The one who perceives

Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound: they shall walk, O Lord, in the light of thy countenance.
Psalm 89:15 KJV

On longer runs up the Sumida River from my apartment building, I come to Asakusa and Sensō-ji, the oldest temple in Tokyo. According to legend, a gold statue of Kannon, a Buddhist deity, was caught by two brothers who were fishing there in AD 628. They tried multiple times to return the statue to the river, but magically it kept returning to them. Because of this seemingly divine occurrence, the chief of Asakusa Village remodeled his home into a shrine so that the locals could worship the statue there.

The Merciful One

Today around Sensō-ji, many signs point to the location of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion and mercy. Kannon (観音), which literally means “see sound,” hears the sounds of suffering. At the Tokyo National Museum, I saw various statues of the bodhisattva with eleven heads to perceive all suffering, a “thousand” eyes to see all suffering, and a “thousand” arms to reach out and relieve all suffering. Kannon is called “The Merciful One” who is able to achieve Nirvana but delays doing so due to compassion for suffering beings.

During the roughly two hundred and fifty years of persecution in Japan, “Hidden Christians” used images and statues of Kannon to secretly worship the God of the Bible. They sometimes made the statues look like the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus, what are now known as the “Maria Kannon.” These statues sometimes contain a cross hidden in the back or within the base.

Fascinating analogy

I find the analogy of Mary and Kannon fascinating. What if we instead consider Jesus the greatest of all perceivers? Isn’t he the one who sees and hears all our cries of pain and suffering? “The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are attentive to their cry . . . The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles” (Ps. 34:15, 17 NIV).

Isn’t Jesus the greatest of all merciful ones, who reaches out with his mighty arm to save? “The arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear” (Isa. 59:1). More than the legend of the reappearing statue, isn’t Jesus the greatest of all pursuers, “the Hound of Heaven,”¹ who never stops pursuing people from every language, tribe, and nation? “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock” (Rev. 3:20). Jesus is our merciful Savior, who perceives all our cries of pain and suffering and answers with the “blessed sound” of the gospel (福音). Through the ages we cry “Kyrie Eleison” (Lord have mercy), and Jesus answers those cries for mercy by pursuing us, even to the point of death on a cross. And not only that! Jesus came into the world to save us and also to have a relationship with us with the intimacy of family, that we may forever “walk in the light of his countenance.” Jesus is one truly worthy of all our honor and worship. Praise be to God!

1. A poem by Francis Thompson, published in 1890, that portrays God as relentlessly pursuing his people. http://www.houndofheaven.com/poem
Photo: Maria Kannon statue at Tokyo National Museum