Topic: Martyrdom

The saints of God are engaged in a war between conflicting empires battling for control of the world, but Jesus has radically transformed our understanding of how we fight.

Living the beatitudes is tough and dangerous, and we will need the inspiration and company of the saints, before us and beside us, if we are going to make it.

True martyrdom involves suffering even unto death. But, no less important, the martyr sees what other people may not be seeing, and opens their eyes to it.

Jesus confronts us with our cannibalistic behaviour in order that we might follow him into a saving communion with God and one another.

True martyrs are those who are killed because their love, truthfulness and forgiveness are intolerable, not those who die killing for their cause.

The glory of God is most fully revealed in Jesus’s willingness to suffer death at the hands of the law.

Salvation belongs to Christ alone, but those who have fought and died for other forms of salvation are among those with whom Christ identifies himself; fellow victims of the atrocity from which Christ is saving us.

Jesus is the model for rightly honouring the victims by exposing and resisting the systems that sacrificed them.

Jesus’s resurrection was a sign which declared that Jesus’ cause was God’s cause, that Jesus’ values were God’s values, that Jesus’ people were God’s people.