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Archives: December 2009
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Archives: December 2009
What's so great about martyrs...
By Craig Borlase
I had to preach at church yesterday. It was awful. Honestly, it was a shocker. This is no false modesty, just the genuine truth that what I said was poorly thought out and poorly delivered. Even my ‘humorous’ picture of a woman with a bare nipple didn’t get the tidal wave of laughter I had predicted. Just silence. Really awkward silence.
A day on from the trainwreck and I can see where I went wrong. I just told a whole load of stories about martyrs and left it at that. I told them about our great ancestors who had lived great lives and suffered great pain on their way to a great death, but I forgot to say anything about how their lives could practically impact our own. For those on the receiving end I imagine that it was a little like the feeling you get when you stroll into one of those dimly-lit American clothes stores to be confronted by brooding black and white shots of uber-perfect naked torsos and awesome abs. How could anyone hope to match up?
Maybe Proverbs 26:11 explains why, but whatever the reason I think I’m going to share a few of those stories with you right now.
Being a Christian in China during the twentieth century was one of two extremes: exceedingly good or exceptionally bad. Reacting to decades of colonial rule by distant western nations, the extreme nationalist group known as The Boxers gathered momentum. Uniting under the slogan ‘Support the Qing and destroy the foreigners’ they launched an unsuccessful rebellion. Yet while they failed to gain power, they left an audacious body count in their wake, including 188 foreign missionaries and 32,000 Chinese Christians slaughtered for their faith.
These events were horrific. But from the 32,188 stories comes a seemingly endless supply of tales of courage, compassion and premium-grade faith. Like the tale of the Chinese pastor who refused to recant his faith. Incensed by his stand, the mob cut off his eyebrows, lips and ears. When he still refused to deny his faith, they wrenched his heart from his body. The pastor’s fourteen-year-old daughter saw it all yet refused turn her back on Christ, sharing her father’s fate as well as his faith.
The Boxers were intent on ridding their land of the ‘white devils’, and were convinced they had caught and could humiliate another one as they tied a pastor to a pillar inside a pagan temple. All night the man preached to his captors. Morning brought with it an angry mob, one-thousand strong. Again they tore out his heart.
The same crowd in Tsun-hua chopped the feet off an ‘uncooperative’ Chinese Christian teacher, while a colleague implored her pupils to ‘keep the faith’ as she was burned alive.
Flick back a few centuries and the same threads can be seen woven through the life of Polycarp, another Christian who gave his life for his faith:
Polycarp was a local bishop in what we now call Turkey. As part of the annual celebrations that honoured the Roman leaders, crowds gathered to see yet more Christians killed by wild beasts. Yet the audience was jaded. They’d seen it all before. ‘Away with the atheists,’ they shouted – a common term for Christians at the time – ‘go and find Polycarp.’ The bishop was duly found. Old, but full of faith, he spent the final two hours before his arrest giving prayerful thanks to God.
The events that followed have been retold over the centuries. Brought in front of the local proconsul, Polycarp was offered a deal: repent of his faith or die. The 86 year-old was witty and courageous, attempting a little last minute evangelism of the Roman leader. When the crowd heard that he had refused to recant they called for him to be put in a ring with a lion.
Impossible, said the proconsul, for the games season was over. So the Jews in the mob performed their usual role and brought timber to build a pyre. Polycarp persuaded them to not nail him to the stake, knowing that his faith was far stronger than the temptation to flee. Quickly the flames surrounded him like a ship’s sail.
Yet something was not quite right: something looked a little different.
It seemed that he was burning without actually burning up, as if the raging fire was not touching him at all. So the mob intervened and had the ageing bishop stabbed.
Bizarrely, the crowd was able to see how from the wound there came so much blood that the fire was extinguished. To the crowd’s amazement a dove appeared to leave the bishop’s body and fly upwards.
*
And here’s the bit I forgot to say yesterday…
These stories of the greats among our ancestors, they can do more than just entertain – or intimidate – us. They can offer something practical that we might otherwise miss. OK, so enduring great physical pain may well not be on the table for us – and we should be grateful to God for the freedoms that we enjoy here – but did any of these martyrs set out with the aim of losing their lives?
Was death something they aspired to? I don’t think so. I think that for these people whose stories we have just skimmed, death was merely a consequence of the way they lived out their faith.
Theirs was the sort of self-less trust in God that grew out of the simplest – and most life changing - of habits; listening to God and then doing what they were told.
It might never lead us to the torturer’s lair, but if we strip back our clever plans and schemes to impress each other, and if we choose instead to listen and then obey, won’t our stories be immeasurably better?
About the author...
Craig is a lovely chap who lives in Reading. He's a writer, think and all round creative tinker! He has a lovely family and back in the annuls of time used to work for Soul Survivor (in fact he was the one who invented the idea of a Soul Survivor Magazine... so you owe him a lot... well, we do).
About the photo
The photo is taken from Flickr, by a user called noveglazer and is used here under a Creative Commons License, of which we're grateful.
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