Martyrs

Martyr, by Jason Engle

Propers: The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 23), AD 2022 C. 

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

2000 years ago, to follow Jesus meant risking everything. 11 of his 12 Apostles met bitter ends; more if we include Judas and James, Stephen and Paul. Know what you’re getting into, He warns us this morning. Know what it is that we’re building together, and the war that is coming to us. If you would be My disciples, keep your eyes wide open. See if you can bear the cost.

Do you hate your family, hate your friends, hate the things you own? Because chances are you’ll lose them, and suffer for that loss. Will you make your wife a widow? Will you leave your children orphaned? Because that is what’s at stake here. Rome doesn’t mess around when it comes to talk of liberation. They stick you on crosses for that. And Jerusalem has quite the track record of murdering her own prophets.

To follow Jesus Christ is to follow unto death, even to death on a cross. Are you ready for that? Because if not, He tells us, then you might as well go home right now.

That’ll sober you up, won’t it? It wasn’t until some 300 years after Jesus’ death that Christianity was finally legalized within the Roman Empire. The Emperor witnessed a battle-vision—and it didn’t hurt that his own mother was Christian. All of a sudden, after Constantine, the followers of Christ could come up from out of the tombs; literally, because we worshipped down in catacombs under major urban centers. Soon bishops and priests were treated as officials of the state.

What at turnaround, hunh? What a rags-to-riches, underdog tale. It must have seemed like the culmination of centuries of prayer. Christians had been derided as atheists, cannibals, traitors, fifth-columnists, rebels, and abolitionists. But now, in a trice, the same Empire that had crucified Christ and murdered generations of martyrs bent the knee to Jesus as the one true King of Kings. No more tombs for us! Now we worshipped in basilicas, the royal Roman forums.

And of course, when the Empress Dowager is a Christian, what a rush there is to join. Money, people, and power flooded into the open hands of bishops. And we did our best to stay true to the teachings of Jesus Christ, many of us anyway. But it is quite the change to go from worshipping a victim of the Empire as your God, to holding now the reins of that same imperial power for yourself. I wish I could say that we’d done a better job.

Yet the legalization of Christianity, while hailed as a miracle, also came with compromise and cost. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

One of the issues arising from all this was the abrupt loss of martyrdom. And surely that’s a good thing, right? Surely folks should not be murdered simply for faith in the Lord. But martyrdom had been such a central Christian experience for so very long that truly we did not know now quite what to do without it. Christians had focused on the Cross because we were frequently nailed to it. We were burned alive, beheaded, thrown to lions, worked to death, and killed in the arena.

And from the very beginning, from the book of Acts itself, we wanted to know just what all it means. How do we make sense of martyrdom, of Christians murdered for our faith? The connection rapidly became clear: “For if we have been united with Him in a death like His,” wrote St Paul to the Christians at Rome, “we will certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His.”

Christians killed for Christ are joined unto His death, mystically united in the Crucifixion. We see this already with St Stephen, the Protomartyr, whose death clearly mirrors Jesus’ own. In a sense, we complete the Crucifixion. And Crucifixion leads to Resurrection. Those who die in Christ are united to Him both in death and in the life to come. Hence the Cult of Saints: Christians who die for the faith are exalted in heaven as images of the Image of God, as “little Christs.” Their blood is now Jesus’ Blood. And their relics, their bones, are now His Body.

The martyrs gave it all, holding nothing back. It’s not that they hated wife and children, parents and siblings, but that they loved Christ all the more. They gave up their possessions, their families, their very flesh, all for the love of God, all because they’d rather die for the truth than live in a lie. And now after 300 years, there were suddenly no more martyrs. Well, what did that mean for the community? How can we unite with Christ if we don’t bear the Cross?

We’d been dying for our faith for so many generations that now we had to figure out how to live for it. And so new terminology developed in order to describe new forms of martyrdom. The age of the red martyrs was over, at least for a time. Few were called to spill their blood for faith. Now arose the white martyrs, the hermits and monastics, who gave up all for Christ, not to die for Him but to live for Him, in a life of selfless service, a life of constant prayer.

But not everyone could be a monk or a nun, especially when society itself was rapidly Christianizing. And so the early Fathers spoke of green martyrs: that is, Christians living out the faith in daily life, not for themselves but for others. “When we through the grace of Christ live in a time of profound and perfect peace,” wrote Symeon the New Theologian, “we learn for sure that cross and death consist in nothing else than the complete putting to death of self-will.”

Did you catch that? The form of martyrdom amid civil peace is the death of self-will.

We need not crucify flesh anymore; now we must crucify ego. And to be clear, we are all called to this martyrdom, all called to this witness. Unless you are a white martyr—a hermit, a monk, or a nun—you are called to be a green martyr. Whereby you and I and all of us are to live out our daily lives in society as everyday witnesses to Jesus Christ, indeed as “little Christs” for our neighbor in his need.

We’d think we’d have it easy then, wouldn’t we? I mean, given the choice between dying violently, taking monastic vows, or getting a job and raising a family, that last route, the green route, sounds the smoothest, doesn’t it? I bet a lot of red martyrs wished they’d had the opportunity to go green.

But it’s insidious because it’s so ephemeral. “Our struggle,” writes the author of Ephesians, “is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness.” Or in the more recent words of Tyler Durden: “We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.”

Now, you and I, dear Christians, don’t live in first-century Judea, or in fourth-century Rome. We live in twenty-first-century America, two millennia after the birth of Christ. And this indeed is a weird time and a bizarre place to try to follow Jesus. We won’t get killed for preaching Christ or coming to Church on a Sunday. In fact, much of the country claims to be Christian whilst never cracking a Bible.

We live in the most ego-driven civilization ever to conquer this planet. And that’s saying something, because the Romans had ego. This is the land of consumption, the land of self-reinvention. Here we don’t judge you by your ancestors, supposedly. Here we judge you by the things you buy: by your purchases and your politics. We are in the business of boosterism, the mass manufacture of desire. And that makes this a very hard time and place to be a Christian if indeed we’re called to crucify the ego.

For so long we have been content with a half-Christianity, one that makes no demands, one that politely declines to interfere with consumer spending and corporate profit. And honestly, it’s left us exhausted, because we are ever striving to do the very thing that Jesus told us we can’t; namely, to serve both God and Mammon.

Oh, what a thing it is to dedicate one’s life to the teachings of Jesus Christ and to be met with apathy and boredom! At least when people persecuted the Church it was because they gave a damn. Now we all slouch our way toward Bethlehem.

Jesus’ teaching this morning sounds harsh to us, a bar too high to reach. But that’s not it at all. To love Christ first and foremost, even before our love of family or possessions or self—that is what it is to be free! That is our true liberation. Oh, to let go and trust the mercy of God in Jesus Christ; to surrender entirely unto His grace, knowing that He is salvation; this is our true martyrdom! And it is not death but life! To die to the ego is to rise in Christ, to be fully human at last.

Sometimes preaching in America feels like teaching calculus to the comatose. We’re so sedated by excess we cannot even imagine a Cross. We do not seek salvation because we cannot see our chains. But they are there, and Christ will break them. “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord” —for someday He shall save even me.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.