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A Toolkit for Explaining the Christian View of Marriage

Peter Walks on Water Philipp Otto Runge

Peter Walks on Water, Philipp Otto Runge, 1806.

With the Marriage Plebiscite being distributed to all Australians on 12 September, and a count of the results being collected in November, it is crucial for Christians to understand and moreover, be able to explain to others, the reasons for their position on marriage.

Because Marriage is foundational to society, the government has agreed that the whole nation has a right and indeed a duty to provide feedback via a voluntary plebiscite on the proposal to allow same-sex “marriage”.

Many people find it difficult to articulate and defend their core beliefs on marriage, especially if they are on the “no” side, because the media are generally heavily in favour of the “yes” vote and the “no” case is not publicly being well made.  The problem with the way this issue is being discussed in Australia is that it is being defined as an “Equality” issue.  The assertion is made that same-sex attracted people are being discriminated against.  What I would like to do here, is reframe the issues at stake so that we can see more clearly the way to defend what most Christians instinctively know is right, but are not sure how to explain, especially when faced with angry and emotional others accusing us of being ‘haters’ or ‘spewing filth’ as I have seen in some online commentary.

The first thing we need to say is that this is not about hating people with same-sex attraction.  God loves all people and wants them to enter into a deeply fulfilling relationship with Him.  However, if we love God, we love Truth itself and therefore we need to seek the Truth about what Marriage is.

The second thing to say is that it’s no use discussing marriage with non-Christians by quoting the Bible.  Non-Christians do not regard the Bible as authoritative, so we need to find another area of common ground.  Fortunately, the Catholic Church has a very rich history of philosophy grounded in a respect for reason, so in my discussion below, I will not be talking about God, but about philosophical positions that both Christians and non-Christians can share.

Thirdly, we cannot possibly start this discussion without defining what Marriage is.  And it is when we look at this, that we discover that the “no” and “yes” cases have a fundamentally different way of looking at Marriage.  The problem with the “equality” argument, is that it doesn’t say exactly what we want to treat equally – or rather, it’s not marriage as a concept that it wants to treat equally, but rather self-defined and infinitely adjustable minority groups.  In the words of Ryan T. Anderson, Marriage Equality depends on Marriage Reality.  And Marriage Reality depends on describing Marriage correctly.  Essentially, there are two competing views on marriage, and I will describe them below.

The #1 View of Marriage.  In this worldview, marriage is that relationship which unites a mother and father with the children that their relationship produces.  Some 2,400 years ago, Aristotle said that we can analyse any community in terms of the ACTS that the community engages in, the GOODS that they seek, and the NORMS or COMMITMENTS that they live by.  Looking at marriage, we can see that there is one ACT engaged in by the husband and wife that defines their marriage.  This Act is grounded in the Anthropological truth that the bodies of men and women are complementary.  All of our bodily organs can function correctly on their own – the heart can beat on its own, the kidneys can filter the blood on their own, the eyes can see without recourse to another individual – but the sexual organs require input from another human being of the opposite sex to complete their function.  Together, the man and the woman form a one-flesh union.  And so complete is this union, that within the 24 hours following, a baby might be conceived and subsequently born nine months later.  So the GOODS produced as a result of the marriage are the children.  This is based in the biological truth that human reproduction requires both a man and a woman.  This tells us that the love-making Act that makes the marriage relationship marital, is also the life-giving act that produces the Goods that are the result of that union.  The act is not only unitive because of the love between the spouses, but also generative.  This then leads to the COMMITMENTS arising as a result of their Act – the Commitments to raising the children arising as a result of the love-making life-giving Act.  This is why spouses make commitments that are comprehensive both in time and in exclusivity and are declared as part of the marriage ceremony: “till death do us part”, “forsaking all others I take you to be my lawful wedded spouse”.  You don’t do that with your business partner or your flatmate.  Marital exclusivity is about the sexual act itself – it doesn’t include activities like who you can play tennis with or join a choir with.  These commitments are grounded in the social reality that children deserve both a mother and a father.  A large body of research data shows that the well-being of children in two-parent, intact families significantly exceeds that of children in single-parent families.  And research is increasingly showing that genetic differences between males and females are important for providing balance in child-rearing.  I’m not saying that same-sex attracted people are bad parents, but with the best will in the world, two dads or two mums do not replace a mum and a dad.

The #2 View of Marriage.  There’s a competing vision of marriage that sees it rather as an intense, emotional, romantic and care-giving relationship.  The determining factor is that of all your relationships, this one relationship is your most intense, your most romantic, your BFF par excellence, where you have an exchange of care-giving between the partners, who are not differentiated by sexual preference.  This view has as its motto “love is love”.  Everyone who does not subscribe to this view may be consequently regarded as a “hater” or a “homophobe”, despite the fact that any opinion on homosexuality is irrelevant to the #1 Vision of Marriage.

But the second definition of marriage can’t explain all the marital norms, i.e. the life-long commitment and the exclusivity – and it certainly can’t explain the history of marriage legislation over time.  If the second view is true, then why can’t someone just abandon the marriage when they fall out of love, or when someone more exciting or attractive comes along?  If the second view is true, then what is to prevent it being exclusive – why not have the occasional secret ‘fling’ for the sake of a few moments of ‘love’?  What is there to prevent this sort of relationship being monogamous – why not make it a throuple or allow polygamy?  Why not say, like the Mormon polygamist, “I love them all!”  There is nothing in the #2 definition of marriage which grounds the relationship in monogamy, exclusivity and permanency.

For this reason, I see the second view of marriage leading to the complete erosion of the concept of marriage over time, as those things that currently make marriage special (monogamy, exclusivity and permanency) would become irrelevant.  Of course, it is only the sexual revolution of the 1960s that has made the #2 view of marriage possible – with easy contraception eroding the link between the unitive and generative aspects of marriage and leading to the hook-up culture with its consequent explosion of non-marital childbearing, and no-fault divorce eroding all three pillars of marriage: monogamy, exclusivity and permanence.  So it’s no surprise that some people come to the conclusion that sexual preference is no big deal either.  The subtext of the marriage debate is that heterosexual people have made such a mess of marriage that there is no reason any more to restrict access to marriage across a wider spectrum.

Neither does the second definition of marriage explain why the State takes an interest in marriage.  Obviously the State has an interest in creating a stable society.  And stable societies are made up of smaller units of families.  When families are dysfunctional, everybody is affected.  With a decreased commitment to the traditional understanding of marriage and family, there will be an associated increase in anti-social behaviour, depression, anxiety and other mental-health disorders, and diminished societal cohesion.  There is no reason for the State to have any interest in people’s personal love lives, apart from the fact that the State is interested in the welfare of children, since neglected, abandoned, dysfunctional, depressed and anxious children are a burden on the State.

I haven’t yet addressed the other flow-ons from the re-definition of marriage – limits to freedom of speech and freedom of association, as well as persecution for sincerely held religious beliefs, but will return to them in the coming weeks, along with a discussion of why this is not an “Equality” issue.

I would just like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Ryan T. Anderson, Sherif Girgis, Robert P. George, and Michael Quinlan, from whose work I have borrowed heavily.

In the meantime, here is a copy of a Facebook conversation I conducted with a friend of a friend, to assist you in having your arguments ready to defend the Catholic position.

Facebook-discussion

Further reading and watching:

 

 


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Raising Mentally Healthy Children with Melinda Tankard Reist

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Melinda Tankard Reist speaking at St Stephen’s School, Duncraig, Western Australia on 4 August 2017. Photo: Deirdre Fleming

If these facts about our children don’t give you pause, then you’re not paying attention.

  • More than a quarter of 16-24 year olds have a mental disorder.
  • One in sixteen of 16-24 year olds have depression.
  • One in six have an anxiety disorder.
  • There has been a 90% increase in older adolescent self –harm (mostly girls, but some boys) in the last 10 years – cutting themselves, pulling out hair, pulling out eyelashes, pulling out eyebrows.
  • There has been a 60% increase in 12 to 14-year-olds hospitalised as a result of self-harm between 1996 and 2006. (Patrick Parkinson, Repairing the Social Environment for Australian Children and Young People, 2011, Vos Foundation)
  • One in 100 adolescent girls are anorexic.
  • One in ten girls are bulimic.
  • One in four teenage girls wants to have plastic surgery, mostly breast implants,  with a 50% increase in girls between 15-23 wanting labiaplasty or genital surgery (when there is nothing wrong with them).
  • Among boys, body image dissatisfaction for Western men has tripled in the past 25 years.
  • Up to a quarter of people suffering from anorexia nervosa or bulimia are male, and almost equal numbers of males and females suffer from binge eating disorders.
  • A ‘reverse anorexia’ condition is occurring among men who are dissatisfied with their body image: body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), also called bigorexia, or muscle dysmorphia. In their quest for cheap, muscle-building steroids, these men often travel overseas, but don’t come back alive.

These were just some of the introductory points made by Melinda Tankard Reist, author and media commentator, at a presentation she gave last Friday at St Stephen’s School, Duncraig.  A passionate defender of our children’s right to be children, Tankard Reist links our culture’s obsession with sex with the dysfunctional behaviours now becoming common among our youth.  Drawing our attention to the sexualisation of our culture, she took us through a visual tour of the porn-invaded advertising and industry landscape.  Who hasn’t heard of high-heeled shoes for babies, children’s shirts that say “SL_T, all I need is U”, Trashwhore shorts, Playboy baby clothes (with front-and-centre statements like “Future Player: Lock up your daughters” and “Future Playmate” on their baby onesies), and the not-to-be-missed Cotton On/Typo “Porn is my Saviour” mugs?

Boys, in particular, are at risk from the pornification of the internet, and are exposed to a myriad of sexualised images from advertisers seeking to groom them for a life addicted to their products.  Some advertisers have even cleverly linked the pop-ups featuring their sex-products to common spelling mistakes made by children when searching the internet for completely unrelated material.  Tankard Reist points out that the male brain is not fully developed until age 25 to 30, and that this oversaturation with sexualised images distorts the perception among teenage boys who think that porn presents what is normal.

It has been demonstrated elsewhere, that porn addiction has serious implications for the happiness of both men and women in later life, with porn-addicted men no longer being able to have normal sexual relations with their wives – resulting in an associated increase in treatments for impotence.

Melinda Tankard Reist 20170804_203120

Melinda Tankard Reist in conversation at St Stephen’s School, Duncraig, Western Australia. Photo: Deirdre Fleming

At schools across the country, Tankard Reist is busy engaging children and teenagers in conversation about issues such as teenage self-perception.  Crucial to the discussion is whether the young person understands that they are so much more than just their physical appearance.  Tankard Reist encourages parents to develop in their children a wider sense of their own value, and praise their children for things other than their appearance in order to help them develop a well-rounded view of themselves as people with intelligence, people of faith, with the ability to love unselfishly, and possessing virtues like kindness and self-control.   She helps young women to navigate ways of answering the question, “How do I say no without hurting his feelings?”

Her organisation, Collective Shout, has been instrumental in achieving a number of wins for children. Zoo magazine, the ‘rape manual for boys’, was removed from sale at Coles, and subsequently went out of production, while Grand Theft Auto V, a video game in which you can earn health points by sexually abusing and murdering women, has been withdrawn from sale at Kmart and Target.  Another  campaign resulted in the removal of billboards advertising local brothels, previously positioned overlooking the playground of a Brisbane boys’ school with the obvious intention of grooming future customers.

Melinda was also one of the first to expose the porn sites connected to the Safe Schools Program.  Ostensibly anti-bullying, Safe Schools was developed by Roz Ward, a Marxist LGBTI activist, and former lecturer at La Trobe University (she has now been booted out for alleged misconduct).  More and more people are coming to see the Safe Schools program for what it is, an attempt to sexualise and confuse our children about their bodies and challenge ‘heteronormativity’, at an age when this is the last thing they should be thinking about.  I recommend everyone read Miranda Devine’s article in the Daily Telegraph, critiquing the Marxist agenda of deconstructing the family.  The alternate universe of LGBTI activists sees the traditional family not as the core of a socially cohesive nation, but as something from which we should be liberated.

To smooth the operation of capitalism the ruling class has benefited … from oppressing our bodies, our relationships, sexuality and gender identities alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia (which) serve to break the spirits of ordinary people (and make us) feel like we should live in small social units and families where we must reproduce and take responsibility for people in those units. (Roz Ward)

Ms Ward is quoted in The Australian as saying:

It’s more like 40-50 per cent of young people who are not ­exclusively attracted to the opposit­e sex.  That’s how fluid sexuality is headed.

I will have more to say about the (so-called) Safe Schools program in a future post, so stay tuned.

There is much that we as Catholic parents can do to help our children.  We can teach them their value in God’s eyes – their dignity as humans created in God’s plan, with a particular vocation and purpose in this life, one which it is our sacred duty to discover and cooperate with, if we want to live a life of joy and abundance.  Instead of teaching them that most malleable of words, ‘values’ (HT Iain Benson), let’s teach them actual virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope and love.  At the same time, let’s draw their attention to the seven deadly sins, so they can know what not to aim at: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth.  Let’s teach them to pray for the gifts of the Holy Spirit (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord), and to be able to demonstrate the fruit of the Holy Spirit in their lives: love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  When my children were still living under my roof, we prayed for these things every night and they memorised the lists, and although they’re not perfect (but who is?), I can see the fruit in their lives today.  For our culture and for your children’s present and future happiness, keep the faith.

Further reading and listening:


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First Sunday of Advent, Year A | Prayer and Promptings

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Chapelle Saint Michel d’Aiguilhe, (Chapel of St Michael of the Needle), Le Puy-en-Velay, Auvergne, France.

Last week I said I would talk more about how God speaks to us.  This is one of the fascinating aspects of Christianity, because it is primarily in Christianity (and to some extent Judaism) that God presents Himself to us as a loving Father, who pays us the unexpected compliment of desiring communion with us, his children.

Once, we dive into Christianity with minds and hearts obedient and open to receiving, then God can start having a conversation with us.  ‘Conversation’ is my word of choice, because it conveys better the trust and openness required for spiritual progress.  Prayer is much more than petitioning for things. That conflicted genius, Oscar Wilde, once said: “Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.”  No doubt this facetiousness was Wilde enjoying the sound of his own voice.  For my part, prayer actually is largely correspondence:  I like to write down my prayers, often in front of The Blessed Sacrament, and re-read them a year later to see how God has directed me.   As I get older, I am increasingly on the receiving end of an impression that God is steering me almost despite myself.  Perhaps Wilde was alluding to the fact that prayer is not an activity directed at someone who is an equal, but rather someone infinitely higher than ourselves, whose ways are not our ways.

Often God’s promptings come in the form of a ‘still, small voice’.  I’m not talking about the usual stream of consciousness that we all experience as a background to our thoughts; neither am I talking about a voice that seems to come from some other, as in schizophrenia, but rather an inner suggestion which comes with a certain insistence and often makes me respond, in turn, ‘Oh, that’s just ridiculous!’ to, eventually, ‘Well, if you think that’s possible, maybe I should try it and see where it leads.’

It is this ongoing conversation with a loving Father that helps me navigate through my day.  Sometimes He answers my prayers before they’ve even arrived fully formed on my lips.  Yet when the answers come, I am struck by how appropriate they are to what I might have prayed if only I had got around to it.  Just this week, by way of a small example, I have been thinking about my misgivings concerning a study we are about to do at Bible Study on Prayer and Prosperity, and God has answered my concerns with a randomly selected podcast from John Bergsma on “The Upside-Down Kingdom”.

Another incident this week seemed a clear example of a ‘steering’.  On Friday, I went to Adoration at St Andrew’s Church as usual between 3 and 4 p.m.  I was all set to leave, but everyone else had made off and I was the only one left.  Fortunately I wasn’t in a hurry –  I had had some space freed up by what I thought was my decision (and now believe was a prompting from God) on the previous day to take advantage of a free offer and do my shopping online.  Just as well I stayed, for suddenly the church was invaded by a riot of St Vincent de Paul workers, unloading 43 newly-packed Christmas hampers for the needy.  I’m sure they were doing the Lord’s work, but they were completely oblivious to the presence of Christ exposed on the altar, and chattered in loud voices as they debated whether they should store the hampers in this corner or over there, with one woman even wanting to walk across the sanctuary.  Suddenly, I felt as if Jesus (on the altar) and I were two people in possession of a secret: and the secret was that the Lord of the Universe was physically present in the room and no-one knew it!  It was as if the Queen of England had arrived incognito to dinner, and everyone at the table thought she was the woman brought in to do the washing up.  Strangely, this experience gave me a heightened awareness of Jesus’ real presence in the Monstrance, perhaps in the same way that one becomes even more convinced of the Divinity of Christ when a stupid or thoughtless person uses His name with great disrespect.  I spent the rest of my time at Adoration just enjoying the Companionship of the Holy One and not leaving him alone and disregarded on the altar.

Then there’s the sort of prayer that is ‘asking for stuff’.  Well, God is such a loving and trustworthy Father that he will not give us anything that isn’t good for us (unless, paradoxically, he wants to teach us that it’s not good for us).  (He has done this a few times in my life!  Ouch!)  Very often, God doesn’t give us what we ask for straight away.  Often we get an answer only after quite a journey of improvement.  This is one of the reasons I like praying to ‘Our Lady, Undoer of Knots’.  She helps us undo one snag at a time.  I had quite a dramatic demonstration of this when I was praying for reconciliation in the family of a Christian couple I know whose son was refusing to talk to them.  Now, the father was actually someone who had divorced and remarried (something the Lord clearly calls adultery).  Anyway, when I took this situation to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots, the first thing that happened (in the same week!) was that the father’s first wife died suddenly.  It seemed to me that what God was saying to him was, ‘Your adulterous situation is blocking your prayers for reconciliation.  Perhaps now you can have another look at what you did, and first come to me with a repentant heart before you pray about your son.’  Interestingly, it was at the first wife’s funeral that the opportunity arose for this family to resume some conversation with each other, and things have been moving along, knot by knot, ever since.

For a more dramatic example of God’s roundabout methods of answering prayer, let’s go back to Oscar Wilde.  His poem E. tenebris was written in 1881, when he was only 27, long before his troubles and his trial.

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:
The wineof life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God’s throne should stand.
‘He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,
Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name
From morn to noon on Carmel’s smitten height.’
Nay, peace, I shall behold before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.

Sure enough, if this was a prayer, God took Wilde seriously, and after a tortuous journey involving his trial, imprisonment, exile in France, impoverishment and finally being struck down with meningitis, Wilde came back 19 years later to the faith he had toyed with throughout his life.  In the words of the Passionist priest, Father Cuthbert Dunne, who attended him on his deathbed,

As the voiture rolled through the dark streets that wintry night, the sad story of Oscar Wilde was in part repeated to me… Robert Ross knelt by the bedside, assisting me as best he could while I administered conditional baptism, and afterwards answering the responses while I gave Extreme Unction to the prostrate man and recited the prayers for the dying. As the man was in a semi-comatose condition, I did not venture to administer the Holy Viaticum; still I must add that he could be roused and was roused from this state in my presence. When roused, he gave signs of being inwardly conscious… Indeed I was fully satisfied that he understood me when told that I was about to receive him into the Catholic Church and gave him the Last Sacraments… And when I repeated close to his ear the Holy Names, the Acts of Contrition, Faith, Hope and Charity, with acts of humble resignation to the Will of God, he tried all through to say the words after me. (Wikipedia)

How wonderful are the words of Isaiah in today’s first reading, for approaching prayer according to the heart of God:

Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the Temple of the God of Jacob
that he may teach us his ways
so that we may walk in his paths …

Today’s readings

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32nd Sunday in OT | Maccabees, Martyrdom and Meaning

ciseri-antonio-the-martyrdom-of-the-seven-maccabees

The Martyrdom of the Seven Maccabees, Antonio Ciseri, 1863, Oil on Canvas, St Felicita, Florence, Italy.

One of Satan’s wiles is the distortion of words, so that they lose distinctions and create confusion where previously there was clarity.  That this would happen is predicted in Isaiah.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20)

One of the words under attack in our time is ‘martyrdom’.

We have a superb, if gruesome, illustration of the traditional meaning of martyrdom in today’s Old Testament reading from 2 Maccabees.  In fact, this is one of the first descriptions of martyrdom in a distinctively Jewish context, aside from prophetic accounts such as Isaiah’s Suffering Servant passages.

The setting is the Greek empire during the period after the death of Alexander the Great, when the empire was split between the northern Seleucids (Mesopotamia, Persia – Iraq and Iran in our day – and Syria) and the southern Ptolemies (Egypt and Palestine).  Antiochus IV, king of the Seleucids, a man seized by a thirst for power, wrested control of Palestine away from Ptolemy IV, Pharaoh of Egypt, in 169 BC.  In an extraordinary display of self-aggrandisement, he assumed the title “Theos Epiphanes” or “God Manifest”.  He then set about a systematic destruction of Jewish culture and religious practice.  The aim was to unify the territory he controlled by replacing the ‘backward’ religious beliefs and observances of the Jews with ‘enlightened’ Greek (Hellenistic) culture and religious practice.  He attacked the temple, carrying off its altar and sacred vessels, pillaged the city and tore down Jerusalem’s wall that had been rebuilt by Nehemiah after the Babylonian captivity, took women, children and cattle captive, and rebuilt the city with a stronger wall and a Citadel.

The king then issued a proclamation to his whole kingdom that all were to become a single people, each nation renouncing its particular customs.  All the gentiles conformed to the king’s decree, and many Israelites chose to accept his religion, sacrificing to idols and profaning the Sabbath.  The king also sent edicts by messenger to Jerusalem and the towns of Judah, directing them to adopt customs foreign to the country, banning burnt offerings, sacrifices and libations from the sanctuary, profaning Sabbaths and feasts, defiling the sanctuary and everything holy, building altars, shrines and temples for idols, sacrificing pigs and unclean beasts, leaving their sons uncircumcised, and prostituting themselves to all kinds of impurity and abomination, so that they should forget the Law and revoke all observance of it.  Anyone not obeying the king’s command was to be put to death.  Writing in such terms to every part of his kingdom, the king appointed inspectors for the whole people and directed all the towns of Judah to offer sacrifice city by city.  Many of the people – that is, every apostate from the Law – rallied to them and so committed evil in the country, forcing Israel into hiding in any possible place of refuge.  (1 Maccabees 1:41-53)

To the horror of the Jews, sacrifices to Olympian Zeus were made in the Temple on the Altar of Burnt Offering on the 25th of each month, (2 M 1:59) any copies of the Torah that were found were torn up and burned, and women who had had their children circumcised were put to death with their babies hung round their necks.

Today’s reading from 2 Maccabees gives us a vivid portrayal of a particular family of Jews who resist this ideological colonisation.  Seven brothers and their mother are arrested and tortured to force them to taste pork.  Their eldest brother has his tongue cut out, his head scalped and his extremities cut off before he is fried while still alive in a red-hot pan before his brothers and mother.  Slowly the torturers make their way through all the brothers and finally the mother.  With remarkable courage they stand firm in their resolution to be faithful to the Torah and their covenant relationship with God.  You might wonder why they didn’t just eat the pork – it’s only food after all.  But to the Jews, adherence to the dietary laws was not just a meaningless dietary restriction.  It was symbolic of their relationship of familial trust, love and duty towards the God who had formed them and led them since earliest times.

Now what is remarkable about their martyrdom is that they see it, not as a failure, but as the occasion for a number of opportunities, namely,

  1. An opportunity to participate in the future, bodily resurrection:

“Ours is the better choice, to meet death at men’s hands, yet relying on God’s promise that we shall be raised up by him; whereas for you there can be no resurrection to new life.”  “Cruel brute, you may discharge us from this present life, but the King of the world will raise us up, since we die for his laws, to live again for ever.”

  1. An opportunity to explain God’s plan for his people and his intervention in human history.

“You have power over human beings, mortal as you are, and can act as you please.  But do not think that our race has been deserted by God.  Only wait and you will see in your turn how his mighty power will torment you and your descendants.” 

(In fact, within 5 years, Antiochus IV is dead, and within 100 years, the Greek empire is overcome by the Romans under Pompey.)

  1. An opportunity to die to self – to give up concern for one’s own safety and security to uphold what is good and true.

“Heaven gave me these limbs; for the sake of his laws I have no concern for them; from him I hope to receive them again.”

  1. An opportunity to atone for the sins of their fellow Jews; they are able to redeem the sins of other people by taking on suffering themselves:

“Do not delude yourself: we are suffering like this through our own fault, having sinned against our own God; hence, appalling things have befallen us.”

  1. An opportunity to show profound humility and trust in God’s ultimate plan. The mother says,

“I do not know how you appeared in my womb; it was not I who endowed you with breath and life, I had not the shaping of your every part.  And hence, the Creator of the world, who made everyone and ordained the origin of all things, will in his mercy give you back breath and life, since for the sake of his laws you have no concern for yourselves.”

Now contrast all this with the other kind of (self-described) martyrdom, the kind on display so frequently these days among terrorists.  The type of martyrdom that says you can kill yourself in the name of religion.  When a terrorist blows himself up, hoping to take as many others with him as possible, this is as unlike a Jewish or Christian martyrdom as it is possible to get.  If there is anything in common between the two ‘martyrdoms’, it is the zeal and commitment of the participants, but that is all.  It is possible to make several distinctions between these martyrdoms:

  • Judaeo-Christian martyrs have historically been innocent victims. The martyrs of Islamic State are perpetrators of terror and cruelty, not victims.
  • Judaeo-Christian martyrs give up their own lives in non-violent surrender to the violence of others. They do not seek death, merely surrender to it when death becomes inevitable.  Martyrs of the Islamic State actively seek death and are effectively committing suicide.
  • Judaeo-Christian martyrs see their suffering as redemptive. Their willingness to undergo suffering is an atoning sacrifice which has a redemptive effect.  Witness how the Holocaust of World War II led to the reversal of the Jewish diaspora and the re-creation of Israel.  Witness how the blood of the early Christian martyrs was the seed of the Church.
  • The heavenly reward that Judaeo-Christian martyrs hope for is one where they will be united with God in a living relationship of selflessness, perfect love and joy in His presence … the reward that the martyrs of ISIS hope for seems to be focused on selfish pleasures and unbridled lust – men being rewarded with 72 virgins, for example.

These are just a few differences; others could be found.  Right now, there is an unprecedented number of Christian martyrdoms occurring, particularly in the Middle East and Africa.  The perpetrators are ISIS, Al Quaeda, Al Shabaab, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Wilayat Sayna, Lashkar-e-Taiba and their ilk. Many of these go unreported by a media that is hostile to Christianity, but you can easily find them here.  Right now, the state of Christian martyrdom in the world is so dire, that we pray that God will soon end this torment and restore the world to himself.  May the blood of the real martyrs atone for the sins of a world that has abandoned God in so many ways, and may God strengthen us to resist any attempts of the state to restrict religious freedom.

Today’s readings:

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