Brave Hearts and Black Hearts
Michael Bray
Life Advocate Magazine
May, 1996
Brave Hearts and Black Hearts
Braveheart was a fine film. The good guys won. Justice and freedom prevailed in the end. And those who were shot the moon shot the moons with arrows. Timeless Biblical themes. Confessedly, it was violent. It took us beyond the elementary principle of defensive slaying of a wicked assailant or two. The paramour of a sodomite prince was thrown to his death by the tyrant King Edward of England (“Longshanks”). A brutal English officer had his throat slit, just as he had slit the throat of the hero’s wife. Soldiers who had abused others were bloodfully conquered by revolutionary Scots. And cowardly, traitorous Scottish nobles were executed with all due gruesomeness by the violent vigilante, William Wallace.
Like most folks, I revel at the sight of the underdog prevailing against the tyrants. And what underdogs! One critic called the story a “morality tale about chivalry and courage in the face of ruthless adversaries.” But triumph comes at great cost. And so the hero dies the awful death of a traitor; he is tortured (including disemboweling) and finally drawn and quartered.
But what ought to be the punishment for a traitor? We are awestruck by the violence because we don’t recognize the cruelty of the crime of treason. The nobles betrayed Sir William Wallace and the commons of Scotland; a battle was lost along with the lives of faithful men. Wallace, therefore, dispatched the traitors. Unlike ubiquitous federal indictments which regularly charge citizens with crimes against America for possessing firearms, treason is a real crime. It is not just a death threat against the life of one person; it is a threat against the whole nation.
Yet we haven’t executed a traitor for forty years. We missed prosecuting Jane Fonda and probably will forebear the treasonous deeds of Farrakhan. It is not that there haven’t been prosecutions of any traitors since Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; we have recently imprisoned Jonathan Pollard and Ames Aldridge, for example. But these folks will do less time than your average abortuary demolitionist. (Justice is surely turned inside out in a nation which has commits treason against God and prosecutes the defenders of the defenseless.)
There isn’t the patriotic zeal to fully prosecute the crime of treason. And why should a nation soaked with the blood of innocents be zealous for self-preservation? It is sad indeed with Memorial Day upon us to contemplate how we have squandered the patriotic sacrifices of others. But so it is. Treason is no big deal.
In times of social and political turmoil one man’s traitor is another man’s hero. As George Bush put it, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” One man’s government informant is another man’s snitch. Benedict Arnold was a hero or traitor depending upon whether you were a Loyalist or a revolutionary American. And Brutus and the senate might be traitors or patriotic defenders of the republic. And if we all things are relativized thus, we can call Rahab a traitor against her city of Jericho.
But we don’t. We don’t treat Rahab with such disrespectful relativist moralizing. On the contrary, we say with the Scriptures that she was faithful. We say this because there is such a thing as truth. She is honored as a patriot of God because she heard, believed in, and obeyed the Truth. She broke other loyalties and embraced the Truth when she was confronted with it.
She stands opposite Judas who abandoned fealty to the Truth and embraced lies. It is not the changing of sides which makes a true traitor; it is where the Truth lies in relation to the side to which one switches.
There is a traitor named Rick Thomas of Norfolk, who is getting his pieces of silver from the federal government. He appeared to be a believer in the Truth working among abortion opponents, married to activist Charnell Thomas, even volunteering to be a bodyguard to ACLA Director, Dave Crane. Like Judas, he moved among Christians, attending the Chicago meeting, ACLA meetings, and the White Rose Banquet. But the week before Holy Week, it became clear that Thomas was a traitor. He told his wife of his work as an FBI informant. At the same time the freshly indicted Clark Ryan Martin declared to fellow activists that Thomas was a government snitch.
Lots of homiletical goodies in this story. Point number one: We can identify a difference between the Pharisees and Judas, though both be perdition-bound. Like the hostile Pharisees who persecuted adherents to the Truth, Inquisitor in Chief Thomas Burrows relentlessly pursues Christians. Though under the direction of Janet Nero, he is responsible for his embrace of her perverse sodomite, abortophile, etc. agenda instead of the Truth. On the other hand, like Judas, Rick Thomas has betrayed the Truth. He has been exposed to and even embraced the Truth and then has fallen away and believed lies. His is a more spiritually perilous condition.
And there is a practical reason for this distinction. We need to loathe what God especially loathes so that we can avoid sin and serve Him more completely. (Read about the six things God hates, Prov. 6:16f.) And we need to heed the dire warning against retrogression (Heb. 6:1-4). There is practical hope for a disgusting persecutor of God’s people such as Mr. Burrows. Like St. Paul, He can turn from his abuse of Christians or sodomy and whatever other communalities he might have with the Tank Lady. But the Scripture offers no practical hope for a person like Rick Thomas who had “tasted of the heavenly gift and . . . the good word of God.” The Scripture says, “it is impossible to renew them again to repentance.” He joins Judas in the center of Dante’s Hell in the close company of cowards.
Point two: There is no justification for cooperating with the Pharisees (or with the Tank Lady’s minions). Nero’s discredited task force known as VAAPCON (Violence Against Abortion Provider Conspiracy) is truly CRAPCON (Washington Post, 26 Jan.). It is a federal inquisition leveled against abortion opponents built upon the perverse FACE bill; and it is, as Judge Randa properly ruled in Milwaukee, a violation of the Tenth Amendment. Therefore, as Cheryl Richardson said while she was kidnapped by the feds, “Do not join your hand with the wicked man to be a malicious witness” (Ex. 23:1). Mr. Burrows and his wicked friends wish to enlist Christians as malicious witnesses against one another. The very purpose of this Task Force is to jail the defenders of the innocent.
Point three: Those of us who have been faithful to this point need to thank God for His sustaining grace. We have just passed the Resurrection Season (a.k.a. Easter) when we were reminded of Judas’s betrayal. And we think to ourselves, How could he have done it? But in the moment that Jesus announced that a betrayer was at the dinner table, the disciples may have experienced a most important epiphany: “Is it I Lord?”
Each knew – even if only in a fleeting moment – his own dark potential to be a traitor. May His grace sustain His servants.
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