A Weird Experience

Yesterday, August 9, was the 72^nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. I remember well being in Nagasaki and at the ceremony marking the 37^th anniversary of that tragic event. That was just five days after I—and June and our two younger children—had been through a weird experience.

The Return Home to Japan

Our family’s third missionary furlough was in 1981-82. When we left Missouri to return to our home in Japan on July 17, we said goodbye to our two grown children and made the trip back to Fukuoka City with our daughter Karen (12) and son Ken (10).

Before having time to get settled back into our mission residence, we left for the annual meeting of the Japan Baptist Mission at the retreat center south of Mt. Fuji. We got back home on August 2 and were still trying to get our house back in order in the days following.

On August 4, I had a telephone call from a former student whom I knew fairly well. He had audited one of my classes at the seminary and had even been in our home for a Christmas party for students.

M.-san called because he wanted to come by for a visit. Even though we were not ready for visitors, he was rather insistent and I reluctantly agreed for him to come that evening.  

The Stabbing

When M.-san arrived, he was carrying a bag and a baseball bat. After just a few minutes, I realized that he was clearly mentally “off.” I soon told him I needed to end the visit and said I would drive him to the nearby train station so he could go home. Then I intended to contact his mother and urge her to get her son medical help.

M.-san then asked me to pray for him—as he had done the last time I had seen him. Just before we had left for the States in 1981, I happened to meet M.-san walking across the campus at Seinan Gakuin University, and he asked me to pray for him—which I did then and there.

This time, because of his mental state—and because of the baseball bat!—I prayed with my eyes open, focused on him.

After the prayer I went back to the bedroom to get some socks. When I came back, he was standing by the front door, but he didn’t have his bag or bat with him. I looked back and saw his bag in the room where we had talked. When I turned back toward him, he struck me on the chin with a long knife.

I quickly grabbed his wrist and took the knife from him—and he began to apologize repeatedly. I had felt little pain but the floor was sprinkled with blood, so I told M.-san to leave because I had to go to the emergency room. I didn’t know how badly I had been injured.

As it turned out, the knife blow, which had doubtlessly been intended for my throat, had glanced off the bottom of my chin and cut me there and on the top of my chest. A few stitches was all that was needed. June credited my beard with saving my life, as it largely concealed his target.  

The Aftermath

The next day, M.-san’s mother came to our home with a huge bouquet of flowers and apologized profusely for what her son had done. We felt so sorry for her.

Then on Aug. 7, as previously planned, we left for a short trip to Nagasaki, staying with missionary friends there. We went to the memorial ceremony on the morning of Aug. 9, mourning with the large crowd gathered in sadness because of the death and devastation caused by the atomic bombing of that city on that date in 1945.

In the meantime, M.-san had been found by the police and taken into custody. He was later incarcerated in a mental prison facility—and died there (probably at his own hand) the following year.

My experience is only one example of a huge problem: not being able to detect and to treat mental illness before weird, or truly tragic, events occur.

Was Jesus Insane?

What a preposterous question: was Jesus insane?! Those who are pious Christians may even be offended that such a question is raised. On the other hand, those who are highly anti-Christian may think the answer is obvious: in most likelihood he was.

This is no new question, though. Early in the Gospels we read, “When his family heard what was happening, they came to take control of him. They were saying, ‘He’s out of his mind!’” (Mark 3:21, CEB).

And repeatedly Jesus was accused by his religious opponents of being possessed by demons. As you know, demon possession was at that time the explanation of what we would call mental illness.

The question of Jesus’ sanity was raised anew in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century. In 1913 Albert Schweitzer wrote his thesis for an M.D. degree. It was titled (in English translation) “The Psychiatric Study of Jesus.”

According to Schweitzer, the German theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) was the first in modern times to conjecture that Jesus was “psychopathic.” Schweitzer, however, mainly analyzed the works of three contemporary medical writers—a German, a Frenchman, and an American—who between 1905 and 1912 sought to explicate Jesus’ insanity.

Schweitzer’s conclusion, though, was that the efforts of those who claimed Jesus was insane fell “far short of proving the existence of mental illness.”

I started thinking about this topic when reading a book with the unlikely title The Ethiopian Tattoo Shop (1983), a collection of 22 “parables” written by Edward Hays, a Catholic priest in Kansas. (The book was recently mentioned by a friend who knows Hays, and I have heard others also speak highly of him.)

One of Hays’s stories is “The Hired Hand,” a man that was wonderfully good and kind to his employer and his family. But he said his name was Jesus Christ, and before long he was arrested as an escapee from the “State Insane Asylum.”

What would happen, Hays wonders, if Jesus were to reappear among us today? Quite possibly, he would be considered insane or “demon possessed” just as he was when he lived on earth 2,000 years ago.

Then I began reading The Underground Church (2013), an engaging book by UCC Pastor Robin Meyers. The first chapter is titled “Sweet Jesus: Talking His Melancholy Madness.” That thought-provoking chapter is based in part on the poem “Maybe” by Mary Oliver (which is also attractively presented on Vimeo here).

Meyers also refers to Thomas Merton’s reflections on Adolf Eichmann in Raids on the Unspeakable (1964). At Eichmann’s trial, he was found to be “perfectly sane,” and Merton found that disturbing. So he concluded that “in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be . . . totally ‘sane’” (p. 49).

Similarly, in Don Quixote Cervantes wrote, “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness—and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”

This same sentiment is expressed by the preeminent Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (1910-98): “In a mad world, only the mad are sane.”

According to a former employee of the CIA whom I heard speak earlier this month, the U.S., which during the Cold War implemented the military strategy known as Mutual Assured Destruction (appropriately known as MAD), still supports the same policy increasingly applied to the tense relationship between Israel and Iran.

In this light, perhaps the “madness” of Jesus is sanity, after all.