Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 30

Anabaptists by the thousands were executed by Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century. Their crime? They did not believe in infant baptism or war. Holding such unfamiliar, heretical notions on baptism and pacifism, they were punished by death.

Dirk Willems, an Anabaptist awaiting death in a prison near his home in Holland, made a rope from clothes and rappelled down the prison walls. The moat around the prison was covered with ice. Willems dashed across it and made it to the other side. A guard pursuing him fell through the ice. Hearing the guard scream for help, Willems, obeying the commandment of Jesus to love enemies, stopped, turned around, ran back, and pulled the guard to safety. The guard placed Willems under arrest and returned him to prison. On May 16, 1569, Dirk Willems was condemned to death. They burned him at the stake.14

Our culture recently finished that once-a-year pageantry where we pivot away from getting ahead, for a few moments, to indulge in a few deferential thoughts and words about a silent baby lying sweetly in a manger. Now done with that, we return to the real world of religious strife and shooting wars of drones, assault rifles, and improvised explosive devices.

The Amish and Mennonites of the sixteenth century, descendants of the Anabaptists, marched to a different drummer. They marched in a dark and bloody time to the disturbing drumming of Jesus’s words: “Love your enemies.”15 Many of them like Dirk Willems, because of their peacemaking, lost their lives.

My obedience to Jesus is made of thinner stuff. I am more comfortable with the haloed baby Jesus lying in a manger surrounded by gentle animals making child-friendly sounds than with the grownup Jesus making the centerpiece of his Sermon on the Mount a seemingly absurd mandate to love enemies.

Is loving enemies totally irrelevant and impractical anymore? Twenty-first century middle-earth Christians like me want to know.