This book by the talented Christian Japanese novelist was created as an introduction to Christ for the Japanese people, which explains its focus on the "motherly love" of God rather than the fatherly. Shusaku asserts early on that the reason that Christianity has not been able to affect the Japanese people is because the God who western Christians preach is simply too foreign for them to accept or understand. While it enlarges one's perspective on who Christ is, Shusaku's work is simply too much speculation posing as fact. Perhaps worth a read, but read with caution as he is not biblical in several instances.

Judas Iscariot. His motives likely were not quite as simplistic as what is written in the Gospel of John. Were he the owner of a simple mentality, he would have quit the master long before, near the Lake of Galilee, or during the days of those painful wanderings in the north. His failure to break with Jesus would seem to indicate that he shared the other disciples' dream that Jesus would stage a comeback and would then restore the ancient glory of Israel in accord with their hopes. (111)

Chapter 12: "Into Thy Hands, O Lord, I Commit My Spirit"

A person begins to be a follower of Jesus only by accepting the risk of becoming himself one of the powerless people in this visible world. (145)

Chapter 13: The Question

How did the cowardly disciples come by their sturdy faith after Jesus died? How did a man so ineffectual in this world, who had upset the dreams of his own disciples, come then to be divinized by these same disciples? These two questions forever entangle people who read the Bible, yet the biblical scholars, with their theories of form-criticism or of redactionism, hardly so much as allude to these questions. (159)

back