When Faith refuses to surrender

A Sermon for the Feast of St Vincent of Saragossa

Texts:  Psalm 56.1-2, 8-end & Mark 3.7-12

Today we are invited to remember St Vincent of Saragossa — which already presents a small difficulty, because remembering martyrs can sound rather noble and abstract (especially when the martyr in question has been safely dead for over seventeen hundred years!). From that distance, martyrdom can begin to look neat and tidy, can’t it?  Polished by songs and icons.  Sanctified almost into myth.  In real life, of course, it’s rarely like that at all.

Vincent was a deacon in Spain during the reign of Diocletian, in the 4^th century. And the authorities wanted him to do just one, simple thing…bow to a statue of the Emperor.  You see, they weren’t after his blood. They wanted his compliance.  His obedience.  To them.

Diocletian — like several Roman emperors — did not merely rule. He expected to be revered. The emperor was increasingly treated as a divine figure, the guarantor of peace and order. His empiric proclamations were announced as ‘good news’! (Where have we heard that before?).  Citizens were required to demonstrate their loyalty by making a simple libation — a pinch of incense, a splash of wine — at the foot of the emperor’s statue, and by renouncing their old gods in favour of this new, imperial one.

It doesn’t sound like much, does it?.  A gesture. A civic duty. A way of saying, I understand how the world works. And maybe that’s precisely what made it so dangerous.

Vincent could have done it. He could have poured the wine, muttered the words, gone home, and carried on believing whatever he liked in private. Plenty of people did exactly that. But he didn’t. And I wonder if that’s because he sensed that this wasn’t really about religion at all. It was about who, or what, got to claim ultimate authority over a human life.

You see, here’s the problem:  systems that demand absolute loyalty don’t cope very well with people who won’t play along.  Sometimes, like that poor woman, Rene Nicole Good in Minneapolis, people who won’t play along with dominating power often get shot.  And that, I think, is where martyrdom often begins —with this collision between the will of the powerful, and the human spirit which refuses to be bossed about.   Something has to give. The system, or the individual.  And very often, it isn’t the system.

The psalm we heard just now sounds as though it was written by someone who knows that pressure from the inside. “Be gracious to me, O God, for people trample on me; all day long foes oppress me.” This is the voice of someone being worn down. Watched. Leaned on.

And yet the psalm does something quietly subversive. It imagines God not as the one who instantly fixes everything, but as the one who notices. “You have kept count of my tossings and turnings; please put my tears in your bottle.” God notes and holds the suffering.  And he refuses to let suffering be dismissed as inevitable, or necessary, or simply something we must pay for good order.  According to the psalmist, God holds our suffering, just as he holds our hand.  Or, if you prefer a more metaphorical image of God – as I usually do - He always offers us a mirror for our suffering – a way of examining it – of making it make sense.

In the gospel reading from Mark, Jesus was doing the suffering – but it looks different. Jesus is not imprisoned or tortured — not yet — but he is almost crushed by the crowd. Everyone wants something. Everyone presses in. Jesus has to keep a boat ready, just to create a little space to breathe.

And then something rather odd happens. The unclean spirits recognise him and shout out exactly the right words: “You are the Son of God.” And Jesus silences them. Even the truth, it seems, can become dangerous – especially when it gets recruited into the wrong kind of power structures.  Jesus refuses a form of recognition that would turn him into a tool of power — even a holy one.  That’s why Christian Nationalism is such a dangerous trend.  It’s all about power.

I wonder if that speaks rather directly to our own moment.

We live in an age that seems dominated by demi-gods — politicians who speak as though they alone can save, fix, or restore a nation; those who demand loyalty not just to a set of policies, but to themselves. We see it on the world stage, don’t we?  We watch strongmen who cultivate the image of invincibility, who rewrite history in their own favour, who expect obedience and gratitude in return.

But if we’re honest, it doesn’t stop there. Power like that has a habit of trickling down. Some people listening to this sermon will know what it is to live under the quiet but oppressive rule of a dominating presence — perhaps a partner, a parent, a boss.  Some of you will know how peace is maintained only by keeping someone else happy, by not saying the thing that mustn’t be said, by making small, daily libations to another person’s ego.

And some of us, if we’re brave enough to admit it, may occasionally find ourselves on the other side of that dynamic.  Sometimes, we are the ones enjoying being deferred to, enjoying being right, enjoying being the one whose mood sets the temperature of the room.

St Vincent exposes the fragility at the heart of all such power. He had no power in his moment of martyrdom.  All he could do was refuse the gesture that would have made everything easier.  “Just bow down to the damned statue, won’t you?”.  But by resisting, he revealed the limits of the authority ranged against him. The state could break his body. It could not make him worship.

St Vincent does not invite us to seek suffering. Rather, he invites us to notice where pressure is being applied in our own lives — where the quiet demand to comply, conform, or keep our heads down is strongest — and to ask, gently and honestly, what would be lost if we gave in.

The answer may not be dramatic. It may simply be our voice. Our integrity. Our freedom to walk, as the psalm puts it, “before God in the light of life.”  And maybe that is where faithfulness usually begins — not with grand gestures, but with the decision not to bow to the wrong thing, even when doing so would make life a great deal easier.  Amen.