As I read these words this morning, I am shaken. Not because we are shocked by these words. No, we have met, worshiped with and prayed with amazing folks just like this. When I asked why they remain in Syria, they used phrases exactly like the ones below. I am shaken by the shame and humiliation I feel when I exam my willingness to love others and serve God with such unshakable conviction and passion. Where does this come from? What do you do with this? God forgive us! We are indeed jars of clay! But our brothers and sisters...they...are...heroes!
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The Syrian ministry workers in those villages chose to stay in order to provide aid in the name of Christ to survivors. “I asked them to leave, but I gave them
the freedom to choose,” said the ministry director, his voice tremulous
as he recalled their horrific deaths. “As their leader, I should have
insisted that they leave.”
They stayed because they believed they were called to share Christ with those caught in the crossfire, he said.
“Every time we talked to them,” the
director said, “they were always saying, ‘We want to stay here – this is
what God has told us to do. This is what we want to do.’ They just
wanted to stay and share the gospel.”
“At several steps on their path to death by beheading and crucifixion
last month, 11 indigenous Christian workers near Aleppo, Syria had the
option to leave the area and live. The 12-year-old son of a ministry
team leader also could have spared his life by denying Christ…”
The
Christian Aid Mission
account of the fate of Aleppo’s indigenous Christian missionaries is
harrowing and humbling. While Western politicians debate whether or not
to risk World War III by creating a safe haven in northern Syria and
imposing a no-fly zone over Aleppo – with the expectation (/certainty)
of US/European forces, sooner or later, having to shoot down a Russian
bomber or Syrian fighter jet – we’re hearing a lot about
Assad’s (lesser) evil,
ISIS barbarism and the pervasive
demonic contempt
for the human spirit. Women are stoned, men burned alive, girls raped
and gays hurled from tall buildings. It is an image of hell.
We’re not hearing much about Aleppo’s Christians: the mainstream media don’t care very much what happens to them:
..The Syrian ministry workers in those villages chose to stay in order to provide aid in the name of Christ to survivors.
“I asked them to leave, but I gave them
the freedom to choose,” said the ministry director, his voice tremulous
as he recalled their horrific deaths. “As their leader, I should have
insisted that they leave.”
They stayed because they believed they were called to share Christ with those caught in the crossfire, he said.
“Every time we talked to them,” the
director said, “they were always saying, ‘We want to stay here – this is
what God has told us to do. This is what we want to do.’ They just
wanted to stay and share the gospel.”
While we drink our Fair Trade coffee and pray for the
recovery of our gay pride flags,
our brothers and sisters in Christ are risking everything to share the
gospel with those who are being lost. They suffer hell on earth to keep
people out of hell for eternity. What experience of Jesus have they had
which we do not? What God-consciousness do they possess which we have
not? What inner life fires them to such certainty, peace and the
assurance that to die is gain?
On Aug. 28, the militants asked if they
had renounced Islam for Christianity. When the Christians said that they
had, the rebels asked if they wanted to return to Islam. The Christians
said they would never renounce Christ.
The 41-year-old team leader, his young
son and two ministry members in their 20s were questioned at one village
site where ISIS militants had summoned a crowd. The team leader
presided over nine house churches he had helped to establish. His son
was two months away from his 13th birthday.
In front of the team leader and relatives
in the crowd, the Islamic extremists cut off the fingertips of the boy
and severely beat him, telling his father they would stop the torture
only if he, the father, returned to Islam. When the team leader refused,
relatives said, the ISIS militants also tortured and beat him and the
two other ministry workers. The three men and the boy then met their
deaths in crucifixion.
“All were badly brutalized and then
crucified,” the ministry leader said. “They were left on their crosses
for two days. No one was allowed to remove them.”
The martyrs died beside signs the ISIS militants had put up identifying them as “infidels.”
What manner of demon slices off a boy’s fingertips in the pursuit of
religious conversion? What father’s agony can bear being forced to
renounce his Saviour in order to spare his son? They are not infidels,
but saints, sanctified by the Blood of the Lamb, made holy by being in
Christ, the sanctifier. Their eschatological mission transcended race,
religion, sex and social status: their loyalty to Christ made them love
their enemies, seeking the image of God in the ravaged faces of hate.
Eight other ministry team members,
including two women, were taken to another site in the village that day
(Aug. 28) and were asked the same questions before a crowd. The women,
ages 29 and 33, tried to tell the ISIS militants they were only sharing
the peace and love of Christ and asked what they had done wrong to
deserve the abuse. The Islamic extremists then publicly raped the women,
who continued to pray during the ordeal, leading the ISIS militants to
beat them all the more furiously.
As the two women and the six men knelt before they were beheaded, they were all praying.
“Villagers said some were praying in the
name of Jesus, others said some were praying the Lord’s prayer, and
others said some of them lifted their heads to commend their spirits to
Jesus,” the ministry director said. “One of the women looked up and
seemed to be almost smiling as she said, ‘Jesus!'”
After they were beheaded, their bodies
were hung on crosses, the ministry director said, his voice breaking. He
had trained all of the workers for their evangelistic ministry, and he
had baptized the team leader and some of the others.
Thus is the vocation of Christian missionaries: without their
sacrifice, the whole truth cannot be known. Their fears are real and
their grief is great, but the zeal to proclaim the glory of the Risen
Christ is more real and far greater. Is there any joy to be found in the
torture and murder of a 12-year-old boy? Is the loss of any young life
not worth a headline somewhere? Is our world so distorted and deformed
that the crucifixion and beheading of Aleppo’s Christian missionaries
doesn’t rend the hearts of anyone but their families and fellow
missionaries?
These are the real martyrs; the very special dead. May their presence
and power rend the veil between earth and heaven. We need their faces
and stories in our petty, mundane lives. We might then see Jesus through
the molehills.
