Fiction for Holy Week

And a new resource announcement!

Most years I read a novel during Holy Week, with the goal of finishing it on Good Friday. The frequency and timing aren’t the only constants. As of now, I always read one of three novels. Each of them is a passion narrative of one sort or another. All three of them involve a crucifixion. That’s why I aim to finish reading them on Good Friday. 

Sharing this tradition of mine feels a little self-indulgent, as I don’t have a compelling spiritual or philosophical reason for keeping it. I can’t say with any confidence whether it would benefit you to take it up yourself. As for me, I stumbled into the habit and liked it and so kept doing it. 

Each of these novels has been formative in my spiritual journey in a way it would be hard to overstate. The characters are as real to me as any of you. They are friends and fellow pilgrims whose experiences have been a means of grace. So while I can’t suggest that reading a novel at Holy Week is an especially meaningful form of devotion, I do believe that reading any of these novels at any time will be deeply enriching. 

Enough throat clearing. The novels are listed below and described briefly, in the order in which I first encountered them. Coincidentally, this is also the order in which they were originally published. You can, of course, read them in any order you like. 

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)

The novel is set in the 1930s, in a state in Mexico where a socialist and secularist military government suppresses the Roman Catholic Church by banning religious services, forcing priests to marry, and banning alcohol (presumably to prevent the Mass). 

The antagonist is a zealous police lieutenant who views himself as something of a messiah figure. He aims to liberate the Mexican populace, especially its children, by eliminating religion. He’s not above killing a handful of citizens on the way to the bigger vision of protecting them. He has his sights on a priest: the last priest in the state. Once he finds and neutralizes that priest, his work will be done. 

The priest he pursues is our protagonist. We never learn his name. He is only called the “whisky priest,” because of his weakness for alcohol. He’s a coward and the father of an illegitimate child. He admits, “I'm a bad priest and a bad man.” Even so, he is captive to a stubborn belief in God’s existence and the power of the sacraments. He believes that God forgives people when he hears their confessions. He believes that the bread and wine of communion become the body and blood of Christ when he blesses it. And so he spends the novel covertly traveling from rural village to rural village to perform sacred rites, one step ahead of the lieutenant: “a damned man putting God into the mouths of men.” 

The story is full of moral ambiguities. There’s a Judas character, for example, whom the priest both despises and recognizes as the image of God. Other characters, including the whisky priest, doubt that martyrdom is an appropriate end for a man such as himself. When I read it, I have the sense that God, who is silent in the text, nevertheless haunts the margins of every page. 

If there’s a central theological theme in the novel that makes it appropriate for Holy Week, it may be this observation by the whisky priest: 

“It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”

Shusaku Endo, Silence (1966)

Endo’s novel is set in 17th-century Japan. It follows a Portuguese missionary named Rodrigues who, like the whisky priest, moves surreptitiously across the countryside looking for Christians driven underground by brutal persecution (known now as Kakure Kirishitan or “hidden Christians”), while evading capture himself.  There’s a priest on the run, a zealous government official in hot pursuit, and even a Judas figure out to profit from the drama. 

If this sounds like the plot of The Power and the Glory, that’s because it is, essentially. Greene and Endo were fans of each other’s work. Endo’s story is a retelling of Greene’s, in a different cultural setting and foregrounding a different set of questions. The central theological question is why God seems to stand silently at a distance while people suffer for their faith. It voices “the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent.”

Endo’s priest, Rodrigues is a more sympathetic character than Greene’s whisky priest. Rodrigues is tortured by his inability to rescue the Japanese Christians who are being martyred as he continues to evade arrest. “Born into the world to render service to mankind, there is no one more wretchedly alone than the priest who does not measure up to his task.”

I like that this novel feels like a conversation with Greene’s. There are similarities not only in the plot but also in the physical descriptions of some characters. There’s also a similar reflection on the necessity of Christ’s death, appropriate for Holy Week:

“This child also would grow up like its parents and grandparents to eke out a miserable existence face to face with the black sea in this cramped and desolate land; it, too, would live like a beast, and like a beast it would die. But Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt—this is the realization that came home to me acutely at that time.”

Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (1972) 

And now for something completely different. 

This last novel is the least obvious choice for a Holy Week read. The main character is a Hasidic Jewish boy named Asher Lev, who grows up in Brooklyn in the 1950s. From a very young age, Asher has a gift for drawing and painting. The gift is almost compulsive. He makes art, sometimes without realizing, from whatever happens to be nearby—one time from the cigarette butts in his mother’s ashtray. 

Asher’s dad works for the office of “the rebbe,” the community’s spiritual leader. He travels the world establishing religious communities in their stream of Judaism, as well as helping persecuted Jews relocate to America. His work is weighty—the kind of work that restores the world. He views Asher’s art as foolish, at best. At worst—to the extent that it distracts Asher from studying Torah and doing something more productive with his time—he views the art as wicked.

Unlike the priests in the other novels, Asher is never in any physical danger. Like the priests, though, his presence in the community causes everyone else trouble. There’s no question his gift is remarkable. Everyone questions whether it is good or evil, and whether, by exercising it, Asher is being selfish—to his father’s shame and the community’s harm. 

The central struggle, then, is between Asher and the community he feels alienated from. An artist tells Asher:

“Every artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.”

But Asher doesn’t want to be freed from his family or community or even his faith. He wants to be embraced as he is within them. Asher explains, 

“I wanted to paint the same way my father wanted to travel and work for the Rebbe. My father worked for Torah. I worked for—what? How could I explain it? For beauty? No. Many of the pictures I painted were not beautiful. For what, then? For a truth I did not know how to put into words. For truth I could only bring to life by means of color and line and texture and form.”

As a child who grew up in fundamentalist Christian circles, I resonated with Asher when I read his story for the first time in my twenties. I often felt in search of truth that my mentors might consider lies. To be honest, I still worry that people I love and admire will consider me dangerous by virtue of the questions I’m eager to ask and the diverse answers I’m willing to entertain. And yet, when I re-read the novel last Holy Week, I found myself resonating—for the first time and quite by accident—with Asher’s father. That’s one sign of a great story: it grows with the reader.

If it’s still not clear what makes this a Holy Week read, that’s fair. I’ll say only that the story ends with a crucifixion—and of whom and of what sort you might not easily guess. For me it’s a reminder that the crucifixion is the answer to many inscrutable questions. 

And all of these novels prime me, each in their different ways, to receive the hope of the resurrection and God’s great, “Yes!” in Jesus on Easter Sunday.

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New Resource Coming Soon!

NEW eBOOK Coming Soon!

Reading the Bible in Three Dimensions will be released in April. We’ve been working behind the scenes for several months to get here, and I’m excited to finally share the news with you.

I’ve had the privilege of speaking to groups of students and pastors and congregants for more than a decade about how to account for their own cultural biases when they read the Bible. Very often at the end of those workshops someone will ask, What do we do next? This little book is my answer to that question. What I hope you’ll do next is take what you’ve learned and share it with others. Lord willing, Reading the Bible in Three Dimensions will help you do just that.

This little book (just over 60 pages) has a fairly specific purpose. It’s designed to be useful for groups who are studying the Bible together. It describes three dimensions that always affect how we understand what we’re reading (whether we realize it or not): what’s in the text, what’s behind the text, and what’s in front of the text. There are exercises in every (short) chapter to help you apply the material in your group right away. The exercises are really good, if I do say so myself. There’s even a brief guide at the end about how to navigate disagreements and differences of opinion when they—inevitably—arise.

Did I mention this will be an ebook? It will be an ebook. That means you can take it to your group discussion right on your phone or tablet. Will it ever be more than an ebook? Who’s to say? Anything’s possible.

My dear friend Alastair Sterne—pastor, author, designer extraordinaire—designed the cover and interior layout. More importantly, he believed in this project and kept me motivated. I wouldn’t be here, sharing news of this new resource with you, without Alastair’s enthusiastic support.

Stay tuned!