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The Drama of Jesus
Peter Milward, S.J.
Copyright © 2013 Peter Milward, S.J.
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2013-05-13
Preface
There’s no doubt about it. The life of Jesus is intensely dramatic. I doubt if there has been a more dramatic life in the history of man, whether in the real lives of Alexander and Julius Caesar or in the fictitious ones of Hamlet and King Lear. In the four gospels it has been told with dramatic intensity both in the narrative style of the first three and in the discursive style of the fourth. Shakespeare himself drew deep inspiration from these four sources, as appears in all his plays and particularly in his tragedies from Romeo and Juliet to King Lear.
During the Middle Ages the gospels provided abundant material for the religious drama of the time, and much of it has come down to us in the cycles of mystery plays, which are still enacted from time to time not without success. It is surprising, however, how little of this material is used in modern times, or if used, how little of its latent drama is realized. Few of the ambitious movies I’ve seen on the life of Jesus have been particularly impressive. At a showing of one I didn’t even care to return after the intermission, I found it so tedious. In my childhood I listened to Dorothy Sayers’ radio play The Man Born to be King、with Robert Speaight as Christ, but I wasn’t so thrilled by what I heard. Then there are the innumerable lives of Jesus retold in book form, but though I’ve read quite a number of them, I can’t say I’ve found them at all exciting.
Why is this? How can I explain this absence of a dramatic element in the retelling and reenactment of so vivid a drama as the life of Jesus? One reason that applies to many of the lives of Jesus may be the parading of a lot of unnecessary information. Too much scholarship, where even a little may be too much, weighs down the spirit of man and kills as surely as the letter does. Another reason is that after so many Christian centuries we’ve come to take too much for granted, if in an increasingly post-Christian world. Christian writers who approach this sacred subject fail to explore the human motives of the characters involved, least of all the central character of Jesus himself. I can’t help suspecting that, all unconsciously, they assume that, as Son of God, Jesus can have had no real human motives. So they fail to ask the necessary, even obvious, questions, such as may be obvious to outsiders but not to themselves.
Having said all this, I may be asked the obvious question myself, “Physician, why not cure yourself?” All I can say is that I’m no Shakespeare to retell the story of Jesus in dramatic form, nor am I a Dickens to retell it in narrative form, either. I’m just a university teacher of Japanese students, and from time to time I write books of essays, occasionally in dialogue form, for them to read. So the idea has occurred to me, Why not take advantage of my actual situation and present the life of Jesus in a series of conversations with Japanese students?
In this case, how am I to go about my task? To begin with, I must take nothing for granted. I must choose non-Christian students – most of my students are in any case non-Christian – who haven’t even read the Gospels for themselves, but only have that general knowledge of Christianity which most Japanese may be assumed to have nowadays. Then I will take them with me to a quiet seminar house outside Tokyo, where we can spend a week of uninterrupted discussions on the drama of Jesus. I will get them to ask me all the questions I need for this purpose, especially those which I have found from long experience naturally occur to the minds of such students. In particular, I will get them to ask the basic question, “Why?” so as to explore the reasons and motives hidden behind the gospel narrative. In this way, I think, the latent drama in that narrative will come out vividly enough, even without my using a dramatic or narrative form of writing.
The rest I must leave to my readers, to peruse these pages with a sympathetic imagination, so as to envisage the situation as I describe it – just as I in turn have tried to envisage the situation described in the gospels. Here they may even find a twofold drama – one involving myself and my five students, as we go through our discussions day by day, though I have reduced this dramatic element to a minimum, and the other involving Jesus and his disciples, as well as his enemies, which was the focus of our attention during our discussions. Finally, whatever conclusion they may reach after their perusal of these pages, I would urge them to return to the gospels, or at least two of them, that of Mark for his vivid dramatic style with emphasis on the actions of Jesus, and that of John for his looser discursive style with emphasis on the thoughts and motives in the heart of Jesus.
In conclusion, it only remains for me to say what Jesus himself said to his first disciples, “Come and see!”
What are we here for?
The place was a seminar house on the outskirts of Tokyo. We had come here, five of my students and myself, after the end-of-term exams in July. “What on earth are we here for?” had been the question of Iwao one day after class, and it had been echoed by several of his friends. “Well, you can hardly expect me to answer in a word, can you?” I had replied. “Why not take a few days off in July and come and discuss it with me.” So here we were.
That was why we were in the seminar house. But why were we on earth at all? That was what we had come to find out, if possible, by discussing the matter with one another. We had arrived in the evening and found the place so quiet after all the noise of Tokyo. We could even hear the silence singing in our ears. It was an ideal place for concentrating our minds, far from the distractions of the modern city. After a simple dinner we met in the sitting-room.
“Well,” I said to Iwao, “it was you who first raised the question. So I think you should explain what you have in your mind a little more fully before we begin to discuss it. What’s the big problem? – as an American might say.”
“It may sound a very simple problem,” began Iwao. “It’s almost like Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be.’ It can be stated in the simplest terms, like the verb ‘to be’. Yet for that very reason it seems to me basic to our being. Ever since I came to the university it’s been worrying me. Maybe I was too busy to think of it in high school, but now it almost forces itself on my attention. ‘Why am I? What am I doing here on earth?’ That’s my question, but no one can give me a satisfying answer.”
“Your question,” I commented, “sounds rather like another one of Hamlet’s, ‘What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth?’ But that’s really a different question we’ll have to discuss later. I mean, there’s all the difference in the world between the simple ‘I’ of your question and the complicated ‘such as I’ of Hamlet’s other question. His ‘such as I’ implies a kind of inferiority complex. He feels as if he’s not worthy to be alive. But your question is, I think, more basic. You’re wondering why you’re alive at all, worthy or unworthy. What do you think, Hiroshi?”
“I, too,” replied Iwao’s friend, “have much the same question. Sometimes when I can’t get to sleep at night, I begin to wonder what I’m doing here. I’m lying in my bed, trying to get to sleep. Then I reflect that my bed’s in my home, and my home’s in Tokyo. And then I think of Tokyo as I once saw it from the air, when I went by plane from Tokyo to Hiroshima. All of a sudden it seemed so small beneath me． But then, I continue, how small Japan is in comparison with the earth, and how small the earth is in comparison with the solar system, and finally how small that is in comparison with everything there is. Then I come back to myself and I realize how small and insignificant I am here in bed. What am I but a grain of sand on the unending shore of time? How can such a little life as mine have any meaning or value?”
“You