Six martyrs are among those celebrated on the Calendar of Saints today: two men–Epimachus and Alexander–and four women–Ammonarium, Mercuria, Dionysia, and yet another Ammonarium. They were all executed during the Decian persecutions, around the year 250.
Why take the time to discuss yet six more people who were put to death by tyrants with power? To answer this, I refer you, Dear Reader (and, I hope, movie-viewer) to the first of the Lord of the Rings films–The Fellowship of the Ring. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie (and in the entire film trilogy) was when Gandalf, a wizard of the Istari order, confronts the Balrag and declares: “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” And (spoiler alert), Gandalf successfully stands against this malevolent monster, protecting the other members of the Fellowship…yet loses his own life in the process.
Martyrs: the noun comes from the Greek for “those who bear true witness.” Martyrs are truth-tellers who won’t be dissuaded, no matter the consequences. Martyrs are not always and not even generally killed. But the ones that we are made most mindful of are those who faced and even endured death, rather than become false witnesses, rather than deny the truth that they had experienced and known in their own lives.
These are people–young, old, male, female, ridiculously rich, abjectly impoverished, learned, uneducated, beautiful, ravished by time and disease–who all said to those forces of evil, those Balrags of history: YOU SHALL NOT PASS. YOU SHALL NOT GAIN ENTRANCE TO OUR SOULS AND CONTROL OUR WORDS, OUR HEARTS, OUR ACTS. YOU SHALL NOT PERVERT OUR TRUTHS.
And the point in remembering two women both named Ammonarium, a man named Alexander, another woman named Dionysia, a man named Epimachus, and a woman named Mercuria is not simply to reference the heap of bodies of the massacred. It is to recognize that their acts of courage, their refusals to cooperate with evil, their fortitude means that 1768 years later, we still know their names. None of them likely ever expected that their stories would still be told millennia later, and yet, like Gandalf’s, their sacrifices cannot be forgotten.
It is of course also a caution to us that actually being committed to truth-telling is hazardous. The 1997 movie, Liar, Liar, demonstrates through comedy the manifold conundra that befall an attorney who is magically forced to tell the truth for just 24 hours: everything that can go wrong, does go wrong…or so it initially seems.
What might it mean for each of us to be martyrs (in the original Greek sense)? To refuse to lie in the face of consequences created by those who have a vested interest in suppressing truth (some of whom are even our ‘nearest and dearest’)?
What would happen if all people of faith, by whatever name or stripe they be known, were to suddenly Go Gandalf on our world?!