I’ve been watching a film recently by Terence Malik about an Austrian farmer who was called up to serve in the German army during world war two. He was a devout Catholic and his conscience told him that to support the Nazi war effort was wrong. He couldn’t, with a clear conscience or with any sense of integrity support what he clearly saw was evil. The film is a slow moving piece that draws out the opposition of people who have closed their eyes to evil, preferring instead to speak of such things as love for the fatherland the obligations one owes to authority and to one’s family and friends and even one’s village. His story is like so many stories of martyrs, of how entire societies can be manipulated by fear and in the face of that how some find the strength to follow Christ and live with integrity and preserve their dignity in the face of such widespread fear. Our own times know a variety of fears and we too can find it challenging to live with integrity and honour in the face of some of those fears. There is the fear that we have been living with these past couple of years with the pandemic. I don’t suppose it has been a particular challenge to living with integrity, but it has changed the way we go about our lives, sometimes forced into it by governments even when we would rather go about things a different way.
There is also the more recent fear surrounding environmental change. That also is having an impact on our lives, even challenging notions of what is morally acceptable behaviour; so that fear has impacted our notions of living with integrity and honour. However there is also a more subtle change taking place in society which is directly addressing our notions of what is right and what is wrong. A post Christian attitude to morality, even an anti-Christian approach to morality which brings with it its own fears. A fear of speaking freely what we think, lest we are censured or accused of intolerance or bigotry. We heard in the Gospel how Christ chose that passage of Isaiah to set out the mission given to him by his Father: to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free. It is a passage filled with hope and confidence, and that brings to us the offer of freedom. But it is not a freedom from fear; it isn’t speaking about escaping from those fears that come upon us when we feel threatened by oppressive powers that want to force us to live our lives a certain way. In this world, if we find ourselves getting too comfortable with the powers that govern the world, it may be more a sign that we have capitulated out of fear to the evil spirit of the age. Sometimes the call to live with integrity and honour, the path to true freedom is a call to realise that there is a greater fear that we must listen to: the fear of what will happen if we do not stand and live with integrity and honour.
Christ chose to introduce his mission with a prophetic passage because he knew his mission was to be prophetic, that is to face and name what was wrong and to live with integrity and honour, to accept the fear of suffering and death because he saw what would happen if he didn’t. We may fear standing firm in a world that seems to have moved on, but there is also the fear of what will happen if we don’t stand firm. We too are called to be prophetic, to live as Christ lived with integrity and honour even if it is painful and costly.