{"id":2737,"date":"2023-06-23T07:44:40","date_gmt":"2023-06-23T11:44:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=2737"},"modified":"2023-06-23T07:44:40","modified_gmt":"2023-06-23T11:44:40","slug":"picturing-the-heart-of-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2023\/06\/23\/picturing-the-heart-of-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Picturing the Heart of God"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>.

For most of its history, the island nation of Japan has remained culturally isolated from the rest of the world.

That began to change during the second half of the 20th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 After its catastrophic defeat in World War II, Japan quickly became a major player on the global economic stage.

Many Japanese enthusiastically embraced features of Western culture.\u00a0 Crowds of young women screamed just as loudly for the Beatles in Tokyo as they did in London or New York City.\u00a0 Baseball became a national obsession. \u00a0California Angels superstar Shohei Otani, who both pitches and slugs home runs, is currently considered one of the greatest players in the history of the game. \u00a0American fast food restaurants, especially McDonald\u2019s, dominate the Japanese \u201ctake-out\u201d scene.\u00a0

But things are different when it comes to religion.

Western faiths have hardly made a dent in the hearts and minds of the Japanese people.\u00a0 Historians estimate that Japan has never been more than 1% Christian, despite five centuries of earnest efforts by Catholic and Protestant missionaries.\u00a0

It\u2019s ironic, then, that Shusaku Endo, a passionate follower of Jesus, was considered Japan\u2019s greatest living writer at the time of his death in 1996.\u00a0 The novelist was routinely marginalized and diminished for buying into \u201cWestern spirituality,\u201d even though his books have been widely loved and respected.\u00a0

Endo was frequently asked why Christianity has never really found a home in Japan, and has at times been brutally repressed.\u00a0

He observed that the Jesus-following life, properly understood, speaks to the inner person.\u00a0 Japanese are traditionally wary of revealing their feelings, and emotional vulnerability is considered by many a risk not worth taking.

More than anything else, however, Endo suspected that his fellow citizens\u2019 rejection of Christianity is connected to the Western emphasis on God as Father.\u00a0

An old Japanese saying declares that the four most dreadful things on earth are \u201cfires, earthquakes, thunderbolts, and fathers.\u201d\u00a0 Fathers may be obeyed and respected in Japan.\u00a0 But they are not generally loved.\u00a0 A stereotypical father works all day, comes home late, and eats alone \u2013 a meal he would certainly not prepare for himself.\u00a0 Nor are fathers expected to make apologies, express gratitude, offer encouragement, or provide grace.\u00a0 But they can definitely be counted on to offer criticism.\u00a0

In Japanese culture, failure is unacceptable.\u00a0 Some local volcanoes have even become places where young people who have disappointed their fathers leap to their deaths.\u00a0 \u00a0

Endo realized that in the Japanese mind, very little was attractive about surrendering one\u2019s life to the Father-God presented by the Bible.

But mothers are a different matter.\u00a0 Mothers traditionally provide the emotional glue that holds together Japanese families and neighborhoods.\u00a0

How could he introduce his nation to the mother-love of God?\u00a0 \u00a0

One of the reasons few Americans have ever heard of Shusaku Endo is that Jesus, especially among evangelical Christians, is often presented as a \u201cman\u2019s man.\u201d\u00a0 He is a tough-as-nails Savior who displays cosmic authority, performs acts of miraculous power, and knocks over the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple.\u00a0 Not many American sermons spotlight texts that reveal the mother-love of God.

But such texts do exist. \u00a0\u00a0

In Isaiah 49:15, the Lord says, \u201cCould a mother forget a child who nurses at her breast?\u00a0 Could she fail to love an infant who came from her own body?\u00a0 Even if a mother could forget, I will never forget you.\u201d Jesus says in Luke 13:34, \u201cJerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.\u201d\u00a0 And in Luke 15:8-10, he compares God to a woman who searches her house relentlessly until she finds a lost coin, suggesting that God exerts the same rescue efforts for lost people.

God is the nursing mother, the sheltering hen, and the woman who will never give up.

Endo made it his mission to reveal to his own people that these are pictures of the heart of God.\u00a0 In the presence of such a God, failure was not final for Peter.\u00a0 And failure is not final for us.\u00a0 We are still loved.\u00a0 He wrote, \u201cMy way of depicting Jesus is rooted in my being a Japanese novelist\u2026 [I write] for the benefit of Japanese readers who have no Christian tradition of their own and who know almost nothing about Jesus.\u201d

Author James Bryan Smith wrote recently about a class of seminarians.\u00a0 Their professor asked them to close their eyes and picture God.\u00a0 What did they see?

Most of these men and women preparing for Christian ministry visualized the same thing that leaps into the minds of most Western people:

God is an old man with a flowing beard.\u00a0 He is Michelangelo\u2019s authoritarian Father-God riding on the clouds up on the ceiling of the Vatican\u2019s Sistine Chapel. \u00a0

It\u2019s true that that picture resonates with a number of biblical texts.\u00a0 But we cannot say \u2013 we must not say<\/em> \u2013 that\u2019s all we know about God.

The professor urged his students to consider a different starting point:

When you think about God, first picture Jesus.\u00a0<\/em>

And realize that the God who is really there embodies all of the virtues and values that make life truly worth living.
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To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here. For most of its history, the island nation of Japan has remained culturally isolated from the rest of the world. That began to change during the second half of the 20th century.\u00a0 After its catastrophic defeat in World War II, Japan quickly became a major player on the global economic stage…. Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2737"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2739,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2737\/revisions\/2739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}