The writer Graham Greene called the novel Silence by the Japanese author Shusaku Endo, “one of the finest novels of our time.” Published in 1966 (English translation 1969), Silence tells the story of a fictional 17th century Portuguese priest who is sent to Japan to investigate reports of the terrible persecution of the Japanese Christian community that had been driven underground, and the apostasy of a fellow Jesuit priest. As the Japanese Christians were being rounded up, tortured, forced to renounce their faith by trampling on crudely carved images of Christ, and killed, God is eerily and deafeningly silent. Looking out on the sea that had swallowed up so many Japanese lives, the priest reflects on the words of Jesus from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!.” The novelist writes: “The sea stretched out endlessly, sadly; and all this time, over the sea, God simply maintained his unrelenting silence. ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani!”….The priest had always thought that these words were that man’s prayer, not that they issued from terror at the silence of God.”

The prophet Isaiah today addresses the Judeans in exile, who in their distress experienced this same silence at the profound loss of their land, temple, monarchy, and their very identity as the people of God. As a result, the exiles were in grave danger of losing their faith. In exile they prayed, hoped and longed for release and their return to Jerusalem. Yet as the exile continued God did not seem to respond to their lament or listen to their plea. It appeared, in fact, that God had turned his back on them, forgotten and abandoned them, and given them up for dead. But though God may have been silent, he was always their God. So Isaiah puts God’s question before them: “Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God?’” The exiles complained that God does not listen and will not respond, yet God hears and takes up their complaint.

In our personal lives we endure painful exiles as well, and in our perceived abandonment, we too experience God’s silence. In our gospel reading, Jesus confronts those moments and those experiences. Today we hear that Jesus actively seeks out the sick and the demon-possessed, whose suffering is unrelenting and whose cries for help apparently have gone unheeded. How many of us also live a kind of enforced exile to a strange country that is characterized by sickness and madness, far removed from our home in the soundness of body, mind, or soul? As the God of Israel addressed a word of promise and hope to the exiles from Judea, so also does Jesus, Israel’s crucified Messiah, reach out to all who experience the isolation and the shame of their personal exile into the strange land of sickness and madness. The God of Israel listens and responds in Christ to our estrangement and our abandonment into that far country of pain and death by sharing it completely and unreservedly.

Toward the end of the novel, Silence, the priest-emissary is captured and compelled to renounce Christ. A wooden plaque is placed before his feet on which there was a copper plate engraved with an image of Christ. Endo writes: “Yet the face was different from that on which the priest had gazed so often in Portugal, in Rome, in Goa and in Macao. It was not a Christ whose face was filled with majesty and glory; neither was it a face made beautiful by endurance of pain; nor was it a face filled with the strength of a will that has repelled temptation. The face of the man who then lay at his feet was sunken and utterly exhausted. Many Japanese had already trodden on it, so that the wood surrounding the plaque was black with the print of their toes. And the face itself was concave, worn down with the constant treading. It was this concave face that had looked at the priest in sorrow. In sorrow it had gazed up at him as the eyes spoke appealingly: ‘Trample! Trample! It is to be trampled on by you that I am here.’

What is surprising is that in that sunken, sorrowful, trampled face of Christ the priest encountered the true object of his faith. That Man of Sorrows, the Redeemer of the world and death of death, had been there all along, but the priest had not recognized him until he experienced the persecution of the Japanese church and their sense of abandonment when he too found himself in exile. Only then, when all was lost, was everything gained.

Over against Israel’s complaint that their right had been disregarded by God and that Israel-in-exile seemed to have been invisible nobodies, the Lord mounts his defense.

Israel should not lose heart, nor grow weary in their faith, for the God of Israel is the Lord who has created the world and everything in it. The Lord is the everlasting God. He does not relinquish control of time and events, through his ways are mysterious and though he may even appear to be absent. God may be silent, but he will never go back on his word to fulfill everything he has promised. So you exiles, maintain your hope, for the Lord “does not faint or grow weary.” Moreover, God “gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.” It is precisely “those who wait for the Lord [who] shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” You hope, in other words, is not in vain.

Jesus too, by healing the sick and casting out demons demonstrated that the kingdom of God that seemed so remote and maybe even non-existent, in fact was at hand; and it was at hand precisely for those for whom it seemed farthest away.

There is great concern today about how we not only raise, but how we shelter and protect our children. Of course! This is the role of parents that we hope will be shared by our various communities, our communities of faith to be sure, but also by our neighborhoods, schools, and civic groups, and by well-established organizations such as e.g., the scouts. What a blessing they are to the children, youth, and families they serve.

The one thing, however, we all sometimes neglect, or even avoid and try not to think about, though to our peril, is how to prepare our children for pain, sorrow, loss, hardship, temptation, sickness, and adversity, against which we cannot defend them, but for which we must prepare them. How do we teach them the necessary things life inevitably requires in a world that can be so mean and unfair, a world in fact where God, as Luther says, always hides himself under the opposite, whereby the all-powerful God conceals himself in weakness, who comes near to us in Christ hidden in abandonment and exile, and who though he be life itself, hides himself in a cruel and ignominious death? How do we impart courage, strength of character, faith, and hope in such unlikely circumstances, both human and divine?

Gilbert Meilaender, a Lutheran who teaches at Valparaiso University, wrote these words, which I have quoted before, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: “My child, the world is always a dangerous and threatening place where death surrounds us. When I brought you for baptism I acknowledged that I could not possibly guarantee your future. I handed you over to the God who loves you and with whom you are safe in both life and death. There is no security to be found elsewhere, certainly not from me or those like me.” The only security we have, even in the face of disaster and death, is God, the God of Israel who in Jesus Christ turned the disaster of exile into a homecoming, and death into life.

-Amen-