God Doesn't Forget His Martyrs

Seventy Christians were martyred in the DRC. A call to honor their sacrifice and faith.

MAYBA, DRC – Seventy Christians have been brutally beheaded by an Islamic terrorist group in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

In the early morning of last Thursday, militants from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a terrorist group with ties to ISIS, rounded up and held twenty Christians. In distress, members of the village looked for a way to free the hostages. In the process, fifty more believers were caught by the ADF.

All seventy kidnapped Christians were then taken to a Protestant church in another village, where they were tied up and massacred with machetes. An elder of a CECA20 church in the area said, “We don’t know what to do or how to pray; we’ve had enough of massacres. May God’s will alone be done.”

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Major media outlets largely ignored the story. A few mentioned it as a side note, but it was glossed over and quickly forgotten. Christians dying for their faith? Just another Thursday.

And yet God watches from heaven and collects every one of their tears in a bottle. He brings the martyrs to His beatific presence to love and enjoy Him forever. Though the world could care less, God does not forget His martyrs. Each one is uniquely special to Him.

In the Roman Empire, Christians were often fed to the lions or other wild beasts, a fate the Romans saw as utterly shameful. The Church even began calling the heavenly gathering of martyrs a stadium, a tribute to their sacrifice in the Roman stadiums. The Christian life is a battle, and its greatest athletes are the martyrs who followed in Christ’s footsteps, willing to embrace what many would call a shameful death for His name.

The Church continues to honor the martyrs, some through feasts and others through the ongoing telling of their stories. We are grateful for their sacrifice and recognize that their death was not an end but the beginning of eternal life. In truth, they are more alive now than we are.

For martyrs and angels are distinct in name only, but come together in works. Angels inhabit the heavens, but martyrs do too. The former are ageless and immortal; this the martyrs will possess too. Yes, but don’t the former have a nature that’s incorporeal? And so what? For even if the martyrs are enclosed in a body, yet it is immortal. Rather, even before immortality, Christ’s death adorns their bodies more than immortality.¹

–St. John Chrysostom

We are forever grateful to our brothers and sisters who stand firm in their faith even unto death. Today, we honor the seventy martyrs of the DRC who, more than conquerors, now join the heavenly stadium as God’s greatest athletes. They will ever kneel before God in perfect bliss.

Their legacy challenges us to hold fast to our faith, shed our fleshly desires daily, cast off the burdens that bind us to this world, and seek a closer walk with Christ, who gave His life for us.

1. St John Chrysostom, The Cult of the Saints, ed. John Behr, trans. Wendy Mayer and Bronwen Neil, Popular Patristics Series (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 218–219.