrence S.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2011
• Subjects: Postcolonialism; Heroes; Jesus Christ—Messiahship; Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/6111; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=13026&context=etd_masteral
• Institution: De La Salle University

This theological investigation uses bayani as a heuristic device to understand the messianic role of Jesus of Nazareth from a postcolonial Filipino Christian context. Employing various postcolonial schools of thought in understanding Filipino Christian identity as a discourse, the study unearths the narratives that formed the conceptual development of bayani in Philippine history and the messianic tradition that Jesus embodied through a postcolonial rereading in the sacred scriptures. The strategic essentials found in bayani and messiah were analyzed through Analogical Imagination. These essentials were later deconstructed through a supplementary analysis of funeral rituals accorded to a bayani and the traslación of the Nuestro Padre Hesus Nazareno. This research concludes that bayani is analogical and supplementary to the messianic role of Jesus of Nazareth due to cultural hybridity of narratives based on these findings: First, both personalities are charismatic leaders who subverted various manifestations of imperialism. Second, they are classic representative subjects of their collective identity who provided a narrative distinct from designs of the Imperial Other while being symbolically narrated by the people through history and commemorative ritual practices. Third, both personalities developed anti-imperial discursive practices that inspire future generations to embody as traces of identity and become a redivivus of a previous bayani or messiah in times of crises. Fourth, popular expressions of the pasyón are found in a bayani making it analogous to the messianicity of Jesus. Fifth, various expressions of pakikipagkapwa in funeral rituals given to a bayani that are also ritually accorded to Jesus of Nazareth in the image of the Hesus Nazareno during the traslación show the supplementarity of roles between the two subjects. Lastly, the use of titular expressions of Panginoon and Poon to Jesus, which consequently made him a bayani to the eyes of the faithful, shows that Spanish missionaries patterned it from the datu-alipin relationship of the precolonial times as part of their colonial translation to evangelize the natives.