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Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany – January 20, 2008
In his memoirs titled “Something like an Autobiography,” the brilliant Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, who lived from 1910 to 1998, tells the story of the making of his masterpiece “Rashomon” in 1950; a work, says Roger Ebert, that “struck the world of film like a thunderbolt.” No one had ever seen anything like it. Not following conventional plot lines, the story is told in flashbacks that disagree about the events they are flashing back to; told in four first person eyewitness accounts that differ radically from each other. A seminal work, it’s one of those movies whose name has a familiar ring to it even to those who may have never seen it.
Much like “Catch -22,” the title “Rashomon” has entered our language as an effective shorthand description for a complicated phenomenon, one still of interest, and not just in film studies or psychology departments. Lawyers commonly use Mr. Kurosawa’s title to describe what happens when eyewitnesses of events present conflicting, sometimes contradictory testimony. What do you do when four people see the exact same thing and then give you four different versions of what happened? The topic has kept professors busy. In 2005, Cambridge University offered a lecture entitled “The Rashomon Effect: Dialogue and Negotiation. Why a Japanese film is essential to understanding our complex situations.”
It was that complexity that bothered Mr. Kurosawa’s three assistant directors who came to see him shortly before filming began. They were unhappy, they said. They did not understand the story. “If you read it diligently,” he told them, “you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible.” “We believe we have read it carefully,” they insisted. “We still don’t understand it at all.”
Patiently, Mr. Kurosawa, who was forty-one at the time, near the beginning of a career that would last fifty years, explained the movie to them. Two of the assistants were satisfied with what they heard, but the third walked off, still looking puzzled. He never did get it and eventually left the project. This man did not understand, Ebert writes, “that while there is an explanation of the film’s four eyewitness accounts of a murder, there is not a solution.”
There is no solution because each eyewitness of the events unfolding in the movie tells the story from his or her own point of view. They are all true accounts because they present an accurate portrait of what each witness thinks happened but, says Mr. Kurosawa, each account has to be called into question because, as he puts it in his autobiography, “human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing.”
Set in a time of social crisis in Japan - the 11th century - the movie opens in the torrential rain with two men, a priest and a woodcutter, taking shelter under Kyoto’s Rashomon gate, the largest in the city, marking the outer boundaries of the ancient capital. They are joined by a commoner who, after engaging the two in conversation, learns that a samurai has been murdered, his wife assaulted and that a local bandit is suspected. In the course of telling the commoner what they know, the woodcutter and the priest introduce flashbacks in which the bandit, the wife and the woodcutter say what they saw or think they saw. Later, a medium shows up to channel the ghost of the dead samurai who gives his own version.
The movie ends with no agreement among the four, only that an event of great importance has taken place. We are left to puzzle out the conflicting details ourselves. It’s a riveting movie, ranked number nine in a director’s poll of the ten best of all time. Number one – “Citizen Kane.”
While subject to scathing reviews at the time by Japanese critics, “Rashomon” was a huge hit overseas, winning all sorts of awards, including the Academy Award for best foreign film, all sorts of box office records for a subtitled movie. As a result, Mr. Kurosawa says, he was “spared from having to eat cold rice.”
While the use of four sometimes disagreeing narrators – or witnesses - marked Rashomon as a daring, modernist work, one that would have “enormous cinematic and cultural influence,” says one film historian, its approach is less of a shock to those familiar with the story behind another movie, made fifteen years after Rashomon: “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” A well intentioned, well made, but ultimately indistinctive account of Jesus’ life, showing up on no all time best lists. Perhaps there’s a reason for that – film making techniques aside; “Story” is in the singular.
As anyone who has paid even the slightest bit of attention in Sunday school knows, in the Bible there are four sometimes disagreeing narrators – or witnesses – all putting their own particular emphasis and interpretation on what one Anglican theologian calls “the extraordinarily exciting and poignant story of Jesus; perhaps the most famous life ever lived on earth.” A life that, he says, is more properly entitled“The Greatest Stories Ever Told.”
Over the centuries people have tried to find a solution to the Gospels sometimes different versions of the same events, looking for a way to reconcile conflicting, sometimes contradictory testimony. Some focus on one Gospel only and leave the rest aside; others look for a summary that merges all the accounts into a single narrative; while still others try to find a unifying strand in the different versions, setting aside all that does not seem to fit, searching for simplicity in the midst of matters of great complexity.
“But,” says New Testament scholar Robin Griffith-Jones, “a further, more satisfying – and finally more exciting - possibility lies open: to take each one of the four stories on its own terms. Each portrays Jesus from a particular angle…” And these differences among the four witnesses are not just in the details. “Most telling,” says Griffith-Jones, “are the distinctive flavor and shape of each gospel.”
To Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” he receives four, sometimes widely different answers. Each witness must be listened to attentively; not only to the stories they tell but the way they tell them. “What is true of the stories we ourselves tell,” Griffith-Jones says, “is true of the gospels’ stories, too: To a careful listener, narrators reveal as much about themselves as about the ‘facts’ of the stories they tell.” And here he is careful to put the word “facts” in quotation marks.
The four Gospel witnesses, my friends, are far less concerned with presenting a series of dispassionate facts adding up to something like an objective biography of Jesus; instead they have each invested their hearts, minds and souls in presenting a series of truths, designed to reveal how they see the one who is the way, the truth and the life. They are more like hymn sheets than history books, says another writer, and we should be looking for a different sort of harmony in them than we would, say, in the testimony of various witnesses to a car accident.
For example, while all four Gospels agree that to encounter Jesus is to be drawn to him, that he exercises an extraordinary authority over people, they have different versions of just how those first followers came to walk behind him on their way to God.
Matthew, Mark and Luke tell of some fishermen who “immediately” leave their nets to follow Jesus. Today, John gives us a different account. Today the disciples do not leave their nets, they leave their teacher; all, it needs to be said, with their teacher’s blessing.
John’s Gospel does not have an account of the Baptism of Jesus but the Baptist describes the event, taking care to assign himself the proper, lesser, role. Mr. Kurosawa notwithstanding, it appears some people can talk about themselves without embellishing. “The next day,” we read, “John was again standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus.”
They heard; they saw; they followed. In John’s Gospel “to see” Jesus is to come to faith in him, to believe in his ability to bring us to God. The invitation to would be disciples, “Come and see,” is given twice in the first chapter, once by Jesus himself to John’s former students, and then, only a few verses later, by Philip to Nathanael, who wondered if anything good could come out of Nazareth. “Come and see.” That’s all they say; not, “come and see just as I see;” not, “come and believe just as I believe.” The truth of the Gospel is to be discovered, not dictated.
The essence of our witness is to state what we have seen and have come to believe and then to invite others to come and see for themselves. Now, no one expects that we will all hear or see or even follow in the exact same way. The point of our witness is not uniformity of testimony, uniformity of vision, uniformity of belief – which, as we’ve seen, is impossible. The point of our witness is not to come to some sort of solution, as if we could summarize all God is and all he has done in a brief deposition, which is equally impossible. The Scriptures nowhere attempt that. “Great things are they that you have done, O Lord my God!” the psalmist says. “O that I could make them known and tell them! But they are more than I can count.”
More than we can count, often more than we can express; we are witnesses with stories to share as best as we are able. We don’t have to be legendary artists pushing the boundaries of aesthetic sensibilities to do so. Despite the complexity of the tale, witnessing to it is remarkably simple. As the Marquette County Michigan Prosecutor’s Office says in “How to be an Effective Witness” allin capital letters, “WE WANT YOU TO TELL THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH.” Then they go on to say, in lower case, that “the manner in which you testify will affect the judge and jury’s perception of your truthfulness.” Yes, it’s all a matter of perception, isn’t it?
It’s not just what we say that will cause people to want to see what we see; that will cause people to want to follow in the way we have chosen to follow; that will lead them to the life we have found; it’s not just what we say, it’s how we say it. Our lives are our witness. Patiently, yet boldly, we seek to tell nothing but the truth.
At the end of his book, John writes that his particular angle in setting down his story was “so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” He wrote it, in other words, to be comprehensible; so that we may not find ourselves in the position of the woodcutter in Rashomon who, riding out the rain outside a holy city, says, in the movie’s opening line: “I just don’t understand.”
He’s certainly not alone in that feeling. To those like him, seeking shelter from the storm, seeking a way to make sense of it all, we offer a unique story, an honest witness, and a humble invitation to the discovery of faith: “Come and see.”
Amen