In the island nation of Vanuatu, there is a community of people who worships an American soldier as the incarnation of God. In another village nearby, there are people who believe that Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, is his brother, and worships him alongside the American G.I. allegedly named John Frum. On another island, apparently President Lyndon B. Johnson is God.
Because John Frum was said to be a U.S. soldier, the worshipers sing the Star-Spangled Banner and march in mock Army combat uniforms embrazoned with “Tanna Army U.S.A.”
Anthropologists call this phenomenon a “cargo cult.” It was a more common sight in isolated Southern Pacific, which had seen sudden encounters with Americans, Japanese and Europeans during World War II and thereafter.
The more sophisticated people in a more “civilized” part of the world, like we, tend to laugh this off as an infantile imagination of a “primitive” people.
But the phenomenon of cargo cults gives us a moment to pause and think. From time to time, many prophets were raised and perhaps not as many, but several, incarnations of God appeared in different places. If a follower of one incarnation begins to think his or hers is the only, first and one incarnation of the true God, a somewhat more sophisticated, but nonetheless similar, cult would develop into a full-fledged religion.
While it is not my intent to call some of the world’s major religions, including Christianity, “cargo cults,” I feel that sometimes the Church places too much focus on the “historic Jesus” bound in the first century Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts, at the expense of the spirit of the Gospel teachings and the eternal truth behind the Gospel and the one who is the main subject of the Gospel.
Even in the first century, a careful reading of the four Gospels and the book of Acts reveals two distinct Christs, one Jewish and other Greco-Roman. The former is presented as the Jewish messiah sent by the God of Israel, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, while the latter presented as the son of the Unknown God of the universe.
So this brings us to a question: what is essential, and what is the “cargo”? Is it the Messenger? Or the Message?
