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| Paul Miki: God's Samurai w/ The Merry Beggars |
"I tell you plainly:
there is no way to be saved
except the Christian Way."
+ Paul Miki
1562-1597 A.D.
As we step past All Saints' Day and see the season of Advent on the horizon, we among Emmaus City Church are seeking to soak in stories of people throughout the past millenia who have followed Jesus, using Our Church Speaks: An Illustrated Devotional of Saints from Every Era and Place as our resource. Here is the first excerpt we included on this blog:
When we handed these books out to our congregation this past weekend, this is part of the note we included inside each one:
This might seem at first to be a peculiar Advent devotional. But saints often are peculiar people who stand out in a particular time and place. In fact, the times when saints shine the most are times of darkness. They give glimpses of Jesus’ Light, which darkness cannot overcome.
Advent begins in the dark. And we, as part of Jesus’ Church, are called to live as Advent people who anticipate Jesus’ coming into our darkness today to overcome it. Ultimately, our hope rests in the God of Advent who drew near to us in Jesus’ first coming and will come again to take away the darkness forever and be our eternal Light.
That hope is what saints have embodied as our sisters and brothers across time, ethnicities, Christian traditions, nationalities, and more.
As we step into this next year, our prayer is that we will shine all the more with the holy light of Christ in us and through us. And we pray that we “being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love.” After all, “the Father has enabled us to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light. He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of the Son He loves.”
This post features an excerpt from Our Church Speaks so that you might also walk some of this journey with us with reflection, prayer, and anticipation for how the Light of the world might shine in your life during this season.
Opening Prayer
O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
Glory be to the Father, and the Son,
and the Holy Spirit.
As it was in the beginning, is now,
and ever shall be, forever and ever.
Amen.
Paul Miki
When Your Neighbor Is Your Enemy
Christianity first reached Japan in 1549, due to the heroic missionary work of the Jesuit priest Francis Xavier and his companions. In the next sixty years, over three hundred thousand Japanese citizens converted to Christianity. Conversions became so widespread that the Japanese ruling class suspected Christians were seeking to overthrow the government and colonize and enslave the Japanese people. The ruler, Hideyoshi, issued an order for the arrest and execution of Christians. Japanese evangelist Paul Miki was on track to become the first Japanese-born Christian priest, but he was arrested before this aspiration was fulfilled. He was among a group of twenty-six Christians who were rounded up and forced to undergo a six-hundred-mile march from Kyoto to their place of execution in Nagasaki.
As they walked,
Miki tried to convert those they encountered,
and the prisoners sang an
Ancient Christian hymn,
the Te Deum:
"We praise You, O God;
we proclaim You as Lord.
All the earth worships You,
the Father everlasting."
When they reached their destination,
they were crucified.
Paul Miki delivered his final sermon
from his cross:
"After Christ's example,
I forgive my persecutors.
I do not hate them.
I ask God to have pity on them all,
and I hope that my blood will fall
on my fellow men as fruitful rain."
Christianity was suppressed in Japan for the next two and a half centuries. Missionaries were expelled from Japan, thousands of Christians were crucified or burned at the stake, and many Christians were ordered to trample on images of Christ or suffer martyrdom. Seven generations of underground Christians persisted in secret until 1871, when the Japanese government finally gave them legal protection. Nagasaki, where Miki and his companions suffered martyrdom, became the center of Japanese Christianity and today is home to the largest population of Christians in Japan.
Scripture
"But I say to you who hear,
Love your enemies,
do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you,
pray for those who abuse you."
+ Luke 6:27-28
Meditation:
When Your Neighbor
Is Your Enemy
Jesus taught His followers to love two groups of people: neighbors and enemies. While we have no record of Him explicitly teaching that these two kinds of people might sometimes be the same person, He certainly experienced it. Jesus was not betrayed, accused, mocked, scourged, and sent to be crucified by faceless, nameless agents of the state, but rather by friends, neighbors, coworkers, and fellow citizens. Jesus' suffering was personal — emotional and relational, just as much as it was physical.
And that's all just at the human level. At the divine level, Jesus suffered under the hands of His own creation, hands He had made. Jesus was betrayed with words from mouths and lungs filled with air that He created.
Often the enemies we hate the most are neighbors who have wounded us. We may feel general contempt for political leaders or pundits that we see online, but our deepest animosity is always directed toward people who have hurt us personally. Real enemies have names, faces, and addresses. Sometimes the most bitter enemy is someone you used to love. Maybe someone you used to think loved you.
And yet Jesus' love persisted, and He loved His neighbor enemies all the way to the end.
This is the Christian faith's
bewildering neighbor love and
enemy love.
It is love toward those
who are unsafe.
Paul Miki sought to embody
this kind of love toward his neighbors
who became his enemies.
Likely the people who marched him
six hundred miles to Nagasaki
and crucified him there
were not faceless, nameless agents
of the state,
but former friends.
They were likely neighbors.
As Christ's blood became the life-source
of His Church,
so Miki's blood fell from his broken body
into the ground in Nagasaki and,
over the centuries,
slowly fertilized the soul until it began
to produce abundant fruit in
a growing local church.
Nagasaki was transformed from
a Japanese Golgotha to
a foretaste of the new Jerusalem.
This is what it looks like when
the Kingdom of heaven encounters
the kingdom of this world.
But from the blood is born a
new humanity that practices
the way of peace.
How tragic that, years later, those neighbors in Nagasaki were destroyed by an atomic bomb dropped by baptized American Christians because Japan was their enemy. Upon the fortieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these words were spoken by Father George Zabelka, the US Air Force chaplain who served as a priest for the airmen who dropped the atomic bombs:
The bombing of Nagasaki means even more to me than the bombing of Hiroshima. By August 9, 1945, we knew what that bomb would do, but we still dropped it. We knew that agonies and sufferings would ensue, and we also knew — at least our leaders knew — that it was not necessary. The Japanese were already defeated. They were already suing for peace. But we insisted on unconditional surrender. ... As a Catholic chaplain I watched as the Boxcar, piloted by a good Irish Catholic pilot, dropped the bomb on Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki, the center of Catholicism in Japan. I knew that St. Francis Xavier, centuries before, had brought the Catholic faith to Japan. I knew that schools, churches, and religious orders were annihilated. And yet I said nothing.
The tragic irony of the destruction
of Nagasaki should not be forgotten;
rather it should serve as a constant,
of Nagasaki should not be forgotten;
rather it should serve as a constant,
sobering reminder that
the Way of Jesus looks more like Paul Miki
and less like an atomic bomb.
Prayer
O God, grant that we may desire You, and desiring You seek You, and seeking You find You, and finding You be satisfied in You forever. Amen.
pgs. 22-24
Bonus Podcast:
Bonus Video:
Additional Advent Resources:
Many blessings of peace and presence,
Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan
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