I’ve made a tentative commitment to participate in the March for Life down in Washington in January of 2007. To be honest, I’m not going because I think it’s a worthwhile activity but only because it might be interesting.
The Bible doesn’t tell us that we properly confront evil by putting on spectacles to amuse those who serve the Principalities and Powers. The Bible tells us we properly confront evil by taking on suffering as our Lord did. For example, we Christians could refuse to accept the benefits of a system which is doing great evil.
The general situation in the United States, and I over-simplify greatly, is that a pro-life Christian who has a heart attack will rush to the hospital to be treated in room 107 while abortions are being performed in room 103. Meanwhile, down the street in the research laboratory of the same hospital, experiments are being performed upon parts of aborted babies or upon test-tube babies.
After recovering, that heart-attack victim goes down to Washington to march for his pro-life beliefs. As he marches, the television cameras happen to catch him and one of the knowing hospital administrators in his home-town just smiles as he thinks to himself, “He marches when it only costs him a little sleep and a couple of days, but wait until he has another medical problem. He’ll come crawling back to us, begging for us to add another few years to his miserable life. And when we can’t extend his life anymore, he’ll claim he’s carrying his cross as he suffers the same natural pains and discomforts which my Golden Retriever so nobly bears.”
A decision of this magnitude, to take on sufferings and death when a cure is available from institutions doing both good and evil, is not to be made lightly. But we might well risk our salvation, and certainly prove disloyal to our Lord Jesus Christ, if we delay this decision indefinitely — effectively, refusing to follow our Lord in carrying our crosses.
We live like pagans, screening our major decisions first of all by a cowardly sort of prudence and then trying to make the possibilities that survive consistent with the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. But we may have failed to be Christians even on that secondary basis because the acts appropriate to Christians in the modern age might well involve a true carrying of the cross, a martyrdom of sorts. Those acts don’t survive the standards of our cowardly forms of prudence. To make it worse, we do expect others less lucky than us to be willing to make serious sacrifices to live up to our moral standards. For example, we sit and laugh at television shows that insult people and often lower their self-esteem and then expect the damaged women to make the sacrifice of bearing the babies they conceive when they live down to their self-esteem.
It’s time for us Christians to show we’re willing to make the sacrifices implied by our stated beliefs, time for us to worry less about the sins of other people and more about our own sins, including our willingness to accept the financial and other benefits of institutions doing great evil down the hallway from the room where we seek relief from our latest medical problem.
I’ll end by noting that I’ve always enjoyed good health and I hate speaking like this, knowing full well that others have problems from which they suffer greatly. But I speak not my own opinion so much as I speak to the meaning of the sufferings and death of our Lord Jesus Christ.