ENDO'S DEEP RIVER
A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan
University Public Worship
Stanford Memorial Church
August 23, 2009
Today's gospel reading[i] is particularly striking because it shows so many of Jesus' disciples abandoning him. He's finally gone beyond the pale, many of them seem to be saying, with his teaching about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Perhaps it seems too primitive, too cannibalistic. For Jesus has just said, as reported by John, "[M]y flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them."[ii] Perhaps this sounded too much like the Baal cult of the region, roundly condemned by the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament; followers of Baal allegedly practiced the drinking of bull's blood and human sacrifice.[iii] So at first Jesus' disciples say, "This teaching is too difficult; who can accept it?" And then, after Jesus tries to give further explanation, the gospel writer tells us, "[M]any of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him."[iv]
Certain teachings of Jesus often do indeed seem difficult, and many of us continue to turn back from them. That may even include the teaching from today's gospel lesson that there's a living Father who sent Jesus -- or, as I'd expand upon it, that there's a creator God who's infinite and eternal, who's the law and order of the universe, and who's the spirit that infuses all of life. The reading from Psalm puts the longing for God poetically, assuming that we can be entirely alienated from God: "My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord... Happy are those who live in your house, ever singing your praise... They go from strength to strength... O Lord of hosts, happy is everyone who trusts in you."[v]
But honestly, it's not always easy to trust in God, is it? Life often seems so random, meaningless and absurd if not downright cruel. Modern science seems to challenge so many claims of the Bible. Following the biblical commandments seems to be no guaranty of happiness or success. The list recommending atheism can go on and on.
A wonderful book to help us with this struggle is Shusaku Endo's Deep River, translated from Japanese and first published in English in 1994.[vi] Two characters, one a Christian who becomes a Roman Catholic priest, and the other a student of French literature who's a dedicated atheist, continue a conversation and challenge each other throughout the novel. They meet in college, where Mitsuko is called Moira by her friends, in honor of the title character of a French novel by Julien Green. Green's Moira seduces the puritanical student Joseph, and Endo's Mitsuko seduces a fellow student, Otsu, who is headed for the priesthood. Her aim is to torment him both with sexual desire and with anti-religious arguments so that he'll stop pursuing his spiritual vocation. "Are you a Christian? Do you really believe it?" she asks upon their first encounter. He explains that his family members are all believers, and he's been one since he was a child. Mitsuko is actually attending a Christian university with Otsu, but she's never considered believing in any of its teachings and she hates having to listen to sermons.[vii]
At a party Mitsuko and her friends force Otsu to keep drinking sake until he agrees to forsake God. But instead he just keeps going to the bathroom to vomit, saying, "Even if I try to abandon God... God won't abandon me." The next day, when they're both sober again, Mitsuko reminds him that Marx said religion is the opiate of the people and that Christianity has plundered many lands and killed many people in the name of spreading the gospel. She asks him to stop going into the campus chapel as a condition for their relationship, and he agrees. Later, when he's fallen in love with her and wants to introduce her to his family, she rejects him and stops seeing him.
Mitsuko ends up marrying a successful Tokyo contractor, and Otsu goes on to seminary in France. They meet at one point in Lyon. She asks him to stop using the word God, which she can't relate to and makes her nervous, and they agree to substitute the word Onion. "Just what is this Onion to you?" she asks. He responds, "[N]ot so much an existence as a force. This Onion is an entity that performs all the labors of love." She shoots back, "That's even more repulsive. How can you use such unsettling words as 'love' with a straight face?" But in her own mind, Mitsuko continues to think about the meaning of love and wonder if she's capable of it herself.[viii]
They keep up a correspondence over some years, and Mitsuko learns that Otsu has been delayed in his progress toward ordination, because his French superiors think there is something heretical in his nature, which he feels is simply a difference between European and Japanese sensitivities. When they ask what God is to him, he explains, "I don't think God is something to be looked up to as a being separate from man... I think he is within man, and that he is a great life force that envelops man envelops the trees, envelops the flowers and grasses." The French priests then call this heretical pantheism. He writes to Mitsuko that his faith began early with his mother's warmth -- "The warmth of her hand as it held mine, the warmth of her body when she cradled me, the warmth of her love, the warmth that kept her from abandoning me, even though I was so much more dumbly sincere than my brothers and sisters." He was taught by his mother that God "was simply a vastly more powerful accumulation of this warmth -- in other words love itself... Ultimately what I have sought is nothing more than the love of that Onion, not any of the other innumerable doctrines mouthed by the various churches." Then Otsu moves subtly to speak of Jesus as the Onion: "My trust is in the life of the Onion, who endured genuine torment for the sake of love, who exhibited love on our behalf." Yet, he doesn't see Jesus as the only way that God has been made flesh. As he said during an oral examination in seminary, "God has many faces. I don't think God exists exclusively in the churches and chapels of Europe. I think he is also among the Jews and the Buddhists and the Hindus...and the Muslims. He is everywhere." For this he's viciously reprimanded: "These are the notions born of your pantheistic delusions!"[ix]
Mitsuko, though, comes to realize her personal and existential loneliness, especially after getting divorced, and she tries to deal with it by becoming a hospital volunteer, aiding patients who are dying. But unfortunately, "Mitsuko knew that what she performed were not acts of love from her heart, but mere play-acting."[x] Otsu is finally ordained, and goes to Varanasi, India, on the banks of the Ganges River, to assist the dying there in an odd parallel to what Mitsuko is doing in the hospital in Japan. He assists old, sick people who have collapsed in the streets, after making pilgrimages from all over India to be able to have their ashes scattered in the sacred Ganges when they die. On his back, he carries those who are still living to a facility on the banks of the river and those who have died to the funeral pyres, also at the riverside. But he does his work with a very different attitude from Mitsuko, who comes to Varanasi to meet Otsu. He explains to her, "Every time I look at the River Ganges, I think of my Onion. The Ganges swallows up the ashes of every person as it flows along, rejecting neither the beggar woman who stretches out her fingerless hands nor the murdered prime minister, Gandhi. The river of love that is my Onion flows past, accepting all, rejecting neither the ugliest of men nor the filthiest."[xi]
Near the end of the book an angry crowd breaks Otsu’s neck when he tries to protect the life of a tourist who's committed a forbidden act -- taking a picture of a body being delivered to the funeral pyres. Mitsuko is able to come and comfort Otsu before he's taken to a hospital, where it's likely he'll die. But as he's being carried away on a litter, saying, "My life... this is how it should be," she ends up shouting at him, "You're a fool. You're really a fool... You've thrown away your whole life for some Onion! Just because you've tried to imitate your Onion doesn't mean that this world full of hatred and egotism is going to change!"[xii]
Ironically, just before this Mitsuko seemed to have had a breakthrough moment as she waded into the Ganges in a sari she had bought. She turned her body in the direction of the river's flow and said to herself, "This is not a real prayer. I'm just pretending to pray... Like my fabrications of love, this is just a fabricated prayer." Then she thought these thoughts: "What I can believe in now is the sight of all these people, each carrying his or her own individual burdens, praying at this deep river. I believe that the river embraces these people and carries them away. A river of humanity. The sorrows of this deep river of humanity. And I am part of it." The novel's narrator explains that "She did not know to whom she directed this manufactured prayer. Perhaps it was toward the Onion that Otsu pursued. Or perhaps it was towards something great and eternal that could not be limited to the Onion."[xiii]
So, returning to the disciples saying that Jesus' teachings are difficult... They are. He teaches us to love unconditionally -- all the way through life and even unto death. There are other teachings that are so difficult, as John makes clear, that "many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him." But there's certainly another way to view Jesus' teaching in today's gospel lesson that doesn't seem so primitive and cannibalistic as the literal eating of Jesus' flesh and drinking of his blood. Jesus explains, "It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life."[xiv] Earlier in the book of John, Jesus distinguishes between being born of the flesh, as we all are, and later having the possibility of being "born again" of the spirit, and in that way being able to participate in the kingdom of God.[xv] So, I don't believe Jesus is asking us literally to eat his flesh and drink his blood, as worshipers of Baal might have done with a bull's flesh and blood in ancient Canaan in order magically to gain superhuman strength. As I've expressed earlier in this sermon series, the point is that Jesus is the flesh and blood incarnation of the divine spirit of God on earth. He's been given to us as a precious gift to help us learn how to live our lives fully and meaningfully, with him as the leading exemplar.
In our sacrament of communion we gather at a common table, as he did with his disciples at the Passover Seder that became his Last Supper before his execution, and we eat bread and drink wine as they did then, and we do in remembrance of him now. Jesus made it clear from the beginning of his ministry that man does not live by bread alone; human beings also need to live by the word of God.[xvi] Jesus is the word of God made flesh. In him, and in his teachings, we can learn how to live in a godly or Spirit-filled way. It's not enough physically to eat manna in the desert, as the Israelites did to prevent starvation in the Sinai, or to eat the barley loaves that Jesus and his disciples distributed to five thousand people near the Sea of Galilee. One must also eat the living bread that Jesus brings through his teachings and his way of life. That's the way of the larger liberty -- the way of expanding light and far-sightedness. Jesus' living bread gives us the courage to stand up to unjust authority, whether political or religious. Jesus' living bread gives us the strength to serve people everywhere, whatever their oppression. Jesus came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly.[xvii]
BENEDICTION
Go in peace. Live simply, gently, at home in yourselves.
Act justly. Speak justly. Remember the depth of your own compassion.
Forget not your power in the days of your powerlessness. AMEN.
Mark L. Belletini
NOTES
1
[i] John 6: 56-69.
[ii] John 6: 55-56.
[iii] Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 58-59.
[iv] John 6: 60, 66.
[v] Psalm 84: 2, 4, 7, 12.
[vi] Shusaku Endo, Deep River, translated by Van C. Gessel (New York: New Directions Books, 1994).
[vii] Ibid., pp. 34-37.
[viii] Ibid., pp. 60-68.
[ix] Ibid., pp. 115-124.
[x] Ibid., p. 124.
[xi] Ibid., p. 185.
[xii] Ibid., pp. 211-212.
[xiii] Ibid., pp. 209-211.
[xiv] John 6: 63.
[xv] John 3: 1-15.
[xvi] Matthew 4:4; Luke 4:4.
[xvii] John 10:10.