Thinking about the Palm Sunday vesper service a few days ago here in urban Japan, I had the curious feeling of vaguely being able to follow the Order of Service and to recognize some of the phrases of familiar Bible passages. But later I got to thinking: I wonder how well the Aramaic worldview transfers to the Japanese language in general, and to the 21st century Japanese lives in particular? The next moment I began to wonder the same about English: just because the sentences seem crystal clear as written, perhaps we are missing something important. Then a few days later it dawned on me: the way language is wrapped in social habits and ways of seeing things works something like the following.
As with books, movies and song lyrics, so also perhaps with the Bible: we tend to identify with certain parts. We tend to hear the parts that reinforce what we already hold true, whether it is the "Good" parts (for Americans that might be scenes that demonstrate when a person is strong, independent and with a confident optimism about outcomes; for Japanese that might be the parts that demonstrate group solidarity, awareness of hierarchy and propriety), or it is the "Bad" parts that we accept as things not to condone or strive for (for Americans that might be damaging property or rights; for Japanese that might be inconveniencing others). So it seems our minds sift the episodes and parables of the Bible for the parts that "make sense" to our existing language/society. By extension we are culturally blind to the parts that seem inscrutable, nonsensical or strange and foreign to us.
If all this is true, then here is a powerful reformative exercise for one and all - in study groups tasked with separate incidents to grapple with, or as lone pilgrims wrestling with a set of "exercises." Start by sifting out all the parts that get quickly passed over, or seem plain odd or aberrant. Those represent one region of unknown terrain for which we have no clue or tools to begin to make sense of. Then form a subset of parts that are not exactly recognizable to our modern, culturally rooted minds, but we kind of understand the intent and consequence involved. These are the middle ground where our footing is not fully firm, but neither are we adrift: visually you can think of a marsh or wetland (not quicksand, mind you). After working through these sort-of-odd bits, then maybe it is possible to step a little further away from the warm dry land that we normally tread and work through the inconvenient parts that just don't resonate with us, and that we can't readily identify in.
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