What Doth It Profit
By: Alvaro Adizon
Tags: Foreign Affairs, Philippines, Bible, Fiction, Christianity

“And now?” said the pastor. “How does he? Still at the hospital?”

“Yes,” said the chairman of the barangay. “They say he could die.”

“Oh God,” the pastor said, placing his hands on his head and getting up from the table abruptly, such that coffee in the mugs jumped, the barangay chairman’s mug brimming over with a slight splash on the table, he not having taken more than a single sip from the cup during the course of their conversation, not because the coffee was decaffeinated according to some outlandish religious precept, but because this western newcomer who’d come to preach God’s holy word seemed to have prepared the brew according to some foreign formulation disagreeable to the chairman’s Philippine palette. Neither of them paid attention to this spillage, the silence filling the room almost total save the dull and impotent whir of the electric fan, the pastor now walking around with his hands still placed over his head and his face contorted in an expression of abject outrage, the barangay chairman taking advantage of the pause to further contemplate the abode of this strange biblical foreigner who just some weeks ago had settled without warning in their humble suburb. To the chairman’s surprise the austere flat possessed no religious ornamentation save a mammoth leatherbound book resting on a silver stand, gilt with garish golden letters: HOLY BIBLE KING JAMES.

“But I’ve heard of men live,” the pastor said at last. “Live without their … Why, the eunuchs of old, for example.”

“It’s not the cutting of it that he’ll die of. It’s the loss of blood. He tried to do it himself, see. With some razor he found from God knows where. And by the time they found him it was quite late.”

“It was after my sermon, you say?”

“Right after.”

This white-skinned pastor who was already pale turned paler yet. He balled his fists and pressed them into his closed eyes. “Oh God,” he said.

“God may be the one at fault this time, it appears to me. What was it exactly you said in that Bible preaching?”

The pastor turned to the chairman, his hair that before had been slicked back and dignified in a manner worthy of a man of God now tousled in a frivolous disarray, his ashen countenance betraying an unbiblical and almost manic despair. “Why,” he said. “I preached: just as human love drives a man to commit acts of madness for his beloved, what more so the Love of God? I was merely expounding the Lord’s own words: if thy right eye leadeth thee to sin then pluck it out, and if thy right hand, cut it off. So I said: the zeal and holy desire to enter the House of God should lead us to commit deeds of recklessness if necessary. Sever the things that attach us to this sinful earth.”

“So it’s Jesus who’s to blame.”

“What!” said the pastor. “No!”

“Who then?”

The pastor didn’t reply.

“Perhaps the one who preached?”

“Hellfire. All I did was further illuminate the spirit of the Lord’s words. The Lord never meant we should actually cut off our hand or our … Oh damnation! He was speaking in metaphor.”

“Metaphor.”

“Yes. A hyperbole.”

The barangay chairman sighed. He said: “Strange doctrine it must be when the very pastor divinely ordained to preach it cannot even explain the meaning of the words of his own God. What more the unknowing listeners, we humble heathen?”

“But I was merely preaching as the good Lord had done in his own holy scripture. Am I to be held responsible that both he and I made recourse to figures of speech?”

“The boy was the eldest son, dear pastor. Worked the evening shift as garbage collector just so that he could help his parents send the rest of his eight siblings to school and give them something decent to eat. What are you going to tell his folks now, with those poor kids starving? God provides?”

“Why. But God does provide. If not in this life then in the next.”

The barangay chairman shook his head sadly. As though no hope any was left for this clueless and sorry prophet, this holy fool of God. “Listen,” he said. “The counselors of the barangay have met and we’ve come to a decision. You are going to have to leave.”

“Leave?”

“Yes. Not just cease all preaching. Leave the barangay.”

“But it was just a metaphor. I did nothing wrong.”

The barangay chairman sighed and stood up from the table. “I’m sorry. But it’s for the good of us all.”

“Wait. Stay. Please.” The pastor turned hysteric, stomping his feet and wailing and supplicating as though the barangay chairman now making for the door were some itinerant messiah upon whom his whole salvation depended. “It was just a metaphor,” he cried. “Just a metaphor.”

“Keep those highfalutin metaphors to yourself,” the barangay chairman said, his face dark and solemn as he closed the door and left. The pastor knelt alone in his room and started to sob and for once questioned in his disconsolate heart the mysterious manifestations of divine justice and providence as attested in that Good Book he held so dear.