Courageous love once changed the world. Can it happen again?
When the Christian movement was young, and the plague was sweeping through the Roman Empire, followers of Christ risked their safety to care for others. Kenneth Woodward points out, “The Romans threw people out into the street at the first symptoms of disease, because they knew it was contagious, and they were afraid of dying. But the Christians stayed and nursed the sick. You could only do that if you thought, ‘So what if I die? I have life eternal.’”
Rodney Stark of the University of Washington adds further insight into the world-changing nature of Christian love in those early years: “Christianity taught that mercy is one of the primary virtues—that a merciful God requires humans to be merciful. Moreover, the corollary that because God loves humanity Christians may not please God unless they love one another was something entirely new. Perhaps even more revolutionary was the principle that Christian love and charity must extend beyond boundaries of family and tribe, indeed, that it must even extend beyond Christian community.”
In 403, as Rome was celebrating its military victory over Alaric, the king of the Goths, a Christian hermit named Telemachus made a visit to Rome and happened into the Coliseum, while 50,000 fans were cheering the gladiatorial games. William Barclay reports that Telemachus was horrified. “Were these men slaughtering each other not also children of God? He leaped from his seat, right into the arena, and stood between the gladiators. He was tossed aside. He came back. The crowd were angry; they began to stone him. Still he struggled back between the gladiators. The prefect’s command rang out; a sword flashed in the sunlight, and Telemachus was dead. Suddenly there was a hush; suddenly the crowd realized what had happened; a holy man lay dead. Something happened that day to Rome, for there were never again any gladiatorial games. By his death one man had let loose something that cleansed an empire.”
Through his courageous love, Telemachus ended the brutality and inhumanity of the gladiatorial massacres.
Ambrose Redmoon comments, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” Early Christians made the decision that caring for one another was more important than fear. May we follow their example.
Courageous love once changed the world. May we dedicate ourselves to trying to do so again in the world around us.