Making Truth Visible
MAKING TRUTH VISIBLE
A Talk Given at the Urbana Student Missionary Convention, 1979.
More than twenty-three years ago I was living in a small thatch-roofed house in a small jungle clearing on a small river called the Tiwaenu in the small country of Ecuador. An ordinary day would begin anywhere from three o’clock till five or so in the morning. The low crooning of an Auca song would often fit into my dreams for a while before I wakened and then, gradually, I would come to, and hear the Indians, still in their hammocks in the houses around the clearing, singing their strange two-or at most three-note songs:
Waenoni baronki iñunae. . . .
I have counted as many as seventy repetitions of verse one, but then, before you lose your mind, they go on to verse two:
MiH baronanai aemumae. . . .
While they were singing I could hear the pat-pat-pat of feather fans as the women fanned the fires, and then the soft cracking sound as they tapped manioc with a stick, peeled and split it in preparation for cooking. They would push the glowing log-tips together, set their clay pots on top, and I would hear the pfff-pfff as they blew on the fire. Roosters would crow, the fanning and the songs would go on, and as dawn broke behind the tall trees I would give up pretending to be asleep. I would open my eyes and the two teen-aged boys who slept in the house next door (our houses had no walls) would belt out the first announcement of the day: “Baru! Ñani omaemunamba!” which means, “She’s awake!”
I was a freak to these people. They were the Auca Indians of the Ecuadorian rain forest, a people so isolated that most of them had never laid eyes on anybody they didn’t know, so primitive they still made fire with two sticks. They wore no clothes at all, only a piece of cotton string around the hips. When I asked what the string was for they looked at me horrified. “Well, you certainly wouldn’t expect us to go around naked, would you?” They had a notion from way back—nobody could tell me where they got it—that everybody in the world who wasn’t an Auca was a cannibal, so when they met up with strangers they usually dispatched them as quickly as possible with eight-foot wooden spears to avoid ending up in the strangers’ cooking pot.
One day, two years before I lived there, the Aucas had found five white men on a little strip of sand on the Curaray River, men who had been dropping gifts to them from a yellow airplane. The Indians called the plane ibu, meaning bumblebee, because the sound it made was almost identical. They had argued among themselves for a long time about whether these men might be as friendly as they appeared to be, shouting and gesticulating from the plane, or whether they were just masters of treachery and deception. They couldn’t possibly know that they were missionaries, bent only on giving them some very good news. When they finally found themselves face to face on the sandstrip, the Indians hesitated, uncertain as to what to do. At last, the oldest of the six men, a man whom I later got to know as Gikita, said, “Well, I brought my spear—butu Wati! taenumu waeninani yaeae—I’m going to kill them,” and with that he lunged across the river that separated them and sank his weapon into the back of one of the missionaries. A long fight ensued, but ended with all five of the Americans dead.
That happened more than twenty-five years ago. Maybe it seems unusual in the twentieth century, maybe it seems strange that the God whom the five served should allow them to be defeated by a handful of utterly misled, totally ignorant Indians to whom spearing was all in a day’s work. But in Christian history the story is neither unusual nor strange. In fact, it seems legitimate to me to add the names of those men—Ed, Roj, Nate, Pete, and Jim—to a long list given to us in the Book of Hebrews. You remember many of those who qualified for the great gallery of chapter 11: Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Samuel, and the prophets—even a harlot named Rahab.
There were those not named who conquered kingdoms, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the furious blaze of fire, and escaped from death. They were the successful ones—the winners, you’d say. But do you remember the list at the end of the chapter? You never saw any pictures of them in your Sunday-school papers. They were the ones who were tortured, mocked, flogged, chained, or stoned to death. There were some, the story says, who were sawn in two. They’re in the same list, remember, right in there with the winners.
We’d call them martyrs. You know what the Bible calls them? Witnesses. Greek students know it’s the same word. The word for witness is marturia. So in God’s categories it really doesn’t matter whether, humanly speaking, you win or lose, whether you’re a victim or a victor. You’re a witness.
I started by telling you about my experience of living with people who regarded me as a freak. I was some kind of nut to them. I had hair like palm fiber, they said. Eyes like a jaguar’s—blue ones, altogether the wrong color for a person to have. To a people whose skin was the beautiful shade of strong tea, mine was pathetically washed-out. I was a head taller than anybody. Before they saw me they had heard that a very tall foreigner was coming so they built me a house about twenty feet tall. It was an awful letdown for them when I showed up, only five foot nine. But everything about me was weird. Everything I did was bizarre. I didn’t know how to do anything useful like planting manioc or making clay pots or weaving hammocks or catching fish with my hands, and when I tried, my daughter Valerie, who was three and had learned their language almost overnight, would yell, “Kyae akam!” which means, “Everybody get a load of this!”
Day after day the women and most of the children would go off to the plantations to work and the men would go hunting. There I would be, sitting in a hammock with my notebooks and file box, scratching the gnat bites, blinking the smoke out of my eyes, trying to figure out a language nobody had even written down. Phrases like Wuru naimae nano kaewuti ani. Or MMm wa—which means, “It stinks.”
In the evenings everybody came home, the women from the planting, the men from hunting. They cooked and ate whatever they had brought—manioc, plantains, birds, monkeys, tapirs, whatever. They went to sleep very early and there I’d still be, sitting in the hammock, Valerie asleep in a blanket on a slab of split bamboo beside me. I’d fan my fire, scratch bug bites, study a little bit sometimes, but candles were hard to come by down there, so I would think and pray.
One of the things I thought most about was witnessing. That’s why I was there—to witness. It had to mean something besides giving out tracts, speaking to people in gas stations, going from door to door. Those were perfectly valid activities, but the application seemed too limited. One day I found a verse which altered my understanding: “‘My witnesses,’ says the Lord, ‘are you, my servants, you whom I have chosen to know me and put your faith in me and understand that I am he.’”
I realized I had been chosen to know him. A witness must first of all know something. God’s witnesses know him, put faith in him, understand who he is. In the first letter of John he says, “We are writing to you about something which has always existed, yet which we ourselves actually saw and heard, something which we had opportunity to observe closely and even to hold in our hands, and yet, as we know now, was something of the very Word of Life Himself.” John knew what he was talking about.
What are we talking about? Whom are we talking about? We have got to know him. Jesus made it very clear that there is only one route to that knowledge: obedience. “If a man loves me he obeys me and I will make myself known to him.”
You must know him. You must see him. You must hear his words. That makes you a witness, just as seeing an accident at a street corner makes you a witness. Then what does a witness do? You might be called into court to testify. Leviticus 5 says, “If a person hears a solemn adjuration to give evidence as a witness to something he has seen or heard and does not declare what he knows, he commits a sin and must accept responsibility.” The Apostle John came, the Gospel tells us, to witness to the Light. He was not the Light. He came to give evidence. Another faithful witness was Christ himself. By everything he said or did he gave evidence—he was evidence of what the Father was like. He spoke only what he heard the Father say.
A witness speaks. His witness is his word. But it is also his life. Witness is action. It makes truth visible. God instructed Moses to make a special kind of tent in the wilderness, gave him specific details about dimensions, materials, and furnishings, even down to the silver hooks and bronze pegs, the colors of the embroidery on the waistband of the priests’ vestments. God did this to make truth visible. It was to give the people tangible evidence of intangible verities.
The disciples observed Jesus’ actions and saw the manifestation of Truth, the Word made flesh, visible and comprehensible. Then, when it was time for the disciples to take over where he left off, he promised that they would receive power and become witnesses. The process has been the same ever since: we see him, we are given power, we become witnesses. Some of those mentioned in Hebrews did just that. There was Noah. What an assignment he had—to build that huge boat, of an unheard of size and shape, on dry land where there wasn’t the smallest chance of ever hauling it to any place where it could float. Imagine what the neighbors thought! Poor old Noah, he’s gone bananas. But he kept his cool. The account says he built it reverently. It also says his action “condemned the unbelief of the rest of the world. That’s one of the things a faithful witness does.
What about Abraham? His name is on the list for several reasons, one of them being his willingness to make a human sacrifice. It was the very son through whom God was to fulfill his tremendous promise that God was now asking him to offer up. Imagine the silent journey up the mountain, the old man who had gotten up early in the morning to obey God, the donkey carrying the load of wood, the boy, perhaps ten or twelve years old, and the two servants. When the father and son had left the servants behind, the boy spoke at last. “Father.”
“What is it, my son?”
“Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the animal for sacrifice?”
“God will provide it.”
And they went on in silence. In silence too, I imagine, they set about building an altar and arranging the wood. I wonder what happened next. I wonder if either of them said anything. I try and try to visualize that scene in the lonely spot on the mountain in the wilderness, the father who had known God’s leading through so many vicissitudes, in a desperate conflict of desire to be a faithful son to his Heavenly Father and a faithful father to his earthly son.
I picture not only the life-and-death struggle on the mountaintop but also the throngs of angelic beings, poised, attentive, leaning, as it were, in breathless stillness over the scene. Isaac, helpless and incredulous, looks at his father. The angels wait for the old patriarch’s decision. Is his trust in God strong enough to enable him actually to slit the boy’s throat? Will he by his obedience witness to belief, or by disobedience to unbelief? The decision matters infinitely—not only to the old man and the boy, not only to God who gave the command, not only to the cloud of witnesses who watch, but to all the world for all time. It matters to you and me.
They wait. Abraham stretches out his hand. His fingers close around the hilt of the knife. Suddenly the voice of the angel of the Lord: “Abraham!”
“Here I am.”
Don t touch him. Now I know that you are a God-fearing man. You have not withheld from me your son. All nations on earth shall pray to be blessed as your descendants are blessed, and this because you have obeyed me.”
Witnessing means obedience. Every time you do what God says to do or refuse to do what he says not to do you witness to the truth. And witnessing to the truth is a very risky business—risky in the world’s terms. You’re likely to be arrested, Jesus predicted, handed over to prison, brought before governors and kings for my name’s sake. This will be your chance to witness for me. You will be betrayed . . . some of you will be killed.” Solzhenitsyn, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie ten Boom, and thousands of others know what he meant. They also understand what he said next: “Hold on, and you will win your souls. In the world you’ll have tribulation, but cheer up, I have overcome the world.”
Witnessing conquers the world. But it doesn’t exempt you from suffering.
Daniel was a man who was willing to stand up and be counted. His witness was so pure that jealous ministers and satraps knew they would never find any charge against him unless they could find one in his religion. They found it. He was a praying man, and when he heard the decree that he was to quit praying he decided to be judicious and say his prayers on the golf course with his eyes open. Is that what it says? No. Daniel knelt by his window facing Jerusalem three times a day, exactly as he had always done, and of course they got him. The king gave the order and Daniel was hurled into a pit of hungry lions. The king had a very bad night—couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even enjoy his harem. But Daniel had a wonderful night. The lions were there, but so was the angel of God. “No trace of injury was found on him,” the story says, “because he had put his faith in his God.” God didn’t keep him out of the pit. He went into it with him. The world says, “What is faith? Show us.” Daniel showed us.
Witness enables others to see what they could not otherwise have seen. It changes the picture. Think of Stephen. He never minced any words. Standing before the highest civil and religious court of the Jewish nation, called the Sanhedrin, he witnessed. He spoke the plain truth about Israel’s history: “You obstinate people, heathen in your thinking, heathen in the way you are listening to me now, it’s always the same. You never fail to resist the Holy Spirit. You who have received the law of God miraculously by the hand of angels, you are the men who have disobeyed it!”
If miracles didn’t persuade them, what would Stephen’s defiance do? They ground their teeth at him in a rage and stoned him to death. But while the rocks were flying, Stephen saw something. He saw heaven opened, he saw the glory of God, and Jesus himself standing at his right hand. That’s witness. It conquers the world. It makes truth visible. It changes the picture. When we see Stephen we see not the fury of the religious Jews, not the rain of stones falling on his head, but a man beholding the Lord. Faith stands in the midst of suffering and sees glory. The Church is here not to deliver us from suffering—and I believe you young men and women will be called to suffer—the Church will not deliver you from it, but will make witnesses, those who see beyond things like an ark, a sacrifice, a lion’s den, a furnace—those who see the promises of God, the angel in the lion’s den, the Son of Man in the flames, Jesus standing up to welcome his beloved Stephen.
A witness clarifies alternatives. Pope John Paul, pressed to slacken the rule against the ordination of women, beleagured by women who preach a spurious doctrine of freedom, has clarified the alternatives. Faithful to the Gospel, he replied simply that the issue was not one of human rights but of the will of God.
In a suburb of Moscow a priest named Dmitri Dudko held dialogues every Sunday in his church. It is a very dangerous thing to speak out for Christ in Russia today and people came and put to him all kinds of hard questions—is it all right, for example, to emigrate to the West? “When you run away from difficulties,” Father Dudko replied, “you run away from Christ’s cross.” Somebody asked why God had to be crucified, when God should be all-powerful. “You have a modern understanding of power, force, the thunder of artillery. But our God is a God of love, and he chose the Cross as the weapon of our salvation,” the priest said. “One must choose either the kingdom of God or absurdity.” Hear his witness.
There’s an amazing word at the end of the chapter in Hebrews. “It was not God’s plan that they should reach perfection without us.” Noah, Abraham, Daniel and his friends, Stephen, the five missionaries in Ecuador—they won’t reach perfection—without us? That’s what it says. So what are we supposed to do? The Book tells us.
“Surrounded then as we are by these serried ranks of witnesses, let us strip off everything that hinders us as well as the sin that dogs our feet and let us run the race that we have to run with patience, our eyes fixed on Jesus the Source and the Goal of our faith.”
The race we have to run. Not Noah’s or Abraham’s. God chooses different tests—he writes different exams for each of us, exactly suited to prove the quality of our faith. If to be his witness means for you flunking a course because you refuse to cheat the way everybody else is doing, if it means losing money because you’re conscientious about paying your income tax when you know you could fudge a little bit, it it means looking like a freak or a square or a Victorian or a nerd—will you stand up and be counted? Strip off what hinders you, the verse says. You know what it is. Fear, perhaps. Of what? Suffering? Embarrassment? Maybe your hindrance is love of comfort—America’s idea of suffering is having to put the thermostat down a few degrees. What is the “sin that dogs our feet”? Gluttony? Irresponsibility? Procrastination? Old-fashioned selfishness? What’s your list? Strip it off. Get rid of it. Run your race, eyes fixed on the Source and Goal—Jesus, who endured a cross.
Remember these serried ranks of witnesses that surround us. Remember that they’re cheering for you. Remember the word that was made so powerful to me back there in that thatched house: “My witnesses,” says the Lord, “are you, my servants, you whom I have chosen to know Me and put your faith in Me and understand that I am He.”