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1JDHomrighausen
I think I'm the first to read this one!
A Life of Jesus by Shusaku Endo
Shusaku Endo's story-like book on Jesus is not a work of historical scholarship. Nor is it a work toeing the line of orthodoxy for the sake of the comfortably religious. Endo wrote his life of Jesus for the Japanese. His work emphasizes those aspects of Jesus that make the most sense for that culture.
So Endo discusses neither atonement theology nor Hebraic prophecy. He barely touches on Jesus' divinity. In Endo's portrait, incomplete as are all human portraits of this enigmatic figure, Jesus was a peasant who tried to teach the message of God's love in a world where people only wanted miracle-workers or a Messiah who would fix their earthly problems. Endo's Jesus was a very human being who increasingly realized his bumbling, cowardly disciples did not understand him. Endo's Jesus seems almost bodhisattva-like in his acute awareness of others' subtle sufferings. Endo's God is not a strong father on a throne, but a maternal lover who suffers with humans to show her understanding and love. Endo's God, and Endo's Jesus, reveals His true meaning only in the weakness and vulnerability of the Passion.
But Endo's best insights come not when talking about Jesus alone, but about his relations with John the Baptist, with Peter, Judas, and the other disciples, and with the Roman and Jewish authorities who condemned him. For example, Endo speculates that the temptation in the desert recorded in the Gospels may have been an encounter with an Essence proselyte. Jesus would have seen in the proselyte a message of repentance and the wrath of God, but nothing about the love of God. The crowds who follow Jesus are both his popularity and his downfall, as their fickle judgments first adore him as a miracle-worker, eschew him after the Sermon on the Mount, begin to love him again as they project their Messianic fantasies on him, and ultimately reject and betray him when he preaches at the Last Supper that he will die. Judas was a man who, long before the other disciples, realized that Jesus was not the Messiah. Judas' mixed hatred and love for both himself and Jesus drive him to first betray his teacher, then to repent of that act and become saved through his understanding of Jesus' suffering.
This book is as much a life of Jesus as a psychology of the disciples. How did these cowardly men, who not only ran away from their master in his suffering but disavowed him, become courageous apostles and martyrs? Endo looks at other young, small religious movements of the time and can see no historical reason why they died and Christianity survived. Endo speculates that perhaps the Resurrection made them finally understand all of Jesus' talk about God's love.
Just as Jesus was misunderstood in his life, so he is now. I enjoyed Endo's attempt to make sense of Jesus in one cultural idiom. And while it's clear this book isn't the last word on Jesus, Endo writes that he could well write another book on this divine prophet's life.
"That's the whole life of Jesus. It stands out clean and simple, like a single Chinese ideograph brushed on a blank sheet of paper. It was so clean and simple that no one could make sense of it, and no one could produce its like." (173)
A Life of Jesus by Shusaku Endo
Shusaku Endo's story-like book on Jesus is not a work of historical scholarship. Nor is it a work toeing the line of orthodoxy for the sake of the comfortably religious. Endo wrote his life of Jesus for the Japanese. His work emphasizes those aspects of Jesus that make the most sense for that culture.
So Endo discusses neither atonement theology nor Hebraic prophecy. He barely touches on Jesus' divinity. In Endo's portrait, incomplete as are all human portraits of this enigmatic figure, Jesus was a peasant who tried to teach the message of God's love in a world where people only wanted miracle-workers or a Messiah who would fix their earthly problems. Endo's Jesus was a very human being who increasingly realized his bumbling, cowardly disciples did not understand him. Endo's Jesus seems almost bodhisattva-like in his acute awareness of others' subtle sufferings. Endo's God is not a strong father on a throne, but a maternal lover who suffers with humans to show her understanding and love. Endo's God, and Endo's Jesus, reveals His true meaning only in the weakness and vulnerability of the Passion.
But Endo's best insights come not when talking about Jesus alone, but about his relations with John the Baptist, with Peter, Judas, and the other disciples, and with the Roman and Jewish authorities who condemned him. For example, Endo speculates that the temptation in the desert recorded in the Gospels may have been an encounter with an Essence proselyte. Jesus would have seen in the proselyte a message of repentance and the wrath of God, but nothing about the love of God. The crowds who follow Jesus are both his popularity and his downfall, as their fickle judgments first adore him as a miracle-worker, eschew him after the Sermon on the Mount, begin to love him again as they project their Messianic fantasies on him, and ultimately reject and betray him when he preaches at the Last Supper that he will die. Judas was a man who, long before the other disciples, realized that Jesus was not the Messiah. Judas' mixed hatred and love for both himself and Jesus drive him to first betray his teacher, then to repent of that act and become saved through his understanding of Jesus' suffering.
This book is as much a life of Jesus as a psychology of the disciples. How did these cowardly men, who not only ran away from their master in his suffering but disavowed him, become courageous apostles and martyrs? Endo looks at other young, small religious movements of the time and can see no historical reason why they died and Christianity survived. Endo speculates that perhaps the Resurrection made them finally understand all of Jesus' talk about God's love.
Just as Jesus was misunderstood in his life, so he is now. I enjoyed Endo's attempt to make sense of Jesus in one cultural idiom. And while it's clear this book isn't the last word on Jesus, Endo writes that he could well write another book on this divine prophet's life.
"That's the whole life of Jesus. It stands out clean and simple, like a single Chinese ideograph brushed on a blank sheet of paper. It was so clean and simple that no one could make sense of it, and no one could produce its like." (173)
