"Ideograph of Transforming Vulnerability: Sushako Endo's Jesus"

Preface: This is a review of a Japanese Catholic novelist's stunning portrayal of Jesus. Sushakau Endo wrote his _Life of Jesus_ (1972) to help non-Christian Japanese readers understand and appreciate the meaning, reality and call of Jesus. I think Endo successfully transformed the challenge of that hermeneutic circle into a heavenward spiral of fresh insights and interpretations in which he shed new light not only on Jesus life, but also developed an innovative and moving explanation of why the disciples became such powerful and courageous witnesses after the resurrection. Since I first wrote this in Indonesia in 2004, I have added comparisons to Marcus Borg and John Domic Crossan's _The Last Week_ and Ernest Becker's _The Denial of Death_. Here I also had referred to Bruce Chilton's Rabbi Jesus.


"Ideograph of Transforming Vulnerability: Shusako Endo's Jesus"

H. Talat Halman
Central Michigan University

Shusako Endo (1923-1996) A Life of Jesus. Boston: Tuttle, 1978. ISBN
4-8053-0668-8

(Prologue: The morning I was leaving Bali, I made the wise
decision to pick up this unusual book. Once I started reading it on
the plane, I was captivated. Endo made Jesus seem so real and natural.
Once I finished reading it, I started from the beginning again.)

Endo shows how the paradoxical power of Jesus' vulnerability as a
Messiah of love was the key to the disciples' amazing transformation.

This vision of Jesus in a Japanese Catholic writer's voice written to explain Jesus to non-Christian Japanese brought my appreciation of the meaning of Jesus to life.

In Endo's vision, Jesus' vulnerability as Messiah of love so radically transformed the disciples that from wavering, uncertain and bewildered disciples, they emerged as courageous witnesses to the resurrected Jesus who would be -- and proved they were willing to be --sacrificed as their Master had been.


Endo expresses Jesus' vision of God as divine mother: Jesus not as king, but as patient, suffering, eternal companion.

Shusako Endo's A Life of Jesus reminds me both in style and substance
of Bruce Chilton's Rabbi Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 2000), but it
carried me more fully and deeply into Jesus' life and heart. I
couldn't put it down. In its power to evoke a living sense of Jesus,

Endo's novel is what I think of as a narrative icon.

Endo's vision is not as Japanese as one might infer from the book jacket blurb,
as it is universal, historical, and confessional. Because Endo is a Japanese
Catholic writing this biographical portrait to explain Jesus to other
(non-Christian) Japanese his novel gains the dual advantage of being
accurate while also creating a fresh perspective.

In Endo's novel, as in Chilton's reconstruction, Endo presents a clear interpretation of Jesus' discipleship of John the Baptist and the challenges Jesus' own disciples found in following Jesus.

Endo builds his book toward an innovative interpretation of Jesus'
resurrection to explain the transformation of the once-wavering
disciples into compelling witnesses of extraordinary courage.
He evokes the disciples' shock and disappointment as they realize Jesus
seems to be betraying their expectation of a victorious Messiah, as he
embodies instead a Gospel of love. Echoing throughout the book is the
phrase, "the love of God and the God of love." And in Endo's eyes, this love that Jesus extends makes him, and is in itself, particularly vulnerable and powerless.

Endo's interpretation of Judas is also significant. Endo succinctly unveils Judas' role as the "dolorous," the first to sadly realize – as he expresses it when he watches a woman anoint Jesus with perfume – that Jesus' "messiahood" will disappoint the disciples' expectations. Endo even tries his hand at analogies between Jesus and Judas as two men share a destiny -- though with great differences of significance -- to be rejected and disappointed.


One of Endo's most important themes is the vulnerability at the heart
of Jesus' love. His disciples and companions wanted miracles of
healing and signs and wonders, but refused what he most wanted to
offer – love. Slowly, Endo warms up to his theme of Jesus' vision of
God as divine mother, a vision of a maternally caring God. As this
vision matures Jesus shows that he desires not to be a king, but
rather, an eternal companion. Endo sees Jesus as wanting to patiently
suffer with and offer love to the sick and the poor so he can address
the root of their suffering and the heart of their maladies. This is
why, as Endo portrays it, Jesus' finally chooses powerlessness and
vulnerability, rather than power. Only with this vulnerability and
powerlessness – total acceptance -- can Jesus demonstrate love as
dramatically as he does on the cross.

So Jesus would be the Messiah of love who builds the temple of love.
And in this light Endo's explanation of Jesus' silence before Caiaphas
offers a new clarity: Jesus remained silent because he knew Caiaphas
and he understood two different conceptions of "Christ," one
political, one spiritual. Thus Jesus cannot answer, though in his
silence he affirms that the trial is inauthentic.

[See John Domic Crossan and Marcus Borg, The Last Week where Borg and Crossan interpret Jesus' motives and actions before Caiaphas much more cogently and insightfully.]


Endo's writing evokes Gospel symbols as parallels to Jesus' shift from
Messiah of miracles to Messiah of love. For example, he traces the
progressive deepening of the symbol of the Bread of Heaven. From the
matza and manna of Passover as the bread that "feeds" liberation, to
the Messianic miracles of fishes and loaves at the meals of 4,000 and
5,000, until at the Last Supper the bread is Jesus himself being
consumed. As Endo describes it, Jesus' giving of bread and wine is
more than liturgical: it is the seal of intimate union which his death
and resurrection will bring into realization.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker offers an insight about the power of that matches part of Endo’s momentum. Becker writes that in Christianity:


"…man’s cosmic heroism was assured, even if he was as nothing. This is the most remarkable achievement of the Christian world picture: that it could take slaves, cripples, imbeciles, the simple and the mighty, and make them all secure heroes, simply by taking a step back from the world into another dimension of things, the dimension of heaven." (Becker 1973: 160)


Becker’s description of Christianity’s power is poignant, but in invoking the abstraction, “the dimension of heaven,” I feel Becker misses something more tangible and evocative about this transforming power that Endo succeeds in vividly explaining. Having contemplated Jesus' vulnerability, hopelessness, and powerlessness,
Endo presents a precise and potent vision of the power of the
Resurrection. Endo asserts that the disciples must have been stunned
that, even after deserting their master, they heard that his final
words were words of love. And as Endo sees it, their transformation
required Jesus' total vulnerability and powerlessness: even though
they had deserted him, he had still in such agonizing death, loved
them and expressed that love.

Endo progressively raises this question throughout the book. How had
such cowardly deserters become transformed into such courageous
exponents and examples of Jesus' message, life, and love? Endo
underscores that Jesus' resurrection had a unique and unprecedented
component. No previous resurrection – Elijah, Elisha, (or the allusion
to Elijah and John) offers an explanation of the unique power of Jesus
resurrection as measured by the disciple's transformation. But what
does explain this transformation, Endo argues, is Jesus' gift of
absolute forgiveness in the face of such vulnerability and
powerlessness.

And it is this total, radical, unconditional forgiveness which Endo
means by his enigmatic comment (p. 173) that Jesus' life "…stands out
so clean and simple, like a single Chinese ideograph on a blank sheet
of paper. It was so clean and simple that no one could ever make sense
of it, and no one could produce its like."


Endo's biographical portrait also "stands out so clean and simple." But as I read it I felt Endo had truly made sense of it.