Monday of the Sixth Week of Easter

Lectionary: 291

"I have told you this so that you may not fall away.
They will expel you from the synagogues;
in fact, the hour is coming when everyone who kills you
will think he is offering worship to God.
They will do this because they have not known either the Father or me.
I have told you this so that when their hour comes
you may remember that I told you."

Their hour was not long in coming after the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Gospel seemed to incubate for fifty days among the disciples until the Jewish feast of Pentecost, which also fell on Sunday. And then the Reborn suddenly burst out of the Upper Room to announce the Lord's condemnation of sin and his redemption of sinners. As soon as the city leaders recovered their wits they initiated increasingly harsh measures to suppress the movement. But the Word of God could not be silenced and the disciples remembered Jesus's prophetic words. 

Ever since that time, Christians have had a fascination with martyrdom. When children attain that prepubescent age of hero worship we don't tell them about LEGO-Marvel super heroes but about the martyrs who gave a witness of their faith in the face of murderous opposition. Some endured repeated arrests and torture before they were finally executed. We remind our children that we will never conform our moral conduct to a culture of pleasure, waste, excess, exploitation, and death. 

But martyrs also represent another danger to us, and that is the cult of victimization. While we know that a violent culture habitually wastes human life and potential, we cannot always regard resistance as the work of Satan. If we are sent as judges of the earth, we must be guided by divine impartiality. We should not be partisans in the world's endless conflict between wealth and poverty. 

The Book of Exodus demonstrates that talent for fairness in passages like the following: 

You shall not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When testifying in a lawsuit, you shall not follow the crowd in perverting justice.
You shall not favor the poor in a lawsuit.
When you come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you must see to it that it is returned.
When you notice the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you should not desert him; you must help him with it.
You shall not pervert justice for the needy among you in a lawsuit.
You shall keep away from anything dishonest. Exodus 23:2-6

Without the discipline of Divine Wisdom, a passion for righteousness can lead us astray; and especially when we think we ourselves are the victims. 

Jesus renounces the cult of victimization when he insists in John 10: 

This is why the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again. This command I have received from my Father." 

If he walks resolutely toward Jerusalem and into the hands of his enemies, he does not volunteer to die. Rather, he obeys the Father's will. The gospels tell us he sometimes withdrew from threats and danger. In our dealings with the world, we risk self-deception and self-aggrandizement if we too eagerly wear a crown of thorns. 

And so we ask the Lord to guide us continually in our dealings with the dominant culture. We do not expect them to agree with us at every point, but we can appeal continually to reason and truth, and watch God's hand govern the world according to his purposes.