Santo Niño, a God accessible to all

One of the great mysteries of our faith, if not the greatest, is the way the Son of God came to us, a helpless babe. The Israelites were the people God raised to keep faith in God’s promise of redemption after the first fall into sin by Adam and Eve, our first parents. What really was that sin whereby we all loss the state of grace with God? God had warned our first parents that should they disobey Him, they will surely die. "You surely will not die," said the serpent Satan. "No, . . . you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad."

To this very day, that first temptation persists in men and women. To be a god is the ultimate ambition. For us that means pride of place; to be placed above and over everything – power, priority, privilege, possession. All this spells pride and pride is the root of all sin and the unfortunate thing is that since our first parents fell we all became rooted in this pride. Greatness for us is to win in an election, to occupy the very first places in the land, the power which can give us most everything – the pleasure of wine, women (remember Cleopatra, the serpent of the Nile, mistress of Caesar and Roman lover, Anthony), wild song; the conquest of land, sea and air, of the universe and outer space and be owners of even Mars and the moon; to tame nature plundering according to our desires and when we say nature that includes control of human life and reproduction of life and death by euthanasia.

The radical paradox of the Redeemer coming to us, a helpless babe was beyond the comprehension of the chosen people. "He was in the world, and the world came to be through Him, but the world did not know Him. He came to what was His own, but His own did not accept Him" (Jn 1:10-11).

One would say, we Filipinos are really favored that in the Holy Child whose proverbial name is invoked by them with fondness as "Santo Niño", whose first manifestation in the Philippines when the sacred image was brought to our shores by Magellan, became an object of instant faith. Queen Juana, wife of Rajah Humabon of Cebu received the image as a gift when she was christened. This spurred a wave of Christianization. Why do I say favored? Because that is what the prophet Isaiah says of those who receive the Holy Child and believe in spite of His lowliness, of His being a child without any pretenses to power: "To those who did accept Him He gave power to become children of God, who were born nor by natural generation nor by human choice, nor a man’s decision but God" (Is 1:12-13).

The Holy Childhood of the Lord sums up what God wants us to be if we would enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The Santo Niño is adored and loved by most anybody. Everybody, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, privileged and underprivileged, able and disabled, employed and unemployed, law-abiding citizen and criminal – all can approach Him without fear as we do any child. This explains why one finds the Santo Niño enshired in every nook, in homes and hovels in the squatter areas, in business offices and malls, in the market and vending stalls – everywhere, the cult of the Santo Niño is sign that our bonding with God will depend on whether we ourselves are children, simple, guileless, pure, humble with absolute trust and self-surrender to the Will of God.

There is the Santo Niño to remind us that to those who humble themselves as a little child He is just there when we need Him. The Filipinos manifest this faith as maybe no other nation does.

Feast of the Santo Nino, (Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Luke 2:41-52