The Courage to Confess

Christian discipleship has always required courage—sometimes a lot of courage, sometimes just a little.  During the happy days of the Emperor Justinian, following Christ took (maybe) a smidgeon of courage, while during the unhappy days of Nero or Diocletian it took a lot of courage.  During the days of my childhood (back when dinosaurs ruled the earth) it took a bit of courage to openly say you were a weekly church-going Christian, whereas today it takes rather more courage to make such a confession.  Christian faith now is increasingly regarded (at least in my west coast neighbourhood) as a failing, a tragic character flaw, something best kept under wraps like a dirty little secret and shared with as few people as possible, just as one would keep quiet about a porn addiction.

       Thus the requirement of courage to openly confess Christ and His Church.  Christians have never really fit into this xenophobic world because we are different than others.  Admittedly we fit into the world of Byzantium well enough, but Byzantium was a blip.  A long blip it’s true, but a blip nonetheless.  Now it is increasingly back to eschatological normal where courage is required.

       Our Lord told us this at the very beginning when He said that His disciples had to be willing to deny himself and take up his cross and that the one who refused to do this was not worthy of Him (Matthew 10:38).  Our Lord’s hearers had only too much experience of seeing people taking up their crosses, for such people were the ones who had been condemned to death by Rome who would soon be nailed to them.  A man taking up a cross was a condemned man, a dead man walking, a man in the act of leaving this world for good. 

       This was a stunning image for discipleship for it meant that unless one was willing to be crucified for confessing and following Christ one could not be His disciple—not exactly an incentive to enlist!  But that was the high bar of commitment and courage set by the Master Himself. 

The Lord echoed this reality again during His last meal with His disciples: “If you were of the world, the world would love its own, but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.  If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:19-20). Not surprisingly Paul said the same thing: “All who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Timothy 3:12).  Note that the danger comes to us because after baptism we are no longer “of the world”, but now live as strangers and sojourners in it.  The world recognizes this and, like antibodies attacking a foreign invader, pressures us to conform or leave.

The pressure on His disciples began even during His ministry.  His adversaries had decided that enough was enough.  They regarded Him as a deceiver, as a bad man, a liar, a false prophet, a Sabbath-breaker who habitually sinned against God.  Confessing Him as a true prophet (as many did) was bad enough but confessing Him as the coming Messiah was intolerable.  They decided therefore that if anyone should dare to openly confess Jesus as the Messiah he was to be cast out of the synagogue—i.e. rendered persona non grata in his community, an outcast (John 9:22).  The man who had been born blind and who was healed by Jesus confessed Him as the Messiah, the Son of Man and was indeed cast out of the Jewish community (verses 34-35). 

Today, as I hinted a moment of ago, open confession of Christ and His Church can come at a cost.  The exact price tag of course depends upon where precisely you live:  in (say) Alabama it might be comparatively low; in China or Iran or Saudi Arabia it is much higher.  But it will always come with a price tag of some sort and we should not be blindsided when the bill comes due.

The bill can come suddenly and unexpectedly.  I remember during my high school days some kids were discussing the Christians at the high school.  We were, I admit, not a subtle lot, this being during the days of the Jesus People movement (Google it if you must) and subtlety was not one of the marks of the Jesus People.  We therefore got up the noses of a lot of people.  During the conversation one of the boys asked another kid what he thought of the Christians.

The kid was blindsided by the question.  He was a popular kid and a devout Christian, one who went to Mass every week with his mom.  How would owning up to this affect his popularity?  (Remember, if you can, that being popular in high school was very, very important, especially if you were a boy and wanted to attract girls—like a said, “a price tag”.) He hesitated for a moment and then said, “Well—I don’t knock it”. 

Not exactly a bold confession of Christ.  You could almost hear the angels listening in and saying to one another, “Oh! So close!  So close!”  (His mom also would have been less than enthused.) 

Contrast this with another tale requiring courage.

In the Evangelical world of that time (I have no clue if it has changed) one would preach and then ask anyone in the congregation who was not a Christian to become one.  This involved (in Evangelical praxis) saying a prayer and “asking Jesus into your heart”.  The preacher inviting his congregation to do this was determined, almost desperate, for those present to do this.  To make it easier, he would ask everyone to bow their heads and close their eyes.  He would then ask those who wanted to commit themselves to Christ to silently raise their hands.  No one else would know who raised their hands because “every head was bowed, every eye closed”.  (For the Orthodox not familiar with such praxis, I swear I am not making this up.) Some preachers wanted to make it even easier and said that if someone didn’t have the courage to raise their hand, it was enough to pray silently in their hearts—a fairly low bar, considering our Lord’s words about taking up a cross.

Contrast this with the invitation given by preacher Terry Shepherd, a long-haired bearded Jesus People back in 1972.  He was addressing a large crowd of Jesus People at a weekly meeting called “Catacombs” in Toronto and after his sermon he indeed invited people to convert to Christ and commit their lives to Him.  But his invitation was a bit different.

He said, “I am not going to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes.  If you want to become a Christian you stand on your feet right now and in front of all these people” (there were about 1500 people there) “say in a big loud voice, ‘Jesus Christ is my Lord!’ ‘cause if you can’t confess Him here in this place where He is King, you will never confess Him out there on the street where ‘Jesus Christ’ is just a swear word.”  And, happy to report, many kids accepted his invitation and confessed Christ in loud ringing tones.  That was Jesus People.  That (if only he knew) was Orthodoxy.  That was the courage required of all converts and exemplified by the martyrs we venerate and invoke.

I am, of course, not suggesting the Orthodox adopt this missiological perspective or method.  For us, confessing and converting to Christ is something done at baptism, in the pool of the Sent One (see John 9:7).  But if our liturgics differ from such Jesus People as Terry Shepherd we can at least admire and learn from insistence that conversion requires courage.

Such courage is needed even more now when days of the Jesus People are long, long gone. The days have darkened considerably in my country since 1972 and confessing Christ and His Church comes at an even greater cost than it did then.  Whether it involves making the sign of the cross silently when eating out at a restaurant or identifying as a Christian at the school lunch room or the office water cooler, we must be willing to confess Christ openly, clearly, and boldly.

It is easy to pretend.  In our culture, we call it “identifying”.  When a person with X and Y chromosomes and a beard says he “identifies as a woman” that means he is pretending to be a woman when in fact he is not.  You can tell fairly easily that he is pretending—the beard gives him away.  And if we “identify” as a Christian when in fact we are ashamed to confess Christ openly among His enemies, you can tell fairly easily also that the person is only pretending to be a Christian.  The cowardice gives him away.

No pretending for us.  Like the man who was born blind who was healed by Christ, like the kids listening long ago to Terry Shepherd, and like true converts in every age, we have to have courage.  Jesus Christ is our Lord.  In deed and in word, we are prepared to confess the Master.