Amid Persecution, How Can Christians React As Jesus Did?

An increasing number of people in America are becoming intolerant towards those with differing opinions. In March, Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan was invited to speak at the Stanford Law School. However, students from the university disrupted the event and the school’s “associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion” even rebuked Duncan for his judicial opinions. This sentiment is not limited to Stanford Law School, as people often ask loaded questions such as “Is J.K. Rowling transphobic?” or “Is DeSantis Using Racism to Win the Presidency?” without the intention of truly engaging in a conversation or seeking an answer.

During Holy Week or Passion Week, Christians worldwide celebrate Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem before His crucifixion on Good Friday and resurrection on Easter Sunday. As it was with Jesus, who was ridiculed by oppressors that couldn’t care less what Jesus believed or how He would reply, considering how Jesus was treated by the Jewish and Roman authorities teaches us what happens when politics is prioritized over faith. By observing Jesus’ response, we can learn how to remain whole in this increasingly vitriolic secular age.

The Fear of Political Ambitions

In Jesus’ time, Jewish people yearned for a Messiah who would restore the people of Israel under a new and powerful Davidic kingdom. Judas, one of Jesus’ disciples, may have preferred this also and was believed to have betrayed Jesus when he realized that Jesus had no political ambitions. The Jewish leaders in Jerusalem feared that Jesus’ spiritual ideas would lead people to believe in Him, and the Romans would demolish Jerusalem and destroy their nation. For this reason, the high priest Caiaphas suggested that it was appropriate for one individual to die to save an entire nation.

When Jewish leaders presented Jesus as “the king of the Jews” before the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, Jesus did not protest that title in His response to Pilate’s interrogation. Although Jesus did not have secular or political ambitions, He had something far deeper. He responded that His kingdom was not of this world, for He was born and destined to testify to the truth. Pilate responded to Jesus by asking, “What is truth?” (John 18:28-38).

Subjugating Faith to Politics

Pilate was only concerned with politics, and a threat to the Roman authority was someone who challenged the secular order, and thus someone who was expendable. The Jewish leaders and Pilate learned that they could not get rid of Jesus easily, as a few days after His crucifixion, His followers claimed that He had resurrected from the dead. Despite many attempts to destroy the religion over the centuries by political movements and authoritarian governments that viewed Christianity as a threat, Christianity claims billions of adherents all around the world. Leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot who viewed Christianity as a threat were proven to be disastrously wrong in the end.

However, in today’s world, an increasing number of religiously unaffiliated Americans seem determined to subjugate faith to the whims of politics. Churches, religious groups, and people of faith must be silenced, shouted down, reprimanded, cancelled, deprived of income, or even imprisoned for these individuals’ ideological vision to be successful. They claim that their political project upholds liberty and human dignity, but in reality, it negates these and snuffs out faith.

Cultivating Our Little Gardens of Faith

Cardinal Arthur Roche describes Etty Hillesum, a very intelligent atheist and Jew who fell in love with God before her death at Auschwitz at the age of 29. In her final months before Auschwitz, she described “the two richest and most intense months of my life, in which my highest values were so deeply confirmed.” She later wrote in her journal that “Somewhere there is something inside me that will never desert me again.” Hillesum was trapped by those who hated her, and she had begun to cultivate within herself a garden of faith. It gave her life meaning, and she could partially make sense of some of the most significant human suffering imaginable. Roche comments on this experience, saying that “To have the hope that is beyond the finality of death, something else, entirely gratuitous, needs to enter a moment such as this. Our spirit has to be rooted in and search out something that transcends the historicity of this final point.”

The solution to our current predicament is not to vilify our enemies as typical among political zealots. Instead, like Hillesum, we must cultivate the garden of faith within us, which empowers us to love our enemies, even in times of persecution. It requires