The Spirit of Martyrdom

        Is this a slender proof of the impotence of death, do you think? Or is it a slight indication 

        of the Savior's victory over it, when boys and young girls who are in Christ look beyond            

        this present life and train themselves to die? Every one is by nature afraid of death and 

        of bodily dissolution; the marvel of marvels is that he who is enfolded in the faith of the cross                 

        despises this natural fear and for the sake of the cross is no longer cowardly in face of it.

              ---Athanasius, On the Incarnation, ch. 5 "The Resurrection"

This post is written as something of a reflection on the killing of Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida this past November.  After learning that the shooter was pleading self-defense, claiming that the teenagers were armed and that his life was in danger, although there is at the moment no evidence that this is the case, I began the principle parts of this reflection.  A few other elements of the killing also got my attention.  (1) The killer Michael Dunn was 46, well-employed, apparently a collector of guns, while the victim was a 17 year old.  (2) Michael Dunn was also white and the victim (and possibly his friends?) were black.  (3) Dunn fired 8 rounds total--there is no evidence of return fire from the alleged-armed victims.  (4)  Dunn was under the influence of some amount of alcohol, though whether enough to impair his reasoning is unclear. (5)  The shooting happened at night, in the dark.

I claim no particular insight or knowledge "about what really happened that night", but as an outsider, it is easy to imagine what could have happened, and what I suspect did happen, though I freely admit that my personal suspicions are not very valuable and do not really matter in this particular case.  But for the sake of my reflection, let us for the moment assume that my imaginative suspicions about "what really happened" is correct.  

I imagine the following:  I imagine that Dunn was slightly intoxicated--enough to make him suggestible, perhaps a bit sleepy, perhaps careless, perhaps more prone to anger because of whatever amount of alcohol he consumed.  I imagine that he was in a strange place (in Jacksonville, not his home town), and going to a liquor store and came across a car full of black teenagers listening to loud (rap) music and that he became unduly apprehensive and perhaps even paranoid because of all these factors.  I imagine he thought he had a right and a duty to defend himself and use lethal force if necessary (because who carries a handgun who doesn't believe that's true?).  I imagine he had a nasty altercation that involved lots of yelling and anger and curses from both parties, and that in his anger and partly racially motivated fear, and in the dark in a strange place . . . I imagine that Dunn heard Jordan Davis and his friends threatening him, and took them literally, and that Dunn imagined that Davis had a gun and was going to try to kill him.  So Dunn does what is necessary of course, shoots and kills Davis, and pops off eight rounds total just to make sure he had vanquished his foe, whose status as a deadly enemy was almost entirely fabricated by emotion and imagination.  That is what I imagine.

But regardless as to what I imagine, what I see is fear: fear of death.  Fear of losing one's life to someone else.  Fear of being robbed of what one deserves, fear of dying in a worthless altercation (better make sure--I'll get him before he gets me!  I won't let them take me that way!)  I also see a judgment made--better to kill than to be killed.  Better to protect one's own.  Better to exercise one's power where one can and fight for one's rights.  Better to be a killer than a coward or a fool.  I see the world's perspective on life and death.

What I suspect in Dunn, I've heard right out in other people in other ways: a self-protectiveness and devotion to self-love (incurvatus in se, perhaps) that chills me.  What chills me more is when I hear it in Christians, for it is the warning bell of a love of God and neighbor that has grown cold.  I hear it in the obnoxious birth-certificate "controversy" with Obama.  People absurdly hate him both for his liberal policies and accuse him of being a Muslim at the same time--don't they know that if he were a Muslim fundamentalist, he would not be a liberal in any sense?  But they are so ignorant that all they can do is fuse ignorant fear with ignorant fear--they have the now socially incorrect fear of black people and the socially ambiguous fear of fundamentalist Islam--and the masses to which this fear appeals know next to nothing about these things and no one who is either black or Muslim.  Thus, they join them both together into one great fear.

I hear it in the fearful bigoted speech of people who are "afraid" of black people or more often now, "afraid" of people from the Middle East.  I imagine if I lived in a different part of the United States, I would also hear about "immigrants", but thankfully I don't hear about that.  But the fact of the matter is, if I am afraid of someone else and have not conquered that fear with love and courage, I am going to treat someone or a class of people very badly.  History bears that out, though I am not presently going to prove my case by history.

What most of these small, fearful bigoted people (and heavens, perhaps I am one of them at times?!) have in common is that they want security in life: they want to secure what is theirs, secure what they have.  They want to secure their rights, their protection, their prosperity, their well-being before "those people" take it away.  What a miser or a miserably selfish person seeks to pursue for herself alone, a bigot pursues for "us" and "ours".  A selfish person only loves himself enough to act, a bigot has got far enough in love of neighbor to love their nearest kin alone.  A selfish person will sacrifice for no one but herself, but a bigot will sacrifice for his kind and not for what is not perceived to be his kind.  Thus, a very imperfect love has the capacity for terrible vice and sometimes terrible evil.  

My family particularly is prone to "tribalism"--they love their own and extend to their own every grace, courtesy, kindness, generosity--but little of this can be seen outside the family unit.  In fact, given the charity shown to insiders, it is really shocking to see how "outsiders" are treated.  It is rarely natural for us to extend this self-giving, other-preferring  love to the full extent to which Christ meant for it to be extended.  And by chance we learn to love all our neighbors, all the kindreds of the earth very well for Christ's sake, noticing and taking note and regard for his likeness in them all . . . Jesus has still asked from us a step further: we also must love our enemies.  It is this love that Christ exemplifies most fully in the Gospel--he loves those who betray him and those who put him to death.  Having loved his own, he loves them to the end, even if still they walk away from him or stab him in the back for 30 pieces of silver, or personally see to it that he dies in shame on a tree in agony as a criminal.

   

But back to bigotry.  It is this preference for the things that belong to "us" and "ours", and especially the security that we feel we are owed or entitled to by life or by the government or by the moral law or by whatever justification we seek and find that helps us justify some of our least Christ-like behaviors.  Because security under the perception of threat from a group that is "other" will make people do all sorts of crazy things that they ought not do.  It is the combination of "threat" and "other" ("not-me") that lets either a lone person or a nation think about preemptive strikes and "getting him before he gets me".  And the conviction that I (or we) deserve my own life and security is what makes self-defense necessary.  The one who deserves his life and his rights naturally feels that he must cling to it, and that it is only right to defend it.  If one is so thoughtlessly devoted to oneself and one's own good and one's own deserts and consumed with oneself, how is one to put one's own self aside to love one's neighbor, or more importantly, one's enemy? 

The Christian has been made free from self-defense.  We are not required to defend ourselves.  My life was once given to me in Creation by a gift.  Robbed from me by an enemy, and restored to me by a Friend.  But in restoring my life to me, my Friend did it in such a way that I need never cling to it again.  Jesus gives us Life Eternal that cannot be taken from us by anything or anyone, and thus we are freed to hold on to our own lives very lightly.  I don't have to cling to my life and protect my rights, because my true life is hidden with Christ on high and will one day be revealed in splendor.  What we see now isn't everything that is to be seen.

Tertullian once said that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church.  It is my prayer that the spirit of the martyrs would fill the Church, so that it would be very obvious that we don't need to cling to our lives and our security like the world and our flesh tell us we must.  Athanasius was once able to use the lives of the martyrs as proof that Christ's Resurrection had truly taken place, and that the power of death had truly been beaten.  The saints, the people in the Church, were martyred so often and showed such disdain for dying (which normal people are afraid of) the only logical explanation, says Athanasius, is that something has truly changed.  That with Christ there is something truly different, and that difference is freedom from fear of death and being set free to truly live.  Athanasius (contra mundum!) writes,

        Even so, if anyone still doubts the conquest of death, after so many proofs and so many martyrdoms in      

        Christ and such daily scorn of death by His truest servants, he certainly does well to marvel at so great 

        a thing, but he must not be obstinate in unbelief and disregard of plain facts. No, he must be like the 

        man who wants to prove the property of the asbestos, and like him who enters the conqueror's 

        dominions to see the tyrant bound. He must embrace the faith of Christ, this disbeliever in the conquest

        of death, and come to His teaching. Then he will see how impotent death is and how completely 

        conquered. Indeed, there have been many former unbelievers and deriders who, after they became 

        believers, so scorned death as even themselves to become martyrs for Christ's sake.

        

        (29) If, then, it is by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ that death is trampled underfoot, it is 

        clear that it is Christ Himself and none other Who is the Archvictor over death and has robbed it of its 

        power. Death used to be strong and terrible, but now, since the sojourn of the Savior and the death and 

        resurrection of His body, it is despised; and obviously it is by the very Christ Who mounted on the 

        cross that it has been destroyed and vanquished finally. When the sun rises after the night and the whole 

        world is lit up by it, nobody doubts that it is the sun which has thus shed its light everywhere and driven 

        away the dark. Equally clear is it, since this utter scorning and trampling down of death has ensued

        upon the Savior's manifestation in the body and His death on the cross, that it is He Himself

        Who brought death to nought and daily raises monuments to His victory in His own disciples . . . .

        If you see with your own eyes men and women and children, even, thus welcoming death for the sake 
        of Christ's religion, how can you be so utterly silly and incredulous and maimed in your mind as not to 

        realize that Christ, to Whom these all bear witness, Himself gives the victory to each, making death

        completely powerless for those who hold His faith and bear the sign of the cross? No one in his senses 

        doubts that a snake is dead when he sees it trampled underfoot, especially when he knows how savage      
        it used to be; nor, if he sees boys making fun of a lion, does he doubt that the brute is either dead or 

        completely bereft of strength. These things can be seen with our own eyes, and it is the same with the 

        conquest of death. Doubt no longer, then, when you see death mocked and scorned by those who 

        believe in Christ, that by Christ death was destroyed, and the corruption that goes with it resolved and 

        brought to end.

I pray, not for the martyrdom of blood (though this happens today so much in our Church, albeit not so much in the United States), but for the "white martyrdom", the bloodless martyrdom, that the monastics went out in the desert to seek.  That the people of God would be joined to Christ in a death like his, so that they also may join in his Resurrection and shine the light of God's glory and freedom and power over the world and over death.  May our freedom and our life in Christ be so powerful that death and the world and the flesh are seen to be scorned and mocked by our people.  May the light of the glory of God shine in our faces as we are changed into the likeness of Christ's own face and image.