The Feminine Image of God in Shusake Endo

Editors Note

Shusako Endo is a renowned Japanese author and his works are becoming known in the English-speaking world as well. He is a Christian, a Catholic, and was baptized at age eleven on the occasion of his mother's conversion. He feels his own conversion was neither informed nor a personal choice and much of his work is an attempt to come to grips with the problems resulting from that. He studied in France and found that, politically and culturally, he was an alien. He was immersed in a culture permeated by Western Christianity, and he felt utterly alienated. Endo attempted to harmonize his Japanese cultural heritage and his Western culture religion; through his writings he sought to reinterpret the image of God in Christ, bridge the gulf between the "father-religion" of Western culture and the "mother-religion" of Japan. Jean Higgins seems to have captured the essence of Endo's theology and philosophy, and we believe that her intriguing article is very appropriate for Stauros. While her focus is on Endo's theme of the feminine image of God, there is a clear relationship of that theme to suffering. We believe she presents some innovative concepts and we are pleased to offer you this edited version of Higgins' article.

I began to feel that the gulf I had long felt between Christianity and me was due to European overemphasis on the paternal aspect of religion. Christianity seemed distant to us Japanese because the other aspect, maternal religion, had been grossly neglected from the time of the early Christian missionaries down to the present.1

This quotation encapsulates the theme of much of Endo Shusako's writings. He develops this most fully in his book, A Life of Jesus. His starting point in this portrait of Jesus is Jesus' own image of God. According to Endo, Jesus developed that image in contrast to the image of God preached by John the Baptist and common among the Jews of that period.2 Jesus comes to conceive God as Love. He preaches "the love of God and the God of love."3 But preaching a God of love--and nothing else but--turns out to involve more than a change from the Baptist's God of stern judgment and punishment. It flies in the face of simple observation of normal life. The world is filled with suffering, and God does nothing about it. How can he be a God of love?

Jesus, in Endo's story, grows up a very sensitive and very perceptive young man. He sees the human suffering all around him. He appreciates its depth in every single person he meets. Yet, alone in the desert after a period of discipleship under John the Baptist, he has had profound personal relations with the God of love. He burns with the desire and need to make that God known. But he wonders how he can make the reality of a God of love vivid and plausible to those who suffer so long as they remain in their suffering.4

Western accounts of Jesus often stress that Jesus does all he can to alleviate sufferings, especially by his healings. But Endo finds equally striking in the gospels many instances when Jesus does not work a physical healing but merely offers the consolations of his attention, his presence, and his love (e.g., the woman who was a sinner in Luke 7:36-50). In others again, he notes, Jesus does heal, but the reality of consolation offered by Jesus' presence and love is as impressive in the story as the miracle itself (e.g., the woman with the issue of Blood in Mark 5:25-34).5

At the same time, Jesus protests against the demands made on him for ever more miracles, more healings, more visible signs (John 4:48). Moreover, on the evidence of the Gospels themselves, no matter how many people Jesus did heal, the number of those with whom his power never made contact must have been greater still. Think of all the people in the towns which he never visited; think of the people without faith even where he did pass (Mark 6:5-6). When he heals one out of a crowd, as at the pool of Bethesda, think of the many other sufferers lying about waiting.

Thus though Jesus in the Gospels did cure people, Endo concludes that those cures were more in the nature of signs of God's presence than they were steps in an orderly campaign for the elimination of sickness and suffering. The miraculous works Jesus performed were not his solutions to the problem of suffering. Nor was Jesus' message a promise to eliminate suffering from human life. He indeed repeated prophetically God's ancient promise of a perfect world to come, but he does not announce any program whereby this perfect world can be achieved according to strategically planned action of human beings.

What Jesus announces, according to Endo, is just his God of love. Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor, blessed are those that mourn." To make those who suffer feel loved, he tries to be with them whenever he can. He exposes himself to their misery. He lets them see that he longs to share their suffering as much as possible. This does not take the pain away. It does not change the poor into rich, the mourning into those who celebrate and rejoice. It changes them only into poor who are loved, mourners who know that someone else cares.

The boldness of his preaching and his manner of life aroused great expectations. But when Jesus, preaching the love of God and the God of love, summoned his hearers to heroic love and heroic forgiveness, a chill settled on the crowd. They realized that Jesus was not, in fact, the hoped-for political messiah, that he did not, in fact, have a strategy for restoring the ancient glory of Israel. Their expectations had been in vain. Disillusioned, many turned away from this politically powerless messiah of love.6

Why did Jesus choose this way of acting? Granted that he did not want to be a political messiah, could he not at least have planned and executed a more effective and general campaign against human suffering? A war on disease, a war on poverty, would not necessarily have been political. It would have picked out the evils that could practically be eliminated in a reasonable amount of time and concentrated on those; then advanced to others. It would have concentrated on the sufferers for whom something could be done.

The way Jesus chose to follow, as Endo reads his life, was not the way of efficient, practical use of power. It was the way of love. This way attempted to face fully the whole sweep, the entire reality of all human suffering--in all its immensity and in its every single instance and embodiment--even the suffering for which no one can do anything. He wanted to offer an approach to suffering that would not have to omit any instance of suffering, any person in pain.7 Where there was pain, there he wanted to be, consoling, loving, willing to share that pain. This would be his way of showing the truth of his own faith in the God of Love. He would bring love into every human life he could; he would make love available for every human life.

Endo's point is that in this design and in his carrying it out in the way he did, Jesus did in fact make God's love visible on earth and become himself the perfect image of the love of God and the God of love.8 For what Jesus did is also what God does. God is there and is loving us, present in our pain and privation. We tend not to believe it, because we are not being relieved of our pain. But the truth is that we are being loved. Some day the pain will vanish and only the love will remain. Some day our poverty, mourning, meekness, hunger for justice, and all the rest, will receive their promised rewards. God's word abides: "They will be comforted"; "Theirs is the kingdom of heaven"; "They shall have their fill." But human life is a matter of enduring in the in-between time, hanging on in the waiting period--which is usually a whole life long--and continuing to believe during all that time that we are surrounded by love.

A commonsense, rational, and efficient approach says: "Let us set ourselves to eliminating those problems, pains, and evils. Let us show God's love by improving the universe he has made." There is nothing wrong with such an approach, but there are some problems with that way: not all suffering can ever be relieved, ever be eliminated from the earth. What about those who are left in insoluble instances? Not all cases of even soluble suffering can be reached here and now with even the available solutions. What about those who do not get reached, especially if the message of love is: Your pains will be relieved. For in fact they will not be. That approach not only prefers some or gives first place to some over others but that approach also leads logically to subordinating some to others, exploiting some (the few) for the sake of others (the many). For the focus in that approach is on results.

Now, that is why, good as all that is, it is not the perfect reflection of God and God's love. Focus on results is, in Endo's notion, typical of the love of a father. It is practical, efficient, well-planned. It takes definite steps to a definite desirable end. It can mean punishing in order to improve, withholding love and approval in order to stimulate to a greater good. It can mean cutting, hurting, in order to heal, amputating the part, in order to save the whole. It can mean making an example of one to help many. It is conditional on success, focused on results, on achievement.

But for Endo, God's love is not like that. God's love is maternal, like the love of a mother.9 The mother, for Endo, is the one who cares not so much about the deed as about the person. She cares about being there, present, to the suffering one she loves, to hold and embrace, even if she can do nothing more. She begs to be allowed to fall ill of the same disease, be struck with the same wounds, fall prey to the same misfortunes herself, if only the pain of her loved one can be relieved. And if this cannot be, then she still wants to remain--consoling, comforting, solacing, sharing, watching, waiting--unconditionally.

Ineffective? Inefficient? Weak? But loving? No one can doubt it. No matter what happens; no matter how much the evil we endure has been brought on us by our selves, our own folly, selfishness, sin; no matter the weakness, the cowardice--all is embraced. As long as she is needed, she is there with a love that can be put to any test and can never be doubted. That is, for Endo, mother-love.10

Jesus' life was like that. And his death supremely so. He wanted a death that would be for others and that would be a summary sharing and embracing of all the helplessness, weakness, and pain of mankind.11 Sufferers could then tell themselves, no matter what they had to face:

• One was here before me, vulnerable, weak. And that one is still here, bearing with me, sharing with me. That one remains with me in my suffering, pain, loss; he went through this too, for me.12 I am loved, irrespective of what is happening to me.
• I no longer have only to believe in God's love in the midst of my suffering. These ills will some day pass away and God will embrace me in pure beauty, peace and joy. But meanwhile, now, here, in the midst of them, God is loving me. The face I see is the face of God turned toward me. That hand I feel on mine is also God's hand.
• The suffering Jesus underwent is God's suffering, the suffering of "the god of love who comes himself to experience the sorrows of (human)kind."13 The suffering I myself experience, then, is not punishment, but love; not abandonment, but a very special and deep presence. Out of what some may call silence, I hear him speaking. What he says is: "I am here with you, as burden-bearer, as eternal companion."

Endo holds that Christianity was born at the moment when the disciples realized that they had betrayed Christ's love and that, despite their betrayal, that love was still there for them and always would be. That was the moment they saw in Jesus the revelation of an embracing, forgiving, maternal God. This, he says, is the kind of portrait that speaks to the religious sensibilities of the Japanese people who "tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father."14

What impressed Endo most in the New Testament is: the presence of a God who suffers with us, the form of Christ who comes running to those who suffer and bears half their suffering--the same form that is seen in a mother.15

Endnotes

1. "The Anguish of an Alien", 179. This article was the lead-off essay in The World of Shusaku Endo, a special issue of the literary magazine, Shinpyo (December 1973). It appeared in The Japanese Christian Quarterly in its Fall 1974 issue.
2. A Life of Jesus (Iyesu no Shogai), trans. Richard A Schuchert (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), 24, 57.
3. Ibid., 57-58.
4. Ibid., 11.
5. Ibid., 50-51
6. Ibid., 68, 118.
7. Ibid., 48, 51.
8. Ibid., 147.
9. Ibid., 25; "Anguish of an Alien," 182.
10. A Life of Jesus, 80; "Anguish of an Alien," 181.
11. A Life of Jesus, 147.
12. "Anguish of an Alien," 181.
13. A Life of Jesus, 28.
14. Ibid., 1.
15. Shusako Endo, "Concerning the novel 'Silence,'" in The Japanese Christian Quarterly, Spring, 1970: 103.

Editors Notes

Jean Higgins points out that Endo's presentation of his case involves a very selective use of the New Testament texts and an interpretation which fills in from behind the scenes of the Gospel accounts. Western readers are aware that modern Western interpretations of the New Testament are also based on selective use of the texts. Western interpreters bring the weight of centuries of European culture, and none of us is a neutral observer of the Gospel text. When Endo says that Christianity is about Jesus as patient sufferer, burden-bearer, eternally waiting presence, endlessly forgiving love, it is hard to deny that he is pointing to fundamental features of New Testament teaching, but he is not the first to do this.

Again, when Endo concludes that if these are characteristics of Jesus, then they are also attributes of God, he performs a justifiable, logical deduction which merely takes seriously the Christian doctrine that Jesus is the incarnation of God and the revelation of God par excellence: "No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has revealed Him" (John 1:18). "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9).

If the arguments of this article are correct, what Endo really intends to criticize is the dominant Western image of Christianity since late medieval and Renaissance times. Authentic and original Christianity, as he understands it, is thoroughly acceptable to him, and he proposes and advocates it not only for the Japanese, but for all his readers.

Acknowledgment

We are grateful to Larry Lewis, MM, for drawing our attention to this intriguing article.

We are grateful to Paragon House Publishers for permission to edit and paraphrase the article. It is excerpted from God and Temporality, Bowman L. Clarke & Eugene T. Long, eds., Paragon House Publishers, NY, 1984.