When I was seventeen-year-old high school junior, I got one of my early lessons on the power of words. I had written a newspaper column—not particularly well considered—suggesting that perhaps the school’s football players should not be treated like gods. In one afternoon, what had generally been a happy status quo between jocks and nerds became a battle zone. I ducked into a teacher’s office to avoid the group of angry boys looking for a sacrificial victim.
By the next day, the bloodlust had cooled. I did get a lot of glares and some vaguely threatening remarks in the cafeteria. And my aunt called my mom to explain that my cousin was embarrassed to be related to me. Yet in all of that, I was somehow thrilled at the sudden notoriety. To be popular and to be famously unpopular weren’t the same thing, to be sure, but I found it hard not to feel a certain righteous pride in having bravely rocked the boat.
Was it brave, really? Maybe, maybe not. I’ll come back to the question in a moment. First, let’s look at the lessons from Sunday’s Mass, which can shed some light for us.
The “great cloud of witnesses” in Hebrews 12 is one of the more striking images of the New Testament and a vivid depiction of the communion of saints. The author exhorts us to persevere in the “race” that lies before us. Anyone who has been involved in any kind of public performance—a race, a game, a speech, a recital—can identify with the scene. Knowing that you have people out there supporting you, who want to see you do well, makes a difference.
When paired with our readings from Jeremiah and Luke, though, this image grows more profound. Sometimes the Christian life is like a straightforward endurance race. But other times the race is complicated by people who want to throw us down into an old well, like what they did to Jeremiah, because they don’t like what we say. And worse, as Jesus tells it in Luke, sometimes these enemies may even be members of our own household!
So these saints aren’t “witnessing” a straightforward athletic performance so much as a complex battle on multiple fronts. They are interceding for us, trying to help us, even as certain people on the ground are doing everything in their power to hinder us.
Or so it might seem. There’s a difference, after all, between the open hatred of Jeremiah’s enemies and the family member who loves you but does not share all the same values. The spiritual battle rarely has clear winners and losers, good guys and bad guys. Often, in fact, the hardest battles are between competing goods. Jesus points this out—to the shock of his audience.
First-century Jews valued family as a central good. Having children, educating them, teaching them Torah, was the divine vocation of Israel—to be a light to the nations, a priestly people in whom God’s goodness could be on display. For Jesus to imply that he might break up families suggests either that he is an evil, crazy person bent on destroying everything good about God’s holy people . . . or that he is God. Because only God himself could come before family in the right ordering of priorities.
Jesus’ hard teaching here on family division is an important balance to the story in Jeremiah that I filtered through Hebrews. It’s pretty easy to see ourselves as Jeremiah, as the good guy. It’s easy to see ourselves as the beloved underdog who nobody thinks will win but who believes in himself so strongly and so rightly that he puts everybody to shame. There’s a kind of allure to being in the righteous minority, to feeling as though you’re the one person doing the right thing in a sea of wrong. It’s often tempting to think that the more people are against you, the more you must be right.
That’s how I felt on that day in high school, and today you can see this all over the place. Part of the draw of so-called woke politics is its transgression of traditional boundaries. It’s an awesome feeling to stand there in opposition to received wisdom when you’re convinced that you understand the truth that nobody else could see until now. And the more people argue against you, the more convinced you are on the rightness of your position. Sometimes, “progressive” Christians in these areas invoke the language of prophecy: to be prophetic must mean having a lot of traditional people dislike what you’re saying.
Of course, that goes both ways. The “prophetic” rhetoric of progress can be mimicked by its detractors, especially when what was once progressive has become mainstream. Before I became Catholic, I was part of the noble opposition in the Episcopal Church, the prophetic voice crying in the wilderness for the traditional faith. In many ways, the things I stood for were right, but again there was a certain self-righteousness to being in the minority. There are Catholics today who find themselves in a similar position. Maybe you’re the one person defending Pope Francis in a sea of angry detractors. Maybe you’re the one person defending traditional worship and doctrine in a sea of happy-clappy modernists. And there’s a sense of pride in thinking that you are courageously standing on the right side of history.
Back to seventeen-year-old me. Was I brave? I don’t know; maybe a little. But I have my doubts, because true bravery—the virtue of courage—requires taking risks and overcoming obstacles for something good. Martyrs for the Faith: true courage. Those who broadcast their sexual preferences in public: not courage. Loving Jesus and following him in the face of family opposition: true courage. Having a lot of fun saying nasty things about people you’ve never met: not courage.
Popularity or unpopularity, being in the majority or the minority: none of that means very much when it comes to weighing moral goodness. God’s creation was good and holy in Eden without any conflict. The saints enjoy the beatific vision unencumbered by any ideas of whether or not they were on the right side of history, for they are at the heart of history and the heart of history’s Lord.
And that, ultimately, is where we should be headed: to Jesus and nowhere else. “Let us set aside every weight,” Hebrews says. The weight of sin, of course. But also the weight of being popular, or being unpopular and persecuted; the weight of the many good things we have been given but that are not ultimately ours; the weight of trying to manage history in the right direction; the weight of whatever it is that we, in our pride, think we need.
Let us set these things aside and look instead to Jesus, “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” Cheered on by angels and saints, above all our blessed Mother who prays for us both “now and in the hour of our death,” let us keep our eyes on the goal. God will give us the grace to persevere, and the witnesses’ intercession will help us with just the kind of encouragement—or opposition—that we need to reach the finish line.