Written in Their Own Blood

Who, now, should know the marrow of the Scriptures better than the school of Christ itself — the men the Lord chose for himself as students, certainly to be taught fully on every point, and then appointed as our teachers to instruct us on every point? To whom would he sooner have made known the veiled sense of his own words than to the man he showed the likeness of his own glory: to Peter, and John, and James, and afterward to Paul, who was let into paradise as well before his martyrdom? Or do these men also write one thing and think another — teachers using deceit and not truth? [a]

Peter, at any rate, writing to the Christians of Pontus, says: “How great the glory is, if you suffer patiently and are not being punished as wrongdoers! For this is a lovely thing, and it is what you were called to, since Christ also suffered for us, leaving you his own self as a pattern, so that you would follow in his own steps.” And again: “Dear friends, do not be alarmed at the fiery trial taking place among you, as though something strange were happening to you. Since you share in Christ’s sufferings, rejoice, so that when his glory is revealed you may be glad with overflowing joy as well. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because glory and the Spirit of God rest on you — only let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or a wrongdoer, or a meddler in other people’s business. But if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; let him glorify God on this account.”

John, in fact, urges us to lay down our lives even for our brothers, and states that there is no fear in love: “For perfect love throws fear out, since fear carries punishment; and the man who is afraid is not made perfect in love.” What fear is better understood here than the fear that gives rise to denial? What love does he call perfect but the love that puts fear to flight and gives the courage to confess? What penalty will he appoint as the punishment of fear, but the one the man who denies is going to pay — who has to be destroyed, body and soul, in hell? And if John teaches that we must die for our brothers, how much more for the Lord — a man well enough equipped to give advice like that by his own Revelation too.

For the Spirit had sent this order to the angel of the church in Smyrna: “Look, the devil is going to throw some of you into prison, so that you may be tested ten days. Be faithful to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.” To the angel of the church in Pergamum there was mention of Antipas, the utterly faithful witness, who was killed where Satan lives. To the angel of the church in Philadelphia it was signaled that the man who had not denied the name of the Lord was kept out of the last trial. Then to every conqueror the Spirit promises — now the tree of life and exemption from the second death; now the hidden manna with the stone of glistening whiteness, and the name no one knows except the man who receives it; now power to rule with an iron rod, and the brightness of the morning star; now being clothed in white, and not having his name blotted out of the book of life, and being made a pillar in the temple of God with the name of God and of the Lord and of the heavenly Jerusalem written on it; now a seat with the Lord on his own throne — the very thing that was once flatly refused to the sons of Zebedee.

And who, tell me, are these conquerors, so blessed, if not martyrs in the strict sense of the word? For the victories belong to those who do the fighting; and the fighting, in turn, belongs to those who shed the blood. Meanwhile the souls of the martyrs rest quietly under the altar, and keep their endurance up by the settled hope of vengeance; and, dressed in their robes, they wear the dazzling halo of brightness, until the others too may fill out their share of the same glory. For yet again a countless crowd is shown, dressed in white and marked out with the palms of victory, celebrating their triumph — over Antichrist, plainly — since one of the elders says, “These are the ones who come out of that great trouble, and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

For the flesh is the soul’s clothing. The uncleanness is washed off by baptism, but the stains are turned to dazzling whiteness by martyrdom. Isaiah too promises that out of red and scarlet the whiteness of snow and wool will come. And when great Babylon, in the same way, is shown drunk on the blood of the holy ones, the supplies her drunkenness needs are surely furnished by the cups of martyrdoms — and what suffering the fear of martyrdoms will bring on is shown just as plainly. For among all the castaways, or rather at the head of them all, are the cowardly. “But the cowardly,” says John, and then the rest follow, “will have their part in the lake of fire and burning sulfur.” So fear, which love drives out, as his letter says, does have punishment.

But Paul — an apostle out of a persecutor, the man who first of all shed the church’s blood, though he later traded the sword for the pen and turned the dagger into a plough; first the ravening wolf of Benjamin, and then, like Jacob, the one who supplies the food — how does he speak in favor of martyrdoms, which he was now to choose for himself as well? Rejoicing over the Thessalonians, he says: “So that we boast about you in the churches of God, for your endurance and faith through all your persecutions and troubles, in which you are enduring a plain sign of God’s righteous judgment, so that you may be counted worthy of his kingdom — which is what you are suffering for, too.” [m]

And in his letter to the Romans: “And not only that, but we boast in troubles as well, being sure that trouble produces endurance, and endurance tested character, and tested character hope; and hope does not put us to shame.” And again: “And if children, then heirs — heirs of God indeed, and joint heirs with Christ, if in fact we suffer with him, so that we may also be glorified together. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed in us.” And that is why he says further on: “Who will separate us from the love of God? Trouble, or hardship, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or the sword? (As it is written: For your sake we are being killed all day long; we have been counted as sheep for the slaughter.) No — in all these things we are more than conquerors through the one who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else created will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

But further, in listing his own sufferings to the Corinthians, he certainly decided that suffering has to be borne: “In labors more abundant,” he says, “in prisons very often, in deaths many times. Five times I received from the Jews forty lashes minus one; three times I was beaten with rods; once I was stoned” — and the rest. And if those severities are going to look harder than martyrdoms, he says once more: “So I take pleasure in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake.” He also says, in lines that come earlier in that letter: “This is our condition: we are pressed on every side, but not crushed; we are in need, but not in utter want; we are hounded by persecutions, but not abandoned; we are knocked down, but not destroyed — always carrying about in our body the dying of Christ.”

“But even if,” he says, “our outer man is decaying” — the flesh, plainly, under the violence of persecutions — “yet the inner man is renewed day by day” — the soul, plainly, by hope in the promises. “For our light affliction, which lasts a moment, is working out for us a weight of glory beyond all measure and eternal, while we look not at the things that are seen but at the things that are not seen. For the things that are seen are temporary” — he means the troubles — “but the things that are not seen are eternal” — he is promising the rewards.

And writing in chains to the Thessalonians, he certainly said that they were blessed, since it had been given to them not only to trust in Christ but also to suffer for his sake. “You have,” he says, “the same struggle you once saw in me, and now hear that I am in.” “For even if I am poured out over the sacrifice, I am glad and rejoice with you all; in the same way you too be glad and rejoice with me.” You see what he decides the happiness of martyrdom to be, when in its honor he is laying on a festival of shared joy.

And when at last he had come very near to getting what he wanted, greatly rejoicing at what he saw ahead of him, he writes to Timothy in these terms: “For I am already being poured out, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith. There is laid up for me the crown which the Lord will give me on that day” — the day of his suffering, plainly. And in earlier passages he gave warning enough on his own part as well: “It is a trustworthy saying. For if we have died with Christ, we will also live with him; if we suffer, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he will also deny us; if we do not believe, he still stays faithful — he cannot deny himself.” “So do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me, his prisoner” — for he had said before that, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” For we suffer with power out of love toward God, and with a sound mind, when we suffer for our own blamelessness. But further: wherever he commands endurance, what is he providing it for, if not for sufferings? Wherever he tears people away from idolatry, what leads the way in tearing them away, to idolatry’s own damage, more than martyrdoms do?

No doubt the apostle tells the Romans to be subject to every power, because there is no power except from God, and because the ruler does not carry the sword for nothing, and is God’s servant — and more than that, he says, an avenger to bring wrath on the man who does evil. For he had also said earlier: “Rulers are not a terror to a good work, but to an evil one. Do you want, then, not to be afraid of the power? Do what is good, and you will have praise for it. So he is God’s servant to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid.” [w]

So he tells you to be subject to the powers — not on an opening turning up for getting out of martyrdom, but while he is making his appeal on behalf of a good life, and while he is treating the powers as a kind of help granted to righteousness, a kind of attendants of the divine court, which even here passes sentence in advance on the guilty. Then he goes on to show how he wants you to be subject to the powers, telling you to pay “taxes to whom taxes are due, duty to whom duty” — that is, the things that are Caesar’s to Caesar, and the things that are God’s to God. But a man is the property of God alone.

Peter, no doubt, had likewise said that the king must indeed be honored — but only so far that the king is honored while he keeps to his own sphere, while he stays well clear of claiming honors that belong to God. Both father and mother, after all, are loved along with God, not set on a level with him. And beyond that, no one will be allowed to love even his own life more than God.

By now, then, the letters of the apostles are well known too. “And are we,” you say, “simple souls in every way, mere doves, so fond of going astray?” Out of eagerness to stay alive, I should think. But let it stand that the meaning has gone out of their letters. We still know that the apostles endured such sufferings; the teaching is plain. This much I notice just from running through the Acts. I am not hunting for it at all. The prisons there, and the chains, and the whippings, and the big stones, and the swords, and the attacks by the Jews, and the assemblies of the Gentiles, and the charges brought by tribunes, and the hearings before kings, and the judgment seats of proconsuls, and the name of Caesar, need no interpreter. [z]

That Peter is struck, that Stephen is buried under stones, that James is killed the way a victim is killed at the altar, that Paul is beheaded — these things have been written in their own blood. And if a heretic wants his confidence to rest on a public record, the archives of the empire will speak, as the stones of Jerusalem would. We read the lives of the Caesars: at Rome, Nero was the first to stain the rising faith with blood. That is when Peter is belted by another, when he is made fast to the cross; that is when Paul comes into a birth that matches his Roman citizenship, when at Rome he springs to life again, ennobled by martyrdom.

Wherever I read of these things, the moment I read them I am learning to suffer. And it makes no difference to me which teachers of martyrdom I follow — the apostles’ declarations or their deaths — except that in their deaths I recall their declarations as well. For they would not have suffered anything of a kind they had not known beforehand they had to suffer. When Agabus, using a matching action too, had foretold that chains were waiting for Paul, the disciples wept and begged him not to risk going up to Jerusalem — and begged in vain. As for Paul, wanting to illustrate what he had always taught, he says, “Why are you weeping and breaking my heart? For my part, I could wish not only to suffer chains, but also to die at Jerusalem, for the name of my Lord Jesus Christ.” And so they gave way, saying, “Let the will of the Lord be done” — sure, plainly, that sufferings are included in the will of God. For they had tried to hold him back not with the intention of talking him out of it, but to show love for him; they were longing to keep the apostle, not advising him against martyrdom.

And if even then a Prodicus or a Valentinus had been standing by, suggesting that a man must not confess on the earth before men, and must do it all the less in truth, so that God may not look as though he thirsts for blood, and Christ for a repayment of suffering, as if he were begging for it in order to get salvation by it for himself as well — he would have heard at once, from God’s servant, what the devil heard from the Lord: “Get behind me, Satan; you are a stumbling block to me. It is written—”