4 Great, Tough Lessons I Learned From Silence

2. Piety can be Arrogance.

Throughout Silence, Rodrigues does indeed bravely face the threat of death. He imagines himself to be walking in the footsteps of Jesus Himself—willing to suffer and die for his faith if need be.

Rodrigues is proud of his faith, and he often looks down on his frequent companion, Kichijiro—a man who readily admits that his faith is weak. Kichijiro laments that, had he been born just a century before, he could’ve been a good, lifelong Christian with no problem: Christianity was a thriving, accepted minority in Japan back then. But throughout Silence, we see Kichijiro betray his faith with frightening regularity.

About halfway through the film, a parched, perhaps delirious Rodrigues scoops water from a pool and sees Jesus looking back at him in the reflection—or rather, an image of a classical painting of Jesus that Rodrigues remembered as a student. Almost immediately afterward, the priest is captured by the Japanese authorities. Kichijiro had betrayed him. It seems to Rodrigues that he, indeed, is following in Jesus’ steps, with Kichijiro playing the part of Judas.

But while in captivity, the narrative twists. The authorities don’t want to turn Rodrigues into a martyr: They want to turn him into a traitor. They want him to deny his faith.

“For me, [Silence] is the story of one who beings on the path of Christ and who ends replaying the role of Christianity’s greatest villain, Judas,” writes Martin Scorsese in a foreword to a recent edition of Silence.

We Christians, I think, often imagine ourselves to be like Rodrigues at the beginning of Silence: We love the faith. We say we would do anything for it. And sometimes, we can look down our noses at those who either don’t share our faith or whose faith doesn’t seem to be as strong as ours. But I wonder, in my own walk, whether I’m a little more like Kichijiro, or Rodrigues at the end of the book. I remember the times when I’ve failed to act like I should or done what I could. I wonder, sometimes, whether I’m a Christian because it’s relatively easy to be Christian now, here in 21^st century America. What would happen if I was faced with real persecution? How strong would I be?