Martyrdom and The Truth

One

Putting your money where your mouth is

A lot of people seem to be very confident in all their opinions. They seem to be certain about nearly everything, what the stock market’s going to do, what’s going to happen politically, or geo-politically, or what’s going to happen to the Church, or in the world of sports. But of course, there’s a very easy way to test not just how confident someone sounds in their predictions, but how confident they actually are.

That test is for them to put their money where their mouth is. Because a measure of a person’s certainty is how much they’re willing to invest, how much they’re willing to lay on the line. And that’s also the measure of the certainty of our faith.

Two

Martyr as the Supreme Witness

In the first centuries of the Church, the Roman authorities tried to stamp out Christianity. They very plausibly reasoned that publicly killing Christians in large numbers would act as a very powerful deterrent against anyone converting to the new religion. Who wants to convert to a religion that will get you thrown to lions? And yet, paradoxically, it was the martyrdoms themselves that resulted in the huge number of conversions from all levels of society.

It became a saying that, “the blood of martyrs are the seeds of the Church,” because if you wanted to increase the membership of the Church, there was no better way to accomplish that than to have people willing to be martyred rather than renounce their faith. In fact, the word martyr means witness, because the martyrs were the best witnesses, the best evangelists for the truth of the Gospel.

As the Catechism states, “Martyrdom is the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith” (2473).

The martyrs put their money where their mouths were. They laid everything on the line.

Audiences saw men and women willing to face death, and they thought, “How could people endure this torment unless they really believed in what they said?

And then the next logical step is, “How can anyone believe in something this strongly unless they have experienced something radically convincing?”

And the conclusion was, for the martyrs to suffer so much, and to believe as strongly as they did, they must have access to knowledge of a truth so certain that they’d be willing to invest everything in Christ.

Three

The Unique Way of Spreading the Faith

Christ is the only person in history who founded a religion by allowing himself to be unjustly tormented and put to death. And His Church is the only Church that spreads itself primarily through suffering and a willingness to offer up one’s life.

Think of how different this is, for instance, from Islam. When Mohammed’s life was threatened, he left Mecca, built up an army, and then returned to Mecca and slaughtered its inhabitants. Now just stop, for a second, and think about how much more confidence in the truth you need in order to lay down your life, as opposed to taking the life of an enemy.

So if we are really convinced of the Gospel, if we really believe it’s true, and we want other people to know it’s true, then it’s not enough to preach it or argue it, and it’s certainly not enough to fight for it. 

If we really want to manifest the truth of the Gospel, we have to be willing to do what the Martyrs did and suffer for it.

Four

How can we have the confidence of the martyrs?

And yet how can we have the confidence of the martyrs? After all, the early apostles saw Christ, and saw His miracles – and the earliest martyrs of the Church saw the apostles, and saw their miracles. What have we seen that can make us as confident as they were?

Well, first of all, remember that seeing miracles wasn’t enough to inspire faith or confidence in Christ. The gospel says that some saw the Risen Christ, and still doubted. And many saw the wonders worked by the Apostles, but still didn’t put their faith in the Gospel.

There must be something that Christ can show us that can make us absolutely confident He is the real deal. This is His gift of faith, where He shows us that He and His Church have the words of everlasting life: that only He can make sense of the world and sin and death and life and love. That unless Christ is real, God is our loving Father, our real problem is our own sin, He has died to forgive us, given His sacraments to heal us, and given His teaching to guide us – unless all that is true, there is no sense and no hope for any of the sons or daughters of men.

That is our certainty. That is the truth that compels us to be willing to invest everything in Christ. Because He is the only hope we have.

Five

What have you sacrificed or risked for the faith?

So the only convincing witness to the Truth is someone who is willing to suffer for it, like the martyrs, someone who is willing to lay it on the line.

So what are you laying on the line? How are you shaping your life differently than you would have done if you didn’t believe the Gospel? When a nonbeliever sees your life, will that person say, “Wow, he or she must really believe it, or they wouldn’t live like that.”

Because that’s the best proclamation of the truth there is.