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Martyrdom
Throughout the Length of Days
by Clement of Alexandria
(c.150-215 AD)
Martyrdom
means bearing witness to God. Every soul that
seeks in pureness of heart to know God and
obeys the commandments of God is a martyr,
bearing witness by life or by words.
In fact even if it is not a matter of shedding
blood, the soul is pouring out its faith
because it is by faith that the soul will be
separated from the body before a person dies.
That is why, in the Gospel, the Lord praises
the person 'who has left house or brothers or
sisters or mother or father or children or
lands for my sake and for the Gospel.' That
person is blessed because he too is going to
meet martyrdom simply by living in a way that
is different from the crowd, because he is
following the rule of the Gospel for love of
his Lord.
The truly righteous are set apart from the
world because they produce the fruits of grace
in their actions. They do this because they
have been able to become a friend of God and
to obtain a place at the right hand of the
Father, as the Apostles have done.
- Miscellaneous Studies, 4,
4, IS (Stahlin II, p.255)
[Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD) was an
early Christian writer, Bible scholar, and
theologian who taught
at the Catechetical School of Alexandria.]
A New Ecumenism of Blood
“Today there is an ecumenism of blood. In some
countries they kill Christians for wearing a cross
or having a Bible and before they kill them they
do not ask them whether they are Anglican,
Lutheran, Catholic or Orthodox1...They
are witnesses to Jesus Christ, and they are
persecuted and killed because they are Christians.
Those who persecute them make no distinction
between the religious communities to which they
belong. They are Christians and for that they are
persecuted. This, brothers and sisters, is the
ecumenism of blood.”2
- Pope Francis
“The ecumenism of suffering
and of the martyrdom of blood are a powerful
summons to walk the long path of
reconciliation between the Churches, by
courageously and decisively abandoning
ourselves to the working of the Holy Spirit.”
- Pope Francis' address to
the Armenian Orthodox Patriarch 3
“The blood of martyrs is in the church a force for
renewal and of unity.”
- Pope John Paul II
“The only way to overcome our enemy is by loving
him” (quote from The Cost of Discipleship
by Dietrich Bonhoeffer). When the German Lutheran
pastor
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was led from his cell to
be executed by the Nazis, he told his prison
companion: “This is the end – but for me, the
beginning of life” (April, 1945).
“He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to
gain that which he cannot lose...God, I
pray Thee, light these sticks of my life and may
I burn for Thee. Consume my life, my God, for it
is Thine. I seek not a long life, but a full
one, like you, Lord Jesus.”
– Jim
Elliot, Baptist missionary in Ecuador who
was martyred with four companions in 1956
“I ask of you this day the grace to become a
servant and to give my life here as a ransom for
peace as a ransom for life. Jesus draw me into
your joy of crucified love.”
- Journal entry by Father
Christophe Lebreton who was martyred in 1996
along
with his six companion monks from the Trappist
monastery in Algiers
Tertullian,
a second-century Christian writer, expressed a
profound and enduring reality when he said, “The
blood of Christians is seed.” As he looked
beyond the suffering of the early Christian
martyrs, he could see that their brutal deaths
were not in vain. They would be like the mustard
seed spoken of by Jesus (Matthew 13:31). From
their sacrifice, the kingdom of God would
blossom, strengthening the church and the faith
of countless Christian believers.
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