MARTYRDOM AND THE END OF CHRISTIAN LIFE

A martyr's death is an act of worship offered to God in praise of the one by whose stripes we are healed; it is also a prophetic act which, by virtue of its being responsive to Christ's call to bear witness to him, is directed towards the church and the world. From both perspectives it is an eloquent act speaking of the fallenness of created reality and of its teleological ordering towards God as its ultimate fulfilment.

Germain Grisez observes in his discussion of martyrdom that ‘In a world fallen and redeemed, human fulfilment is only possible by sharing in the fulfilment of the risen Lord Jesus’ (1983: 652). It is precisely because the integrity of human personhood is ontologically dependent on Jesus' willingness to undergo disintegrating death for his loved ones that the consciousness of the disciple is shaped by a radical decentring and disintegration which finds integration in the crucified and risen Jesus. As a practice consequent upon Jesus' invitation to take up one's cross and follow him, Christian witness and the martyr's death to which it sometimes leads is as absolute a repudiation of autonomy as one could imagine. The martyr's last act draws to a culmination the setting of mind and desires on ‘things that are above’: the martyr has learned to know Christ and to be confident that one's life is ‘hidden with Christ in God’ (Col. 3:2f).