Editorial for March 16, 2006
By Jim White
We heard the words spoken over the past weekend. “A State Department spokesman reports that the FBI has verified that a body found in Iraq Friday morning was that of 54-year-old Tom Fox of Clear Brook, Virginia.”
I never met Tom Fox, but I expect to meet him someday. Unlike some other hostages who were civilians working for the military or for a media concern, Fox and his companions, Briton Norman Kember and Canadians Harmeet Sooden and Jim Loney, were seeking to literally apply Christ's command to love friend and enemy alike when they were abducted.
While sincere people may reach differing opinions as to the wisdom of Fox's work with Christian Peacemaking Team, none can doubt his motivation as an individual Christian. He believed God had called him to do whatever he could to bring healing to a tortured part of the world. He hoped, prayed and trusted that in some small way he and his companions could make a difference. Perhaps we will never know whether his death will make a greater difference than his life could have.
The Christian Peacemaking Team is an ecumenically-supported ministry of the historic peace churches (Mennonites, Brethren in Christ and Quakers). Its leaders say that Fox's death will not deter their determination to confront the cycle of violence with “unarmed love.”
In Fox's own words we sense something of how they view their work. After describing the deaths of innocent Iraqis who were killed by roadside bomb blasts and the disintegration of Iraqi life, he wrote, “We ask that there be no retaliation on relatives or property. We forgive those who consider us their enemies. We hope that in loving both friends and enemies and by intervening nonviolently to aid those who are systematically oppressed, we can contribute in some small way to transforming this volatile situation.
“How do I stay with the pain and suffering and not be overwhelmed? How do I resist the welling up of rage towards the perpetrators of violence? How do I keep from disconnecting from or becoming numb to the pain?”
In some circles, Fox is being called naïve. The ways of Christ have often seemed so by the world. Not everybody thought the best of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Fox's body was found with his hands tied with gunshot wounds in his head and chest. Sources conflicted concerning indications of torture.
My real concern, however, is not to establish Tom Fox as a martyr, but to introduce the topic into our thinking. Martyrdom is not something that happened only in the long-ago era of the church. In fact, it has been estimated that two-thirds of Christ's martyrs died since 1900. In some parts of the world Christians are currently having to choose between their faith and life itself.
We Virginia Baptists have lived a sanitized existence for the most part. Even in our early days of the Culpeper Jail period we weren't being kidnapped and killed routinely. But could the time come when the price of our faith will be our blood? “Far-fetched,” you say? For most of us, I agree that it probably is.
Yet for those who hear a different kind of call to radical obedience in remote lands among hostile people, death because of their faith is not so improbable.
The willingness to leave everything, even life, for the cause of Christ requires, ultimately, the ability to stand alone with Christ in the middle of nowhere with allegiance to nothing but him. Tom Fox wrote, “Being in the middle of nowhere really does create a very queasy feeling and yet so many spiritual teachers say it is the only authentic place to be. Not staking out any ground for myself creates the possibility of standing with anyone. The middle of nowhere is the one place where compassion can be discovered. The constant challenge is recognizing that my true country of origin is the middle of nowhere.”
It is beyond dispute that terrorists are planting bombs among innocent people to kill and maim and frighten. There is also no question that they are planting the seeds of hatred and revenge. But it may be that they are planting something else as well. If, as Tertullian said, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, the terrorists may be planting the seeds of their own demise. Death and hatred, or even a mighty military, cannot do what only Christ's courageous Church can. In God's timing and according to God's wisdom, who can imagine what he is planting and how it will grow?
In the meantime, the cost of our faithfulness may not be exacted in how we die but in how we live. The question for most Virginia Baptists today is not whether we will die for Christ, but whether we will live for him. Faithfully. Authentically. Obediently. Courageously. Do you hear the call?