The Cross We Bear

My weekly Bible study group has been using a fascinating little book titled “Cries from the Cross” by Erwin Lutzer, senior pastor at Chicago’s Moody Church.

It is a short work, but full of riches, as Lutzer examines the last words of Jesus, cried out in anguish as He hung on the cross.

We concluded our studies last night with the book’s Epilogue, “Taking the Cross into the World,” where the author reminded us that the cross represents the great reversal of values of the world.

For example, he relates, in the early centuries after Jesus, Christianity “captured” North Africa, thanks to the “love of the Christians that defied explanation.”

Thus, when Christians found dead bodies abandoned in the street they washed them and gave them a decent burial. “The pagans were impressed with these unexplained acts of love.”

It reminded me of Shusaku Endo’s great novel “The Silence” (soon to be released as a movie by Martin Scorsese), with his strikingly similar depiction of the attraction of Christianity for 16th-century Japanese peasants.

I tell you the truth – for a long, long time these farmers have worked like horses and cattle; and like horses and cattle they have died. The reason our religion has penetrated this territory like water flowing into dry earth is that it has given to this group of people a human warmth they never previously knew. For the first time they have met men who treated them like human beings. It was the human kindness and charity of the fathers that touched their hearts.

And yet – Christianity was later eradicated from both North Africa and Japan through force of arms (as is occurring right now in parts of the Middle East). Remnants remain in both regions, but they are small and without much influence.

Is it really enough just to have a love that defies explanation? Do Christians not need something more? Like our own armies? Or is intense persecution simply the cross we must always bear?

One of the members of my group commented last night that God surely has a purpose in allowing the depravities of ISIS that we are witnessing in the Middle East.

At times like these I am thrown back on Isaiah:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

The Reality of Evil

As Christianity faces extinction in the Middle East, under attack from a merciless campaign of genocide by the criminals of ISIS, it is distressing that the response of the West has been so weak.

Even Christians appear shell-shocked by events, and do not seem to know what to do, other than pray and donate to relevant charities.

Probably they simply do not know what to do. But I suspect that many of us simply cannot comprehend that the appalling evil we hear about is actually a reality in the twenty-first century.

A new movie might be about to change such notions.

Martin Scorsese is one of the world’s greatest living directors. He seems to make a new film every two or three years, and often it is a massive hit. His last movie, released in 2013, was the hugely popular “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

That was definitely not a Christian movie. But his next one, due for release late this year or early in 2016, might be.

It is “Silence,” based on the celebrated 1966 historical novel by Japanese Christian writer Shusaku Endo, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize.

“Silence,” Endo’s masterpiece, is set in seventeenth-century Japan and tells the story of an idealistic Portuguese missionary working to help his Christian brethren in Japan in the face of attempts by the authorities to eradicate the religion.

Sadly for much of the time he feels that God is remote, and not answering his prayers – hence the novel’s title.

It is based on real people and real events, and it is striking to read of the cruelty that was employed by the Japanese shogun – military leader – and his officials. The book portrays the torture in some detail, and I assume the movie will do the same.

A favored method was to hang a Christian upside-down over a pit of excrement, with a tiny cut behind the ear sending blood – one slow drop at a time – running down the victim’s face. Death could take a week.

At other times a Christian was tied to a pole that was secured in the sea. High tide would come up just to the victim’s neck, then the water would abate. Again, death was slow.

I do not know how graphic Scorsese will be in depicting the barbarity of the seventeenth-century torturers. I hope he is unflinching. The world needs to see the reality of evil. It is just this manner of evil that is occurring now, in our own time.