Blue Martyrs

Atomic Monk, by alexart911

Propers: The Fourth Sunday of Easter, AD 2024 B

Homily:

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

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

Last Monday a mass stabbing occurred, at the Church of Christ the Good Shepherd, in a suburb of Sydney, Australia. Thankfully no-one was killed, though not for lack of trying. And as the assailant knifed the bishop, in the middle of his live-streamed sermon, the bishop said to his attacker: “May Jesus Christ save you.”

Actively being stabbed. And the first thing that he uttered was, “May Jesus Christ save you.”

“I am the Good Shepherd,” Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel this morning. “The Good Shepherd lays down His life for His sheep.” And John follows this up in his first epistle: “We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”

It’s an easy thing to say one is a Christian. It’s even fairly easy to convince oneself that one believes. But if someone attacked me in the middle of this sermon, would my immediate response be, “This man needs my help”?

We talk a lot about the Cross, in Church. It’s kind of unavoidable. The Crucifixion of Jesus was unspeakably traumatic for that first generation of Christians, the seeming annihilation of their hopes and expectations, the brutal execution of a Man they knew and loved. What did it mean? What would come next? They had to make sense of the Cross. And they couldn’t, really, until that third day, until the Resurrection. Easter changed it all, changed the world. Death couldn’t conquer Christ; Christ had conquered death!

And then what should happen, but that the community of His followers, whom He calls His Body and Bride, should likewise start to suffer death, even death on a Cross. St Stephen, the Protomartyr, was publicly stoned, and he died in the same way as Jesus: commending his spirit to Christ; forgiving his murderers, even as they murdered him. Soon Paul would be beheaded, Peter crucified upside-down, James thrown from the walls of the Temple and bludgeoned with fullers’ clubs. The age of martyrs began.

People were murdered for no other reason than that they believed in the Christ. And it wasn’t just assassins in back alleys. It was the religious and political establishment, the might of empire, the sword of the state. We were led as lambs to the slaughter. Burned alive by Nero. Thrown to lions under Trajan. It’s not that every Christian was killed, or even that persecution was constant, but for generations our faith lived under violence. And we had to make sense of that, lest we all go mad.

Paul laid the notion out clearly: “For if we have been united with Christ in a death like His, we will certainly also be united with Him in a resurrection like His.” Christian martyrs join in Jesus’ death, join Him on the Cross, and so join in some sense in His glory, risen as Jesus arose. But don’t take this the wrong way; we do not seek out death. We have accounts of Christians executed in the Colosseum, with believers in the stands moved to join them on the sands, and bishops desperate to hold them back.

To take up the Cross and follow Christ is not to seek out pain. It is simply to do the right thing, to do as Jesus does, regardless of the consequences. Christ was no masochist, and the Church no suicide cult. Yet here was a Man who had outlived death, who freed us from fear of the grave. And if we do believe that, if we have been baptized into His Resurrection, then we shall love our neighbor whatsoever be the cost.

Love hurts. That is the nature of it. Because love is not an emotion; it’s not the same as feeling in love. Love is to put the good of another even before our own. “What’s in it for me?” can no longer be the plumbline of our lives. Rather the question must become, “Who is now my neighbor? Who is a child of God?” And that’s easy to answer in theory. It's easy to say. We’re all in favor of abstract love. But once it hurts the bottom line, that’s when the truth will out.

When Constantine legalized Christianity, the Church at first knew little what to do. For 300 years, in urban centers, we’d been worshipping underground, literally in the catacombs. We communed upon the martyrs’ moldy bones. Just as we had had to learn to live with persecution, now suddenly we had to live with power, with state support no less. The people who had murdered Christ and hounded His disciples now lined up to be baptized—which was great, right? Glory to God. But what do we do now?

We had learned to die for Christ. But now we had to live for Him. The lack of red martyrs led to the rise of white martyrs, that is, to monks and nuns, hermits and friars. And while I honestly believe that we could use some more of those, that never was a path most folks could take. We had to seek “blue martyrdom,” the life of Christ in the world. We, the blue martyrs, witness to Him in our lives, filled as they are with children and jobs and houses and chores and bills and possessions and stresses of everyday stripe.

Now, I know very well that there are Christian communities throughout the world for whom the age of red martyrs continues. Statistically Christianity remains the most persecuted population on the planet. People still die, every day, simply for faith in the Christ. But that’s not us. We are not persecuted, in America, in the West, despite our persecution complex. We may well be someday soon, but that is not today. American Christians, the ones on TV, seem far more likely to persecute others than to turn the other cheek.

In such a context as ours, the words of Jesus cut us to the quick. The Good Shepherd lays down His life. We are to lay down our lives, in order to take up the Cross. And that doesn’t mean that we pretend to be under attack. It means we love our neighbors as ourselves. And we are called to love our neighbors, not because we have to earn salvation, but because loving our neighbor is salvation. It’s how we love the Christ who first loved us, the One who sets us free from all our slavery to sin. Salvation is freedom is love.

We don’t earn the love of Jesus by our works or by belief. We already have His love, infinite love, by mercy, gift, and grace. Loving others simply is our freedom. It’s what it looks like to be resurrected. And this isn’t just theory, isn’t just words. What the hell kind of freedom is that? But a life laid down in love becomes a life that’s fully alive. Yes, it’s a paradox, but we all know it’s true: the more you give in love, the more you become you.

I know it can seem overwhelming. The needs of the world are so great, and our own positions so precarious. We have a lot of stuff, and yet we have so many debts. One bad diagnosis is all that separates most of us from insolvency. What can we do, as individuals, as a community, in the face of hunger, cancer, addiction, poverty, pandemic, an atomized society and crumbling institutions? For John, the solution is simple enough: “that we should believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as He has commanded us.”

We are not alone, my brothers and sisters. We have never been alone. The Church has seen and survived impossible crises on every continent in every age. Jesus Christ has given to us His Word, His Name, His Spirit, His Body and His Blood. In short, He gives us all Himself, to make us into Himself, His Body still at work within our world. And we begin as He did, with the person who is beside us. Love your neighbor. Forgive  your spouse. Show mercy to your children. Give to the needs of your town. “Hoe your row,” as a colleague of mine likes to say.

Then let the love expand, for Jesus won’t run out. “He who is faithful in little shall be faithful also in much.” Be merciful, forgiving, and gentle. Be generous, selfless, unbound. Lay down your life for another, that Christ may raise you up again. And boldly bear His Cross, by which He has conquered death. This is then salvation: to love and so be free.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, you may do so here, and we would thank God for your generosity.