Pastors in the Classics by Leland Ryken & Philip Ryken & Todd Wilson

Author:Leland Ryken & Philip Ryken & Todd Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL074000, REL108030, Clergy in literature
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

11

Silence

Becoming like Jesus in His Death

We are . . . persecuted, but not forsaken . . . always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.

2 Corinthians 4:8–10

While visiting a Tokyo museum, the novelist Shusaku Endo saw a fumie—an iconographic image of Jesus Christ in bronze and wood. The fumie was blackened by the feet of seventeenth-century apostates who chose to trample the face of the crucified Christ rather than suffer torture and death at the hands of their overlords.

Seeing the fumie raised questions for Endo about Japanese Christianity, about the incarnation and crucifixion of the Son of God, and about his own faith in Christ. What was ministry like for the priests who tried to serve God in those days of persecution and apostasy? Endo wondered if he would have had the courage to suffer torture or would have trampled Jesus underfoot. Silence emerged from these questions, and also from Endo’s lifelong quest to reconcile his Japanese upbringing with the claims of a gospel he first heard in Europe.

Knowing some historical background is crucial to understanding the novel. Christianity began in Japan around 1549 through the pioneering work of the Society of Jesus. By the end of the sixteenth century, there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese Christians—so many that Francis Xavier famously described Japan as “the country in the Orient most suited to Christianity.”

The first portent of persecution was a 1587 edict banning foreign missionaries. Though this attempt to stem the tide of Christianity failed, the following decades saw growing persecution of the church. Twenty-six missionaries were crucified in 1597 near Nagasaki, where Endo’s novel is set. Then, in 1614, the Tokagawa shogunate ordered the immediate expulsion of all foreign missionaries, forcing the church underground.

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