In Rumors of Another World: What on Earth Are We Missing? Philip Yancey tells the story of Ernest Gordon, a British Army officer captured by the Japanese during World War II. Along with other prisoners of war, Gordon was forced to toil in the Thai jungles building a railroad to be used in a Japanese invasion of India. Conditions were brutal and frequently deadly. Japanese guards routinely beat and killed prisoners who appeared to be lagging. 80,000 men ultimately died constructing the railway.
“For most of the war,” Yancey writes, “the prison camp had been a laboratory of survival of the fittest, every man for himself. In the food line, prisoners fought over the few scraps of vegetables or grains of rice floating in the greasy broth. Officers refused to share any of their special rations. Theft was common in the barracks. Men lived like animals, and hate was the main motivation to stay alive.”
Things began to change, however, after an enlisted man took the blame, and was brutally and summarily executed, for stealing a shovel that went missing from the camp. In so doing, he saved the lives of many men, for the Japanese guards had threatened to kill everyone for the theft of the shovel. Later that day the tools were counted again, and it was discovered that nothing was missing after all. From that day on, attitudes in the camp began to change. Men began to behave less selfishly, watching out for one another and treating one another with respect. The sick and dying were cared for. A tiny church was built, and prisoners began gathering to pray. Amazingly, a “jungle university” was started; those with expertise in various areas offered courses in history, philosophy, languages, sciences and mathematics. Artwork was created and an orchestra was formed.
Ernest Gordon wrote, “Death was still with us—no doubt about that. But we were slowly being freed from its destructive grip. We were seeing for ourselves the sharp contrast between the forces that made for life and those that made for death. Selfishness, hatred, envy, jealousy, greed, self-indulgence, laziness and pride were all anti-life. Love, heroism, self-sacrifice, sympathy, mercy, integrity and creative faith, on the other hand, were the essence of life, turning mere existence into living in its truest sense….True, there was hatred. But there was also love. There was death. But there was also life. God had not left us. He was with us, calling us to live the divine life in fellowship.”
And back to Yancey again: “Two worlds lived side by side in the jungles of Thailand in the early 1940s. The miracle on the River Kwai was no less than the creation of an alternate community, a tiny settlement of the kingdom of God taking root in the least likely soil, a spiritual fellowship that somehow proved more substantial and more real than the world of death and despair all around.”
This is one of my favorite metaphors for the church. Do you get it? Does it give you shivers when you imagine what the church might be?
[All quotes are from Rumors of Another World: What on Earth Are We Missing? by Philip Yancey, Zondervan, 2003. The story of Ernest Gordon is told fully in To End All Wars, Zondervan, 1963. I haven’t read Gordon’s book, but I think it needs to be on my “to read” list.]
