"The Day of Martyrdom" | The Rev. Dr. Luk De Volder | November 13, 2022
The November readings in church continue their usual Judgement Day theme, as if the church doesn’t seem to get enough of the Halloween ambience. “The day is coming, burning like an oven,” declared the prophet Malachi. And this statement didn’t have climate change in mind.
But I do confess, as rigid as the prophet Malachi may sound, these days I take God’s judgment over people’s judgement any day. With the hardening of our culture, some people are going into judgment overdrive, with a readiness to see any neighbor as adversary and with an eagerness to inflict pain to anyone considered to be opponent. The Gospel today is giving us guidance on how to deal with people’s judgement and adversity coming our way.
On second thought, maybe a judgment day on our calendar would be a great help. Why not? With the Hallmarkization of our calendar, we not only have religious holidays, or celebrations like Thanksgiving or Memorial Day. We now also celebrate National M&M day on October 13, this past week was the world’s kindness week. This past Sunday, November 6 was actually the Zero Task Day as well as National Nachos Day. This week you probably also missed the British pudding day, National Fried Chicken Sandwich Day. Today is apparently National Hug a Musician Day and the beginning of the National Split Pea soup Week.
This proliferation of observances has makes me wonder how a hallmark version of Judgment Day would look like. After all, Michael-Angelo’s inspiration for his Sixteen Chapel last Judgement wall painting came from people and faces he knew, like the pope’s master of ceremonies Biagio da Cesena who had angered Michelangelo at some point and who ended up down, in the underworld section of the painting. (1) It does make we wonder what faces you would select for the composition of your Judgement Hallmark card. And to whom would you send your card. The advantage of judgement day would be that we would concentrate most of this nasty judging to one day. Or at least the card composition would bring some relief.
Judgement comes in many ways, like going to a parent-teacher conference and feeling so exposed while your child is being evaluated. But these are just part of life situations. Today we are facing a more violent type of judgment: The hardening of our society and this is not a marginal phenomenon. The book entitled, Thrivers, The surprising reasons why some kids struggle and others shine, by Michele Borba opens with testimonies of teenage students and their parents, illustrating how they feel judged by the system. “There is an amazing amount of depression and anxiety. Seventy percent of my friends are in therapy; forty percent are on medication. We are hurting but nobody does anything until another kid is suicidal.” p. 6. “We’re growing up in a highly competitive, academically rigorous environment that breeds stress and constantly compares us with each other. It feels like we’re being raise to be scores, not kids, to be strivers, not thrivers. We’re just burned out.” p. 10
The way children and youth have been conditioned and judged has all too often been performance based and not focused on building their confidence.
Sometimes I wonder that a bit more of God’s judgment might help balance the obsession with the trophy culture that tries to boost self-esteem or the ‘Kardhashianization’ whereby it is all about appearances. Or the misplaced trend of entitlement, with characters like Alex Jones we have seen how extreme and verbally violent this type of entitlement can go. And entitlement has not helped to grow self-confidence, on the contrary. Some awareness of God’s judgment might restore some rightly ordered humility, a helpful way to claim that we all can be thrivers, but we don’t need to be strivers.
So how to cope with a culture that distorts, how not to feel discouraged, how to bring change while you sense that doing the good makes you go upstream? Today’s Gospel addresses how to cope with the judgement of people, especially when society’s aggression is increasing.
(Speaking of hardening, notice how Christ distances himself from a religion that is focused on the temple building as the most sacred component of Judaism: “Speaking of the temple, not one stone will be left upon another”. Christ calls for the return to the humanization of religion: the most sacred temple is the body of Christ, all people gathered in his name.)
The gist of Jesus’ guidance is this: This will give you the opportunity to testify. The Greek text uses the word martyrion, which means testimony. This testimony has nothing to do with the annoying evangelical tendency to flip every conversation into a Jesus PR sales pitch moment. A martyr is someone who is willing to prioritize love at all times, even when it may cost her or his life. As Thomas Aquinas said: Martyrdom is an act of fortitude—the virtue of dealing well in the face of death. By it, one keeps unreasonable fear or recklessness from overwhelming his resolve to stand fast in the good of reason. It includes bearing lesser evils as well. “Fortitude behaves well in bearing all manner of adversity,” Thomas Aquinas says Summa II, Part 2, Quaestio 124.
Sweet Jesus, this sounds serious. And yet, when you hear about this fortitude, you sense right away, that is what we need: Fortitude behaves well in bearing all manner of adversity. How to pull this off? Jesus adds to more pointers: First Jesus acknowledges that the situation might be terrifying. “Do not be terrified.” The negation can be read as if fear is a mark of weakness. Rather it is a call to be led be something deeper. But the mention of the emotional component is already a crucial mark of humanization. We do not grow in strength by repressing how we feel. We grow stronger by owning our feelings, by landing deeper into God’s guidance and by channeling the emotions into an energy of strength.
What is deeper than anxiety is the development of a strong sense of self: This line has become such a change agent: waves of non-violent revolutions have run through history, most recently with the civil rights movements.
Second, “I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand”. As much as we may not feel called to give any testimony whatsoever, our world has arrived at a point where your testimony is of crucial importance. The kindness bumper sticker or the national week of kindness are not halting the wave of resentment and hardening. The humility that we are sharing a hope in the goodness of life that is bigger than ourselves and the fact that we are sharing this hope with each other as something we ourselves are recipients ourselves, prevents any sense of entitlement but ignites a sense of generosity that makes our testimony contagious.
To summarize, A Talmudic quote making rounds on Facebook lately, actually comes from the section called, Ethics of our Fathers, sums it up like this: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
Let us develop as much fortitude to give testimony of the goodness of life and the grace of God that are all to often overlooked these days. Your testimony is truly needed.