“The blood of Christians is seed.”† I first encountered those words of Tertullian inscribed in stone on my first day of freshman orientation at Canisius. They are striking words that conjure images of early Christian martyrs: wild beasts tearing into innocent flesh, people being burned alive and suffering tortures too gruesome to contemplate.
The phrase had the effect desired by those who placed it in the main quad of the college. It was arresting and thought-provoking. It caught my eye, even though at the time my intention was to make my way to the beer truck which had been provided for our refreshment. (Yes, college-sponsored orientation has certainly changed since then.)
It wasn’t the bloody image of martyrs’ deaths that caused the words of Tertullian to lodge in my head and remain there nearly 45 years later.
Seed.
That’s what struck me. The blood of Christians is seed.
Martyr is a loan-word from the Greek, and it doesn’t have anything to do with death. It means witness. The early church considered those who suffered and died for the faith to be the truest witnesses to Christ, even dying innocently as he did. The word stuck. That’s why we associate martyr with death.
The witness of those who gave their lives was generative. Their witness, like seeds planted in fertile soil, bore fruit.
Japan avoided contact from other cultures for many centuries. Even during the so-called ‘age of discovery,’ Japan resisted intrusion from the West. Despite this, missionaries were able to get a foothold in Japan. First the Jesuits, and later, Franciscans ventured into Japan to spread the Gospel.
On February 5, 1597, six Franciscan friars together with 20 of their converts were crucified in Nagasaki. The Japanese government was determined to root out Westerners and their colonial ambitions as well as their infectious ideas and religions. By 1630, none of the missionaries remained in Japan and the church was outlawed.
Yet 250 years later, when the next Christian missionaries arrived in Japan, they were greeted by Christians who had survived and flourished as an underground church for all that time.
Seed.
If we could honestly say with Paul “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me,” I wonder what might grow from that kind of living sacrifice – if we lived in love for the sake of others?
Seed.
Prayer: O God our Father, who brought the holy martyrs of Japan through the suffering of the cross to the joys of eternal life: Grant that we, encouraged by their example, may hold fast to the faith we profess, even unto death itself; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. (From Lesser Feasts and Fasts. New York: Church Publishing, 2018.)
† Plures efficimur, quotiens metimur a vobis: semen est sanguis Christianorum. Roughly translated: ‘The more often we are mown down by you, the more we multiply. The blood of Christians is seed.’ From Apologeticus ascribed to Tertullian, c. 197 CE.