Jesus said, “You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom. Not only that – count yourself blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies against you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens – give a cheer, even! – for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.” (Matthews 5:10-12, The Message)
Everyone likes to be popular. Everyone likes to be well thought of, respected, praised. Yet Jesus said, “Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets. There’s trouble ahead when you live only for the approval of others saying what flatters them, doing what indulges them. Popularity contests are not truth contests – look how many scoundrel preachers were approved by your ancestors. Your task is to be true, not popular.” (Luke 6:26)
But what would happen if you said some things which were true, which Jesus and the Bible taught, but others didn’t like? You would get into hot water. They would be saying: “You are too big for your boots. You are too opinionated, too judgmental. You are not very loving. I believe in freedom of speech but you are going too far.” Today you would be canceled. You would be called bigoted. You would be fired.
It is hard for preachers to be prophetic in the pulpit. Prophets aren’t pastors. Jesus never held a position in a church. To be a Christian is to be like Christ, and he was crucified by the establishment. Soren Kierkegaard wrote that “the majority of people are not so much afraid of holding a wrong opinion, as they are of holding an opinion alone… If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd.”
There is always a tension between being a follower of Christ and being at home in the popular culture. Whenever the church has gotten too close to the power structures it has compromised the faith. Christianity is inherently counter-cultural. Richard Niebuhr in his Christ and Culture (1951) contrasted “Christ against culture” with the “Christ of culture”, and advocated Christ as the transformer of culture.
Stephen Carter of Yale argues that we live in The Culture of Disbelief. He writes,
“we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them … When citizens do act in their public selves as though their faith matters, they risk not only ridicule, but actual punishment.” Carter contends that, “religion is, at its heart, a way of denying the authority of the rest of the world, it is a way of saying to fellow human beings, and to the state those human beings have erected, ‘No, I will not accede to your will….. religion, properly understood, is a very subversive force.”
Some of the biggest issues that divide us today involve faith and conscience. To even attempt to raise them for discussion is to invite persecution or ridicule. Yet the follower of Jesus must witness to the courage of his convictions when it is appropriate. Winston Churchill said, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”
We all have to take risks in our relationships with one another. One risk is that we disagree. But we can agree to disagree without being disagreeable if we do it in love with respect for one another. It is not so much what we say but how we say it that offends people. If we can disagree graciously we will forward the Gospel.
The church should model this way of dealing with differences so that we can influence the way they are handled in the world. We should not be intimidated by pressures to conform to popular culture. The saints and martyrs of history and our contemporary world (for many are suffering and dying for their faith all around the world today), witness to us of the courage of their commitment. Can we be any less courageous in our witness?
Peter Kreeft of Boston College writes,
“If we realized the value of this Kingdom, we would laugh at the world’s worst threats and persecutions as a millionaire laughs at a scratch on a penny. Saint Teresa says that when we get to heaven we will look back on the most horribly painful life on earth as no more than one night in an inconvenient hotel. That is why the martyrs die with praises and even jokes on their lips.”
What it all comes down to in the last analysis is what we value most in life: popularity or truth, the world or the kingdom of God. We can either live for what we believe is the right, the true, the good, or we can compromise and accommodate ourselves to the spirit of the age. The Church was built on the blood of the martyrs and prophets who were persecuted in their generation. They refused to bow the knee to Caesar as Lord. The people we most admire today are those who are often out of step with their contemporaries because they are faithful to the truth of Christ and the Scriptures.
Bishop Ben Kwashi of Jos is the leader of fast growing churches in Nigeria which are constantly having to deal with persecution. The story was told that he has in his living room a plexi-glass box in which are some ashes. When asked what it was, he said that it was his coffin. It contained the ashes of his previous house which a Muslim mob burned down in order to kill him. He and his family escaped from the back door as they attacked from the front. He said that it reminded him that his life was expendable for the Gospel. His witness challenges us with what we are prepared to stand for, live for or die for.
Flannery O’Connor wrote, “You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you.” Jesus calls us to push hard for the values of the Gospel even at the risk of criticism or persecution of any kind. Heaven will applaud us. We will be in good company.
A Prayer:
“Lord and King, we pray for courage to face unpopularity for the sake of truth; for courage to declare boldly our convictions, though they make us despised; for courage to break with evil custom and evil opinions. Give us strong hearts that will not fear what anyone may do to us. Give us, O Lord, the spirit of boldness, that being delivered from all fears of others, we may be strong in you, and very courageous.” (John S. Hoyland.)
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