In the Mouth of the Lion

Believe.

Today I saw something I will never be able to unsee.

Today was another of the circus days. Everyone loves the circus days. Some people argue it’s all just distraction from the stuff that isn’t nearly as fun about life in the empire, but some people are always complaining, and, well, after a while you just learn to tune them out.

Me, I always loved the circus days. The best thing is to find the perfect spot in the stadium, so you can see everything. There’s nothing worse than showing up only to find the only available seating leaves you behind or adjacent to a post. Then you spend all day obsessing over the post.

Today I saw everything. I didn’t really think about posts. I thought about a lot of other things. I’m still trying to process.

I saw a man in the mouth of a lion. It wasn’t the first time. Yeah! That’s the circuses. You will see any and everything in them. It’s what passes for entertainment these days. Death as entertainment! Well, maybe it’s been going on for a while. I don’t know. I never really thought about it until now.

This wasn’t just another man. This was an older man. Amazing how such a simple distinction can change everything.

Later, I asked some questions about him. Usually they don’t really advertise the reasons. I mean, there are executions and then there are the circuses. Two separate things. We all know how you end up in the stadium. It’s no secret. It’s easier to watch when you know it’s never going to happen to you, I guess.

His name was Polycarp. He was one of those Christians. I never understood those people. You hear a lot of stories about them. Most of it is just a lot of gossip, a way to pass the time. I mean, all religions do strange things behind doors. They say Christians are cannibals. That one is certainly memorable. You’d never know to look at one. We get a lot of Christians in the stadium. Maybe I don’t know what a cannibal looks like. The Christians don’t look like what I would expect from one, I guess. They don’t act wild, I don’t know. 

I never really thought about it.

The stories. They say they’ve been around for less than a hundred years. To put that in perspective, it’s been more than a hundred years since Julius Caesar, his assassination. That’s still pretty memorable. There’s always a play about it, during the circuses. The versions always seem to get better. If I lived to see a hundred years, I’m sure I’d see a hundred better versions than I’ve ever seen. It’s just one of those stories.

The stories they say about the Christians, though. Well, it depends where you hear them. The popular histories are pretty dismissive. I mean, these are people at the bottom rung of society. The empire is not exactly going to waste its time tracking all that. The Jews themselves (sometimes it’s easy to forget Christians aren’t Jews), they seem actively repulsed by them. They’re even more dismissive, but probably to distance themselves, an act of self-preservation, which would be smart, considering that even that much is hardly enough to prevent their...involvement in the circuses...

They say we executed the first of them, less than a hundred years ago. Do I have the math right? It’s so hard to tell. Maybe a little over a hundred. Something like that. Very close. Anyway, this Polycarp was involved with them all his life, and he was friends with that first generation, which of course was there when the first of them was executed.

If that clears things.

One of the things I heard was that Polycarp timed his appearance in the stadium to coincide with the anniversary of that execution. The Christians have a name for it, but don’t ask me what. I can barely keep the Jewish holy days straight. If you’re a citizen of the empire, religion means festivals. They’re celebrations. 

The execution was carried out by one of our governors. They say he was a particularly brutal one, and there will always be talk about that sort of thing, justifying it to keep order in the empire and all that. To hear the Christian version of it, because of course now they want to at least sound like friends of the empire, the governor agreed to this execution reluctantly, as if he had no choice, as if the blame were someone else’s. Listen, the empire’s rule is absolute. The Christians can say what they want, believe what they want.

And as I said, they say a lot of things, believe a lot of things. Today, for whatever reason, I decided to listen. Okay, the reason was the old man, Polycarp, in the mouth of the lion.

I began to ask about him specifically. I learned that what I saw was exactly what he wanted. He welcomed it. He made the whole journey from Smyrna, apparently, quite willingly. It was a procession to him! Every stop he made along the way, he greeted his fellow Christians, many of whom made trips of their own to intercept him, never once attempting to avoid his fate, of which he was very clear from the start. 

It baffles me. 

This isn’t just defiance. They say the Christians believe they have a different fate, once they die, that whether as a combination of their faith or their conduct, that death is not the end. They will see something better than anyone living has ever known. I don’t even know what to say about that. Everyone wonders what follows death. Few welcome death itself. Certainly not the death of the stadium.

Yet that’s exactly what this Polycarp did. So I began to wonder. I started listening.

Death is not the end. And I began to wonder, did they expect to just return to life? Did they expect revenge? Did they expect justice for what had happened to them? Did they expect to revolutionize the world?

And then I thought about this man Polycarp again. This life he had led. What he had embraced. This impossible ideal.

And I saw maybe that was the whole point. Perfect selflessness. Impossible. And perhaps, even if terrible, as in the ending, how...sweet.

This was the antithesis of the circuses. This was not entertainment. 

This was life. In the mouth of a lion.

And so I reconsidered the Christians. I thought about the stories I heard. I thought about that execution. I thought about the kind of lives that were lived because of the man who had been executed, not because of the execution itself. The execution itself, what followed it, the anniversary of which this man Polycarp had timed his moment in the stadium to coincide with, perhaps something greater than the best performance of the assassination of Julius Caesar could ever hope to be...

You know, in those plays the key moment is always the betrayal of Caesar’s best friend. To hear the Christians speak of the execution, there’s a betrayal that resulted in that, too, but it’s detached from the moment, and even in the moment, this first of the Christians is said to be forgiving those who made that moment happen.

That’s what it’s all about. That’s what made me think so much about all this. That’s what this man Polycarp, in the mouth of the lion, did to make me rethink everything.

He forgave us. He forgave me. 

Who does that? A Christian, apparently.

And so I say now, believe. Believe what the Christians say. Believe. They have this figured out, regardless of how bizarre they make it sound. Probably the worst things said about them aren’t even true.

Believe. The most impossible things sound so impossible because they challenge everything. Not people. Ideas. The Christians believe not to aggrandize themselves, but to make a better world, with or without themselves in it. I don’t know. Maybe all this looks very different a hundred, two hundred, two thousand years from now. I don’t care.

At some point the play about the death of Julius Caesar finds its perfect words. But for these Christians, the message will never change. It’s trying to remember what Polycarp commemorated, that’s...

Believe. That’s all I say to you now. Believe.