# Modern Christian Martyrdom – Part 1: The Faith and Sacrifice of Today’s Believers

An episode of [Daily Sermons With Bishop Robert Barron](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/6783446284), 29 Sep 2026, 26 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/75250073/modern_christian_martyrdom_pt_1.mp3



## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Matthew Petrusik,
[0:02] Speaker 1: Senior Director of the Word on Fire Institute and the
[0:04] Speaker 1: host of the Word on Fire show. Thank you for
[0:05] Speaker 1: joining us. Recently, Dr. Todd Warner of Evangelization and Culture,
[0:10] Speaker 1: our podcast, sat down with Bishop Robert Barron to discuss
[0:13] Speaker 1: modern Christian persecution with Bishop Barron's new book, What Do
[0:17] Speaker 1: Their Deaths Demand? Now, it's a topic we've explored before
[0:20] Speaker 1: here on this show, but in this new conversation, we'll
[0:23] Speaker 1: take a deeper dive into that subject, exploring the specific
[0:26] Speaker 1: witness of some of these martyrs and examining this modern
[0:29] Speaker 1: era which has seen more Christian persecution than any other
[0:33] Speaker 1: in history. Here to discuss that with Dr. Todd Warner
[0:37] Speaker 1: is Bishop Robert Barron.
[0:48] Speaker 2: In the opening pages of his new book, Bishop Robert
[0:51] Speaker 2: Barron tells us, quote, Christianity is, by an order of magnitude,
[0:56] Speaker 2: the most persecuted religion in the world today. Between 360
[1:00] Speaker 2: and 380 million Christians face high degrees of hostility. Conservative
[1:04] Speaker 2: estimates are that more than 5,000 Christians are killed annually,
[1:08] Speaker 2: and the 20th century produced more Christian martyrs than all
[1:12] Speaker 2: of the previous centuries combined, close quote. Bishop Robert Barron,
[1:17] Speaker 2: on his important work, what do their deaths demand? Christian
[1:20] Speaker 2: persecution today, now. My name is Todd Warner, and this
[1:25] Speaker 2: is the Evangelization and Culture podcast from Word on Fire.
[1:29] Speaker 2: Bishop Robert Barron is the Bishop of the Diocese of
[1:31] Speaker 2: Winona Rochester and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.
[1:35] Speaker 2: He's a host of Catholicism, a groundbreaking award-winning documentary about
[1:39] Speaker 2: the Catholic faith, which aired on PBS. Bishop Barron's most
[1:43] Speaker 2: recent film series, Catholicism, The Pivotal Players, was nominated for
[1:46] Speaker 2: an Emmy Award and has been syndicated for national television.
[1:50] Speaker 2: Bishop Barron is also a number one Amazon bestselling author
[1:53] Speaker 2: and has published numerous books, essays, and articles on theology
[1:56] Speaker 2: and the spiritual life. His recent book, This Is My Body,
[1:59] Speaker 2: sold over 1 million copies. He was a religion correspondent
[2:02] Speaker 2: for NBC and has also appeared on Fox News, CNN,
[2:05] Speaker 2: and EWTN. The number of people that have seen Bishop
[2:09] Speaker 2: Barron on YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook is just immense.
[2:13] Speaker 3: Bishop, welcome. Todd, thank you. Always good to be with you.
[2:16] Speaker 3: Good to be with you. Segment one.
[2:19] Speaker 2: The most persecuted religion. In What Do Their Deaths Demand?,
[2:23] Speaker 2: Bishop Robert Barron writes, quote, St. John Henry Newman distinguished
[2:27] Speaker 2: between what he called notional assent and real assent. The
[2:32] Speaker 2: former is the intellectual consent we give to propositions, and
[2:35] Speaker 2: the latter is the visceral affirmation that we give to
[2:38] Speaker 2: matters concretely observed and deeply felt, close quote. And in
[2:43] Speaker 2: his haunting novel, The Plague, Albert Camus wrote, quote, Since
[2:47] Speaker 2: a dead man has no substance unless one has actually
[2:49] Speaker 2: seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history
[2:52] Speaker 2: are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.
[2:55] Speaker 2: The thousand dead may have made about five times the
[2:59] Speaker 2: audience in a biggish cinema. Yes, that was how it
[3:02] Speaker 2: should be done. You should collect the people at the
[3:04] Speaker 2: exits of five picture houses. You should lead them to
[3:06] Speaker 2: a city square and make them die in heaps if
[3:08] Speaker 2: you wanted to get a clear notion of what it means,
[3:10] Speaker 2: close quote. And finally, the Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin said,
[3:15] Speaker 2: once darkly and perhaps apocryphally quipped, one death is a tragedy,
[3:19] Speaker 2: a million deaths is a statistic.
[3:22] Speaker 3: So Bishop, let's just.
[3:23] Speaker 2: Start with the obvious question. Why are we so numb
[3:27] Speaker 2: to the countless Christian deaths around the world?
[3:29] Speaker 3: Well, I mean, you've named a lot of it there.
[3:31] Speaker 3: And of course, I hardly ever agree with Joseph Stalin,
[3:33] Speaker 3: but there he agrees with the implicitly with Newman, you know,
[3:36] Speaker 3: that notional assent has to do with propositions and that's important,
[3:41] Speaker 3: but it doesn't really grab you at the deep visceral level,
[3:44] Speaker 3: but real assent is the assent that we give to
[3:46] Speaker 3: something that's deeply felt. Well, when you say, for example,
[3:50] Speaker 3: you know, it's true, Christianity is the most persecuted religion
[3:53] Speaker 3: in the world. Well, that's a proposition. That's more of
[3:55] Speaker 3: an abstraction. We say, hmm, that's terrible, you know, or
[3:58] Speaker 3: how interesting. But then when you tell the story of
[4:01] Speaker 3: someone who has been put to death for his faith,
[4:04] Speaker 3: that grabs you to a much deeper level. A second
[4:07] Speaker 3: reason I think why we overlook it is wokeism. I'm
[4:10] Speaker 3: a great critic of wokeism, and one of the marks
[4:13] Speaker 3: of wokeism is a tendency to divide the world into
[4:16] Speaker 3: the binary of oppressor and oppressed. Now, who belongs on
[4:19] Speaker 3: the oppressed side? Well, women and gays and people of
[4:23] Speaker 3: color and non-Christians, it's the other. Who belongs on the
[4:28] Speaker 3: oppressor side? White men, Christians. We're on the wrong side
[4:35] Speaker 3: of that divide. And so we tend not to notice that,
[4:38] Speaker 3: in fact, Christians are being massively persecuted. But it doesn't
[4:42] Speaker 3: fit the neat little narrative of Christians are always the oppressors. No,
[4:47] Speaker 3: in point of fact. And that other stat that you mentioned,
[4:50] Speaker 3: which I think is still staggering, the 20th century produced
[4:54] Speaker 3: more Christian martyrs than all the previous centuries combined. So
[4:58] Speaker 3: you think, oh, the age of martyrs was long ago,
[5:00] Speaker 3: the first few centuries. No, no, no. the great age
[5:04] Speaker 3: of martyrs were in it. It was the 20th century
[5:07] Speaker 3: and it's continued into the 21st century.
[5:09] Speaker 2: So much for progress, right, Bishop? I mean, we're just
[5:11] Speaker 2: getting better and better, people say, and sure enough, more
[5:14] Speaker 2: and more people are dying in droves. In what do
[5:17] Speaker 2: their deaths demand? You immediately explore specific martyrs. So before
[5:21] Speaker 2: we discuss this in any particular way, why was it
[5:24] Speaker 2: so important to tell about these specific stories?
[5:28] Speaker 3: For this very reason, because they grab the imagination. The
[5:30] Speaker 3: way they grab mine, like as I heard these stories,
[5:33] Speaker 3: it brought it to my attention in this very vivid way. When,
[5:37] Speaker 3: you know, abstractly, I would have known from my reading,
[5:40] Speaker 3: you know, yes, Christianity is a very persecuted religion. But
[5:43] Speaker 3: when these particular stories came to my imagination, they changed me.
[5:47] Speaker 3: You know, I think I cited in this book or
[5:49] Speaker 3: maybe elsewhere, the line attributed to Lincoln, which might be apocryphal,
[5:53] Speaker 3: but when Harriet Beecher Stowe came to the White House and,
[5:57] Speaker 3: you know, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, that Lincoln
[6:00] Speaker 3: purportedly said to her, well, you're the little lady who
[6:04] Speaker 3: wrote the book that started this great war. The point being,
[6:09] Speaker 3: everyone knew about slavery. We've been talking about it forever.
[6:11] Speaker 3: But this book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, brought it so viscerally
[6:16] Speaker 3: to mind that it kind of animated the North. That's
[6:22] Speaker 3: what these stories do. They move us to action. Newman
[6:27] Speaker 3: said that too, that propositional assent or notional assent, rarely
[6:32] Speaker 3: moves you to action. Real assent does. That's Churchill, you know,
[6:38] Speaker 3: we're gonna fight in the beaches, we're gonna fight in
[6:40] Speaker 3: the streets, we're gonna fight on the shoreline, we will
[6:42] Speaker 3: never give up. I will give you blood, toil, tears,
[6:45] Speaker 3: and sweat. All of that is boom, boom, it's Anglo-Saxon
[6:50] Speaker 3: and it's direct and it's imaginative language. So the stories
[6:55] Speaker 3: of the martyrs, and that's why I tell them, even
[6:58] Speaker 3: though they're kind of gruesome stories, I think they bring
[7:01] Speaker 3: it to people's minds in a way that propositions don't.
[7:04] Speaker 2: So let's talk about a few of the martyrs that
[7:06] Speaker 2: are featured in this book, What Do Their Deaths Demand?
[7:10] Speaker 2: Many listening still remember the shocking starkness of 21 Coptic
[7:14] Speaker 2: martyrs of Libya. They're marching in their orange jumpsuits along
[7:17] Speaker 2: the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, and then they're kneeling
[7:20] Speaker 2: with black clad, knife-wielding ISIS executioners standing behind them. Just
[7:24] Speaker 2: say a few words about this horror show.
[7:26] Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the one that I think It brought the
[7:29] Speaker 3: thing to my radar screen for the first time, really,
[7:33] Speaker 3: was that story. It was 2015. So I would have been,
[7:36] Speaker 3: I was named a bishop in 2015. So I was
[7:38] Speaker 3: either in California or I was still in Chicago. And
[7:40] Speaker 3: I heard that story. These young men, they're all young men.
[7:43] Speaker 3: And they were, I think, you know, laborers. They were
[7:46] Speaker 3: in Egypt, the Coptics. And they were kidnapped by, you know,
[7:51] Speaker 3: Islamic extremists. And the extraordinary thing is they're brought out,
[7:55] Speaker 3: and this thing is filmed, you know. We've seen you know, happily,
[7:59] Speaker 3: just bits and pieces of that. The whole thing was filmed.
[8:02] Speaker 3: And they did not fight against their persecutors. And most
[8:08] Speaker 3: of them were murmuring prayer and expressions of their faith.
[8:15] Speaker 3: And there was a kind of calmness about them, even
[8:17] Speaker 3: as they faced what they knew was certain death. And
[8:21] Speaker 3: then their killers were unambiguous, that it was a message
[8:24] Speaker 3: to the people of the cross. It was meant to
[8:27] Speaker 3: be a very stark threat to the Christian world. They
[8:33] Speaker 3: even spoke of Rome, you know. So it was unambiguous.
[8:39] Speaker 3: Was this like a tribal dispute or an ethnic dispute? Well,
[8:42] Speaker 3: maybe at some level. But they made it as clear
[8:44] Speaker 3: as they could. This was a religiously based killing. This
[8:47] Speaker 3: was persecution of Christians. Right.
[8:50] Speaker 2: Moving on to Father Jacques Hamel. He's an 85-year-old parish priest.
[8:55] Speaker 2: Many of us remember this because it's shocking that this
[8:57] Speaker 2: poor priest old, small, diminutive man, 85-year-old parish priest celebrating
[9:02] Speaker 2: mass in the church of St. Etienne du Rouvray when
[9:07] Speaker 2: two 19-year-old men stormed into the parish. What happened next?
[9:11] Speaker 3: Well, they slit his throat. I mean, they held him
[9:15] Speaker 3: and some others in church for a while, and they
[9:16] Speaker 3: were threatening them. And Hamel, by all accounts, was invoking
[9:22] Speaker 3: God's power against Satan. He was saying, be gone, Satan.
[9:28] Speaker 3: So it wasn't just these two kids, but there was
[9:30] Speaker 3: a power behind them that he was recognizing, right? But
[9:33] Speaker 3: at the end, they slit his throat. Now, I remember
[9:37] Speaker 3: this one because this is the following year, 2016. I
[9:40] Speaker 3: was in Krakow for World Youth Day. And I was
[9:43] Speaker 3: speaking this night to this grand gathering in this huge arena, 25,000 kids.
[9:48] Speaker 3: And I had a talk all prepared, right? But that day,
[9:53] Speaker 3: the news broke about Jacques Hamel. And so I remember
[9:57] Speaker 3: I told this stadium full of people, I said, I
[10:00] Speaker 3: prepared a talk, but I'm not going to give it.
[10:02] Speaker 3: I want to talk to you about this priest. And
[10:04] Speaker 3: I don't know what I developed, something about the cross
[10:07] Speaker 3: from there or something. But it so grabbed my imagination
[10:10] Speaker 3: that I decided to make it the centerpiece of my
[10:13] Speaker 3: talk to these 25,000 kids. That's how deeply it affected me. Yeah.
[10:19] Speaker 2: Journalist Marquette Grad and Catholic James Foley found himself called
[10:23] Speaker 2: to report in ISIS-dominated war-torn Syria and Iraq. Tell us
[10:28] Speaker 2: what his story was.
[10:30] Speaker 3: That one I remember, as you mentioned, he's a Marquette Grad,
[10:32] Speaker 3: as my brother and sister were both Marquette Grads. I
[10:34] Speaker 3: know Marquette very well, kind of brought the story home.
[10:38] Speaker 3: He's a journalist who had gone to Libya around the
[10:41] Speaker 3: time of the Arab Spring, and he wanted to cover
[10:44] Speaker 3: that situation. And he was kidnapped there, and he was
[10:46] Speaker 3: held there. And he said during his time of incarceration,
[10:50] Speaker 3: he prayed the rosary, but he had to pray like
[10:52] Speaker 3: on his fingers. But he remembered the rosary that I
[10:55] Speaker 3: think his grandmother had taught him. Well, he was released.
[10:59] Speaker 3: And you think now that we're going home.
[11:01] Speaker 2: Right.
[11:01] Speaker 3: I would have said, okay, I'm done. I'm going home. Well,
[11:04] Speaker 3: he went back and he went right into the belly
[11:07] Speaker 3: of the beast at the time when ISIS was most
[11:09] Speaker 3: on the march in Syria and so on. And he
[11:12] Speaker 3: went back there to cover it. And again, he was captured, kidnapped.
[11:17] Speaker 3: And this time there was no happy ending. They beheaded him.
[11:20] Speaker 3: And again, it was filmed, which makes it so nauseating.
[11:25] Speaker 3: But I think it was the fact that he was
[11:27] Speaker 3: so close to home. An American had gone to Marquette
[11:30] Speaker 3: University like my brother and sister. Those three did really
[11:35] Speaker 3: leap out at me as particularly vivid examples.
[11:39] Speaker 2: If you could, speaking of going into Africa, the richness
[11:43] Speaker 2: of Nigerian Catholicism. Mm-hmm. But then the radicality of its enemies,
[11:47] Speaker 2: Boko Haram, the schoolgirls that were taken. Say a few
[11:51] Speaker 2: words about that.
[11:52] Speaker 3: Well, a couple of things. One is, you know, when
[11:54] Speaker 3: ISIS was kind of contained in the Middle East, but
[11:55] Speaker 3: it didn't go away, ISIS sort of moved to Africa.
[11:59] Speaker 3: And so that very militant form of Islam ended up there. And,
[12:02] Speaker 3: of course, Nigeria is a famously divided country. The north
[12:05] Speaker 3: is largely Islamic, the south Christian. But they were going
[12:11] Speaker 3: after a vibrantly Catholic country. when I was at the
[12:16] Speaker 3: Synod in Rome, it was two Octobers, and on the
[12:20] Speaker 3: mind of a lot of people was the church in Germany,
[12:22] Speaker 3: you know, the Synodal Way, and what about the Germans,
[12:24] Speaker 3: what are the Germans saying? And I said on several occasions,
[12:28] Speaker 3: why are we worrying about what the German church is doing?
[12:31] Speaker 3: Why don't we study the Nigerian church? I said, something
[12:34] Speaker 3: like 95% of Catholics go to Mass on Sunday. Seminaries
[12:39] Speaker 3: are bursting. You know, despite enormous persecution, the church is
[12:42] Speaker 3: thriving there. Why don't we study Nigeria? I used to say.
[12:46] Speaker 3: So I think what you found there was this clash
[12:48] Speaker 3: of a very strong Catholic culture and then this deeply
[12:52] Speaker 3: anti-Christian movement.
[12:55] Speaker 2: Lastly, there's so many martyrs we could talk about, but
[12:57] Speaker 2: let's talk about the 20th century communism, specifically in China
[13:02] Speaker 2: and its adversary, the Catholic Church. Jimmy Lai and Cardinal Zen,
[13:06] Speaker 2: a couple of big names.
[13:07] Speaker 3: Your thoughts on them? Yeah. You know, Jimmy Lai, of course,
[13:10] Speaker 3: is a great businessman from Hong Kong, became a great
[13:17] Speaker 3: defender of Western values, political, economic and otherwise, and was
[13:22] Speaker 3: active in some of the protests against the communists for
[13:25] Speaker 3: the incursion into Hong Kong. And he's he's arrested and
[13:29] Speaker 3: he's been held now for the past many years in
[13:32] Speaker 3: solitary confinement. And it came to my attention through, you know,
[13:36] Speaker 3: writers and so on. And then I was able to
[13:39] Speaker 3: establish a personal contact with him. And he does these
[13:44] Speaker 3: pencil drawings. They're pastel paintings he does in his cell.
[13:48] Speaker 3: And he was gracious enough to send me one of those.
[13:53] Speaker 3: And he said he uses some of the Word on
[13:55] Speaker 3: Fire material and all that. So I just felt this
[13:57] Speaker 3: personal connection to him. And the heartbreak of it. We've
[14:00] Speaker 3: been trying. I know the government's been trying for years
[14:02] Speaker 3: to get him out. Protests have been made. I signed letters.
[14:07] Speaker 3: a protest along with a number of bishops. It was
[14:09] Speaker 3: during the first round of the Senate.
[14:11] Speaker 2: Sure.
[14:11] Speaker 3: We signed that. And I think, you know, when President
[14:14] Speaker 3: Trump went to see President Xi in China, I think
[14:17] Speaker 3: he asked about Jimmy Lai. But so far, he's not
[14:21] Speaker 3: been released. But it's, you know, to me, a sign
[14:23] Speaker 3: of the oppressiveness of that government.
[14:26] Speaker 2: Cardinal Zen, would you say a word or two about him?
[14:28] Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm a great hero. Cardinal Zen is, I think,
[14:30] Speaker 3: now in his late 90s, a former archbishop of Hong Kong.
[14:35] Speaker 3: And a great opponent of Chinese communism and a great
[14:39] Speaker 3: spokesman for Catholicism. In some ways, he's like a John
[14:43] Speaker 3: Paul II. You know, John Paul II standing against communist
[14:46] Speaker 3: tyranny in Poland. Zen is very much like that in China. And,
[14:50] Speaker 3: of course, has paid a very high price for it.
[14:53] Speaker 3: He's under very careful surveillance by the Chinese government. He's
[14:57] Speaker 3: been persecuted. He's been imprisoned over the years. And he
[15:00] Speaker 3: stands strong even at the age of 90-something. Yeah. So
[15:04] Speaker 3: I have great admiration for him.
[15:06] Speaker 2: Segment two, why the persecution of Christians? In what do
[15:11] Speaker 2: their deaths demand? Bishop Robert Barron writes, quote, it is
[15:14] Speaker 2: of supreme importance to notice the difference between the manner
[15:17] Speaker 2: in which the great religious founders died. Buddha passed away
[15:20] Speaker 2: full of years, surrounded by his disciples, sure of the
[15:24] Speaker 2: success of his great spiritual reform. Confucius peacefully died of
[15:28] Speaker 2: old age in his bed. His followers resolved to carry
[15:31] Speaker 2: on his ethical teachings, Moses expired, the Bible tells us,
[15:34] Speaker 2: at the ripe old age of 120, not permitted indeed
[15:38] Speaker 2: to enter the promised land, but sure that he had
[15:40] Speaker 2: successfully led his people to freedom and provided them with
[15:42] Speaker 2: divine law. Muhammad died in bed in his home after
[15:46] Speaker 2: a brief illness, knowing that the entire Arabian Peninsula had
[15:49] Speaker 2: been converted to the religion that he founded. And then
[15:52] Speaker 2: there's Jesus. Bishop, how was Jesus' fate different and why
[15:58] Speaker 2: did that matter?
[15:58] Speaker 3: You know, as you read that, you know where I
[16:01] Speaker 3: got that idea from? A theologian I don't often agree with,
[16:04] Speaker 3: but I read him when I was a young man
[16:05] Speaker 3: in Hans Kung's book called On Being a Christian. He
[16:09] Speaker 3: makes that observation. And it's always stayed in my mind
[16:12] Speaker 3: that the other great founders, almost without exception, die peacefully
[16:18] Speaker 3: and full of years and guaranteed success and all that.
[16:22] Speaker 3: And we don't hide this. In fact, look, I'm wearing
[16:25] Speaker 3: this right here, that Jesus dies, this young man, On
[16:31] Speaker 3: this terrible instrument of torture, his friends and followers having
[16:36] Speaker 3: abandoned him, people mocking him as he dies. It's the
[16:41] Speaker 3: exact opposite of someone dying peacefully in bed. It's someone who's,
[16:47] Speaker 3: by all appearances, his movement has been a failure. And
[16:51] Speaker 3: he dies even with, God, my God, why have you
[16:54] Speaker 3: forsaken me on his lips? That's an interesting contrast and
[16:58] Speaker 3: worth thinking about. And also the fact that we Christians
[17:02] Speaker 3: don't hide it. We don't pretend it was otherwise. No, no,
[17:05] Speaker 3: we hold it up. I know one thing, Christ and
[17:07] Speaker 3: him crucified, Paul says, right? We wear the cross now
[17:11] Speaker 3: as a sign. So what does it mean? Well, one
[17:14] Speaker 3: thing it means, I think, is the radicality of Jesus.
[17:18] Speaker 3: All the other people we mentioned, you know, religious founders
[17:21] Speaker 3: or philosophers or people that were given a revelation or
[17:23] Speaker 3: they came to an insight and they shared it, And good,
[17:27] Speaker 3: you know. Look, I'm a philosopher by training. I love
[17:30] Speaker 3: philosophers and all that. But again, then there's Jesus. He's
[17:37] Speaker 3: done to death.
[17:39] Speaker 2: Why?
[17:39] Speaker 3: Because people disagree with his ideas?
[17:41] Speaker 2: No.
[17:43] Speaker 3: They disagreed with this still staggering claim that he made.
[17:49] Speaker 3: So in John's Gospel, it's explicit. I and the Father
[17:53] Speaker 3: are one. He who sees me sees the Father. go
[17:56] Speaker 3: back into the synoptics, the same thing. My son, your
[17:59] Speaker 3: sins are forgiven you. And they say, well, only God
[18:01] Speaker 3: can forgive sins. Well, right, by implication. You've heard it
[18:05] Speaker 3: said in the Torah, the highest possible authority. But I say,
[18:10] Speaker 3: who would have authority over the Torah for a first
[18:13] Speaker 3: century Jew? God alone. Unless you love me more than
[18:17] Speaker 3: your mother and father, more than your very life, you're
[18:19] Speaker 3: not worthy of me. You couldn't imagine Muhammad or Confucius
[18:23] Speaker 3: or Moses or the Buddha saying that. No way. Yet
[18:28] Speaker 3: Jesus says that. That's why he was hounded to death, right? Now,
[18:35] Speaker 3: the next question, well, then why are we paying attention
[18:37] Speaker 3: to him? Because he rose from the dead, thereby confirming
[18:43] Speaker 3: the truth of what he said. He is who he
[18:46] Speaker 3: says he is. Therefore, there's a choice involved. As he
[18:52] Speaker 3: himself put it, either you're with me or you're against me.
[18:55] Speaker 3: Either you gather with me or you scatter. Jesus compels
[18:59] Speaker 3: a choice the way no other founder does. And I
[19:03] Speaker 3: see my point here, it's not to excuse, of course,
[19:05] Speaker 3: Christian persecution, but it is to understand it in a way.
[19:09] Speaker 3: You see why from the beginning Christians were persecuted, because
[19:14] Speaker 3: Christ was persecuted. Christ was done to death. The world
[19:19] Speaker 3: hated me. The world will hate you, Jesus said. So again,
[19:23] Speaker 3: it's not to excuse Christian persecution, but it's to understand it.
[19:28] Speaker 3: Given the very claim of Jesus and of the church,
[19:32] Speaker 3: the opposition emerges.
[19:34] Speaker 2: You're listing off the various things, and I wrote that
[19:36] Speaker 2: down here, a stumbling block to the wise, the corner
[19:40] Speaker 2: rejected by the builders, the cornerstone rejected by the builders,
[19:43] Speaker 2: something greater than the temple is here. Before Abraham was,
[19:46] Speaker 2: I am. The Father and I are one. Whoever has
[19:48] Speaker 2: seen me has seen the Father, on and on and on.
[19:50] Speaker 3: On.
[19:50] Speaker 2: I think you've said this before. Anybody who wants to
[19:53] Speaker 2: domesticate Jesus into a wise teacher with no claim on
[19:59] Speaker 2: him being divine is not reading the Bible, is not
[20:02] Speaker 2: familiar with the Gospels because he's saying it again and
[20:05] Speaker 2: again and again.
[20:05] Speaker 3: Well, you know, it's Lewis. C.S. Lewis was the great
[20:07] Speaker 3: teacher of that truth to generations of people now. You
[20:12] Speaker 3: can't get away with saying, well, you know, he's not God,
[20:14] Speaker 3: but he's a great person. No, he's not. If he's
[20:18] Speaker 3: not who he says he is, he's a lunatic of
[20:20] Speaker 3: the first order. He's a lunatic beyond. I remember Bono
[20:25] Speaker 3: of U2 said he's a lunatic beyond Charles Manson. This
[20:30] Speaker 3: man is saying, I am the center of your life.
[20:33] Speaker 3: I'm the highest possible good. I'm more important than your
[20:36] Speaker 3: mother and father. I and the father are one. If
[20:40] Speaker 3: he's not, then he's a lunatic. And so we can't,
[20:43] Speaker 3: as many do today, live in this sort of safe
[20:47] Speaker 3: middle space. Oh, no, I don't think he's divine, but oh,
[20:50] Speaker 3: he's a great teacher. No, he's not. If you're not
[20:54] Speaker 3: with him, you should be against him.
[20:56] Speaker 2: So to this point, the Romans took Jesus' claim to
[20:59] Speaker 2: kingship seriously.
[21:00] Speaker 3: They crucified him.
[21:02] Speaker 2: The Pharisees and the scribes took Jesus' claim to divinity seriously.
[21:05] Speaker 2: They clamored for his crucifixion. Why don't we... Is it
[21:12] Speaker 2: just that we're blind and deaf to the story? We've
[21:16] Speaker 2: domesticated the man-god because it's sort of inoffensive or we're
[21:19] Speaker 2: just unschooled. What is it about us today that makes
[21:23] Speaker 2: us so casually capable of domesticating into something other than
[21:28] Speaker 2: what he was?
[21:29] Speaker 3: Well, because the burden of affirming his divinity is so great.
[21:34] Speaker 3: I think if you affirm the divinity, well, then my
[21:36] Speaker 3: life has to belong to him. Then he must be
[21:39] Speaker 3: the Lord of my life. And not just a nice
[21:42] Speaker 3: person I follow or someone whose ideas I admire, but no,
[21:46] Speaker 3: the Lord. And I'll go back to Paul, right? Jesus curios.
[21:50] Speaker 3: Jesus is Lord. Well, Caesar was Lord. He was the
[21:53] Speaker 3: one in charge of your life. Now it's not Caesar.
[21:56] Speaker 3: It's Jesus is Lord. A non-divinized Jesus is a lot
[22:02] Speaker 3: easier to deal with. A domesticated Christ is a lot easier. Again, Lewis,
[22:06] Speaker 3: you know, even at our best, most of us Christians
[22:10] Speaker 3: will invite him into the front parlor of the house
[22:13] Speaker 3: one hour a week, right? But I don't want you
[22:15] Speaker 3: hanging around my house. Yeah. I don't want you in
[22:17] Speaker 3: the kitchen or in the bedroom or in the rec room.
[22:20] Speaker 3: I don't want you there. But Jesus the Lord is
[22:24] Speaker 3: not just to be entertained for an hour in the parlor.
[22:26] Speaker 3: He wants to be Lord of the whole house. That's
[22:29] Speaker 3: why I think we find his divinity so hard to take.
[22:32] Speaker 2: So with respect to the dark powers of the world,
[22:35] Speaker 2: what did Jesus' resurrection achieve? Because it was very telling,
[22:38] Speaker 2: and you've done this so much, and it's part of
[22:40] Speaker 2: our narrative as Catholics. The story doesn't end with the crucifixion.
[22:44] Speaker 2: The resurrection is... is the pinnacle, if you will. With
[22:49] Speaker 2: respect to the dark powers of the world, what did
[22:51] Speaker 2: the resurrection achieve and how then would we expect the
[22:54] Speaker 2: dark powers of the world, especially considering this book, to respond?
[22:58] Speaker 3: Yes. You know, in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ,
[23:02] Speaker 3: which is a movie I admire in many ways, there's
[23:05] Speaker 3: that scene where there's Jesus and there's the crowd kind
[23:08] Speaker 3: of around him and they're taunting him and so on.
[23:11] Speaker 3: And then behind the crowd, he has that image, that
[23:14] Speaker 3: kind of creepy, Androgynous. Right. I think it's an actress,
[23:18] Speaker 3: but it meant to look very androgynous. She's carrying this
[23:21] Speaker 3: even creepier baby and she's walking behind. And no one
[23:26] Speaker 3: in the crowd notices her, but she's walking behind the crowd.
[23:30] Speaker 3: That to me is a good way of suggesting the
[23:32] Speaker 3: biblical idea, right, that there are dark powers that we
[23:35] Speaker 3: can see, the corrupt political and economic and interpersonal powers.
[23:40] Speaker 3: But then behind them is this sort of renyant, invisible
[23:46] Speaker 3: fallen spiritual power. And you can't read the New Testament
[23:51] Speaker 3: without noticing that. Think of Jesus at the beginning of
[23:53] Speaker 3: his public life doing battle with Satan. See, before he
[23:57] Speaker 3: begins his public work, he has to deal with that power.
[24:01] Speaker 3: He has to engage that power. And then what you
[24:04] Speaker 3: see throughout his public life is just that, is the
[24:08] Speaker 3: powers that you can see opposing him. Think of scribes, Pharisees,
[24:12] Speaker 3: and so on and so forth. But then behind them,
[24:14] Speaker 3: the invisible power, Now, all that comes to a climax
[24:18] Speaker 3: on the cross where indeed there are visible powers that
[24:21] Speaker 3: hound him to the cross. But implicitly behind them are
[24:26] Speaker 3: the dark powers. So the cross itself is this great
[24:30] Speaker 3: cosmic struggle. Think there too in the book of Revelation,
[24:33] Speaker 3: I always say it's the fourth Christmas story where the
[24:38] Speaker 3: virgin's laboring to give birth and there's a dragon poised
[24:42] Speaker 3: there to devour the child. That's a very dark telling
[24:45] Speaker 3: of Christmas, but it's true that there was a spiritual power,
[24:49] Speaker 3: a fallen spiritual power that opposed Jesus from the beginning,
[24:53] Speaker 3: from the moment of his birth, opposed him all throughout
[24:56] Speaker 3: his life, opposed him to the point of death, which
[24:59] Speaker 3: is why the resurrection is the victory, not just over
[25:03] Speaker 3: fallen human powers, but over the fallen spiritual powers. Now,
[25:08] Speaker 3: does the battle go on? Yeah, read the book of
[25:11] Speaker 3: Revelation now, you know, It's a bit like D-Day versus
[25:17] Speaker 3: V-E Day. At D-Day, the battle was won, right? So
[25:23] Speaker 3: June 6, 1944, less than a year later, the war
[25:25] Speaker 3: is over. But there was still a lot of mop-up work, right?
[25:28] Speaker 3: There was still the Battle of the Balls. There was
[25:30] Speaker 3: still a lot of... We're in that period. We're like
[25:34] Speaker 3: between D-Day and V-E Day. That's called the era of
[25:38] Speaker 3: the church, right? So the struggle with the dark powers
[25:41] Speaker 3: goes on. But they've been defeated. Yeah. They've been defeated.
[25:45] Speaker 1: That does it for us today. Thanks for joining us
[25:47] Speaker 1: on the Word on Fire show. If you're interested in
[25:49] Speaker 1: learning more about how Word on Fire can help you
[25:51] Speaker 1: grow closer to Christ, become a better evangelist, and work
[25:55] Speaker 1: for others and the common good, consider joining the Word
[25:57] Speaker 1: on Fire Institute. Check us out at institute.wordonfire.org. That's institute.wordonfire.org.
[26:04] Speaker 3: We'll see you next time.

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