You wouldn’t think it, necessarily, but early Christian martyrs were often funny. They weren’t pious wimps singing hymns while being led away to torture and death. More often than not they were sardonic, sarcastic, and smart-mouthed.
One of my favorites, Pionius, was a priest who had got himself crucified: just after he was nailed to his cross, the executioner said to him, “Change your mind and the nails will be taken out.” In reply, Pionius looked at his hands, then back to the executioner and just said dryly, “I felt that they are in to stay.”[1] Earlier in the story Pionius was talking back to the authorities, giving verbal jabs far better than he was taking them—so much so that he made one of his fellow Christians, Sabina, burst out with laughter. Turning toward her, the bailiff said, “You laugh?” “If God so wills…I do,” she said. “You see, we are Christians,” she continued. “Those who believe in Christ will laugh unhesitatingly in everlasting joy.”[2] At other times, the martyrs appear rather insolent, almost as if they’re “trash-talking.” There’s an interesting encounter recorded in the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felictas between a young Christian named Saturus and a few of the pagans that had come to gawk at the jailed Christians in their cells. It was custom, apparently, for some to visit incarcerated Christians much like one visits animals in a zoo, and these had come to see Perpetua and her companions eat their last meal before their scheduled torture the next day. But as the story goes, Saturus, that young Christian I mentioned, got up and started talking to a few of the curious onlookers. “Will not tomorrow be enough for you?” he asked them. “Our friends today will be our enemies on the morrow. But take a careful note of what we look like so that you will recognize us on the day”—alluding not only to the day of his martyrdom but also to the day of judgment, to that more far off day when their fortunes will have been reversed, and their curiosity given over to more sober considerations.[3] No, the martyrs were not wimps, wispy and retiring little creatures not fit for a cruel world; they were, rather, what the early tradition called milites Christi (“soldiers of Christ”), strong and valiant.
Now what gave them strength was an eternal view of things which transformed their present world. Like Stephen, our first martyr, at the very moment of his death, cried out, “Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God.”[4] Martyrs, in the very moment of their sacrifice see the truth—everything all at once: the Lord and the world which belongs to him, sin and sinners and the love which conquers all. And it gives them strength—strength to suffer, strength to speak the truth, and strength which fears no man.[5] This is the graced sort of stuff which belongs to soldiers of Christ.
But, of course, some think this dangerous—“extremists,” “ideologues,” “utopian dreamers,” they’re called. But to think this is certainly to miss the point. The Church praises martyrs, not jihadists. She praises those who suffer rather than cause suffering. She praises those who chose to live the virtues of heaven now on earth and thereby suffer the consequences, whose “love for life did not deter them from death.”[6] We praise those who because of their faith in the Lord live their lives according to his will—even when it’s inconvenient or embarrassing and even when it’s physically dangerous. “Why do you rush towards death?” they asked Pionius, that smart-mouthed priest. “I am not rushing towards death…but towards life.”[7] This is either madness or the words of a man who sees eternity so clearly, death means nothing. He had an eternal view of things.
Which is the view Jesus offers in this passage from Luke. Now the context is important: Jesus, as Luke tells the story, has entered Jerusalem just a few days before his death. He’s driven the money changers out of the temple and argued with the authorities, and now the Sadducees ask him an absurd question about a hypothetical woman married, over the span of her life, to seven brothers. “[A]t the resurrection whose wife will that woman be?” they ask. Now they’re not really interested in the answer. They have an agenda working, and Jesus doesn’t waste much time honoring the question. Their perspective is limited, clouded by their own petty theological and moral questions. The Sadducees wallow in the tabloid logic of scandal and comfortable religion, but Jesus answers by talking about the “coming age,” about an age in which we will be “like angels,” when even the holy negotiations of marriage will be no more.[8] Here, just a few days before his own death, Jesus speaks from within the perspective of eternity. The question of whose wife she’ll be is pointless. The kingdom of heaven is come. Thus, the believers of Jesus need to see beyond the goods and ends of this life, even those holy things like family, wives, husbands, and children. We’re to be like angels, leaning on the purity of the sacred, when even our fleshly loves will be purified in the immaterial fire of God. But these are holy things—for the holy.
But to come down a little: what does Jesus mean that the children of the coming age are like angels? This particular passage has a long history in the Church’s arguments about virginity and sexual life. The rest of the New Testament and centuries of early Christian tradition bear witness to a rather creative but constant tension between the those who have given up everything, including spouse and children, in response to the Gospel, and those who, still with faith, carry on the primeval husbandry of family life.[9] For those that are celibate, there is preserved, as Augustine said, the “special joy of Christ’s virgins.”[10] But, for the rest of us, hand in hand with those we love, we by our faithful love and loyalty offer the world a symbol of that future when “we shall all be united and subject to God in the one heavenly city.”[11] The faithful celibate shows us how God provides for us supernaturally. Celibacy is, as the Church teaches, a “special source of spiritual fruitfulness in the world.”[12] Faithful husbands and faithful wives, on the other hand, show us how God loves his Church in all things, gathering up all his children into the arms of their holy Mother. You, with your wife—or you with your husband—are a sacrament of God’s love, and your family is the beginning of heaven. What does it mean for Jesus to liken us to angels? Perhaps this is the answer: we’re supposed to see ourselves clearly in the light of our final end and destiny. We’re supposed to treat ourselves and treat others like we’re going to live with them forever—because we are. What is it like to live like angels? It’s to love without expiration.
And it’s to be pure like them too. Paul said our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit; that is, they are venerable things enlivened by the eternal God.[13] Now we don’t talk much about it—we’re bashful I guess—but, friends, we need to be pure. Early Christians were known for their purity. They were laughed at for it. Can we be so pure again that we rejoice in the laughter of the world? Men, my brothers, pornography is killing us. It’s killing our wives and our children, and we need to stop. And women, my sisters, think again of the strength of modesty. The cult of the sexy is like an altar upon which we sacrifice our daughters. Now I am not some sexless prude, and I don’t want to turn back the clock to some sort of repressive age of guilt and shame, but I do want us (I pray for it in myself) to see that which is truly beautiful within us. Let’s pray for that eternal view of things—that heavenly, angelic view of things which will give us strength, and even that joy for which we pray so often. Amen.
[1] The Martyrdom of Pionius the Presbyter and His Companions 21.3-4
[2] Ibid. 7
[3] Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas 17.2
[4] Acts 7:56
[5] Joshua J. Whitfield, Pilgrim Holiness, 111
[6] Revelation 12:11
[7] The Martyrdom of Pionius the Presbyter and His Companions 20.5
[8] Luke 20:35
[9] Peter Brown, The Body and Society, 44
[10] Augustine, Holy Virginity 27.27
[11] Augustine, The Excellence of Marriage 18.21
[12] The Roman Ritual
[13] 1 Corinthians 6:19
© 2019 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
