The Portuguese Jesuit, Sebastian Rodrigues, is the central character of Shusaku Endõ’s 1966 novel titled Silence, considered to be one of the best Catholic novels of the past 100 years.

Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe went to Japan in 1638 endowed with a missionary zeal for the persecuted Christians of Japan and in search of another Jesuit, Cristóvão Ferreira, a real stalwart of the community who was rumoured to have apostatised. (His apostasy is a historical fact). Rodrigues could not believe that his mentor would not have willingly submitted to a ‘glorious’ martyrdom.

They arrive in Japan with the help of Kichijiro, a sake-soaked apostate (he echoes the mestizo who follows Graham Greene’s “whiskey priest” in The Power and The Glory) who, Judas-like, later betrays Rodrigues and other Christians.

Silence is a book about suffering and redemption, nature and grace, but most of all it is a book exploring the silence of God or His apparent passivity or, worse, impotence in front of our suffering, and His unwillingness or inability to answer our prayers.

This problem continually torments Rodrigues, particularly when he is confronted by the savage persecution of Christians. Instead of salvation, Rodrigues feels that he has brought nothing but suffering for the Japanese. The triumphant missionary activity is thus bringing death not redemption.

The question torments him more when, after his capture, more Christians are martyred in front of his eyes. On one terrible night he is brought to a cell in the magistrate’s palace. Ferreira the apostate confronts him saying that apostasy means sacrificing oneself for the salvation of others, thus partaking in Christ’s redemptive mission.

On Easter Sunday He answered the anguished plea of His son

For a whole night Rodrigues listens to him as well as to the groans of the Christians hung upside down in a pit full of excrement after small incisions were made behind the ears to allow blood to drain slowly, thus prolonging the agony. They have apostatised but will remain in the pit till Rodrigues tramples on an image of the face of Christ. His apostasy will be their salvation.

Rodrigues begs God to break his silence.

Six years earlier Noble laureate Elie Wiesel explored God’s silence in his novel Night. It recounts the horrors of living in a Nazi concentration camp. Eliezer, a devote Orthodox Jew, recounts how from the very first night in the camp he loses his faith in God and in human relationships.

But a particularly horrifying incident shows that this loss is not definitive. A child is hanged while all prisoners are forced to watch. Where is God, someone asks. The boy dies slowly as his weight is not heavy enough to break his neck. Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes clear.

Someone asks again why is God absent and silent.

Will there be an answer?

Rodrigues the Jesuit and Eliezer the Orthodox Jew feel that they hear an answer within them.

Endõ writes that Rodrigues hears Jesus tell him that:

“You may trample. It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”

Was it an illusion, a self-justification or a mystical experience? Endõ says that the cock crowed but later he shows Rodrigues confessing the renegade Kichijiro, thus risking his life again. There are also signs that he continued kindling a Christian presence of sorts in Japan.

Wiesel writes that Eliezer too heard a voice within him answering him.

“Here He is – He is hanging here on these gallows.”

Weisel and Endõ come from different religious traditions. The first was probably inspired by the story of the binding of Isaac while Endõ by the crucifixion of Jesus. They don’t show a God who is above it all and lords it over but a God deeply involved in the history of his children; a partaker of their suffering.

We here meet a kenotic or self-emptying and self-sacrificing Christ, not a triumphant one. This is the Christ who experienced the silence of His Father. The Crucified Christ betrayed and abandoned almost by all feels so very abandoned even by His Father that, on the cross, he lets out a cry of pain and anguish: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

As in the case of Rodrigues and in that of Weisel, God breaks His silence also in the case of His son. The Resurrection is the breaking of the silence of the Father. On Easter Sunday He answered the anguished plea of his son.

Easter Sunday is also His breaking of silence for each and every one of us. Easter Sunday is the definitive reveille of the victory of good over evil, love over hate and life over death.

Truth be told, when we look around us and inside there is abundant evidence of personal, collective and institutional evil. As a result, the silence of God still crushes us. It even hounded Pope Benedict when he visited Auschwitz, the theatre of barbarity perpetrated by his countrymen.

Faced by this existential conundrum we can take the position of the cynic. Elieser was tempted to lose all faith in men and humans. The consequence is terrible.

“I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy.”

Or we can try to find solace in the Promethean belief that humans are not only the measure of all things but the solution of all evils. History shows that this is an illusion.

Or we can, like Christ, make the jump of faith, when on the cross He publicly declared his total confidence in the Father.

In Auschwitz Benedict urged humanity to continually urge God to break his silence as that prayer will help us discover God as he who descended into the hell of suffering and still suffers with us. It will also help us allow the power he has implanted in us to overcome the selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism in us and around us so that a world worthy of God’s children can be built.

This is what Easter is all about.

joseph.borg@um.edu.mt

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