Good Reading, Good Question

I read something the other day that impacted me deeply. There seems to be no better way to share it with you than this blog. The passage is from The Call by Os Guinness… a book that I would highly recommend.

Of course, like all good reading, this passage leads to a good question. I have included that below.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The year was 480 B.C. The East was on the move against the West. A colossal and terrible army, the greatest the world had ever seen, had poured across the Hellespont from Asia into Europe. Led by the all-powerful Persian King Xerxes, the vast host included fish-scale armored Persians, camel-riding Arabs, chariot-driving Libyans… Eighty thousand men rode on horseback or in chariots; around them marched foot soldiers and archers beyond counting.

When this Grand Army marched, it was said, the ground trembled. When they ate, it was as if locusts had devoured everything in their path. When they drank, it seemed that whole pools were dried up and entire rivers reduced to a trickle. The imperial Persian war machine was like nothing anyone had seen before. Simply to pass by the king in review took a full week.

The Persian mission was revenge. Xerxes, the thirty-eight-year old “King of Kings,” had set out from Susa, after four years of preparation, to avenge the defeat of his father Darius. In the process he intended to subdue Greece, nip the budding menace of Athens and Sparta, and expand the far-flung empire of Persia. Athens, of course, was not yet the shining city of Pericles… and Sophocles. The marble wonder of the Parthenon and the golden age of science, philosophy, democracy, and the theater lay in the future. Athens was merely a fractious little city. If anything, Sparta appeared to have greater military potential. But the speculation on the future would have seemed absurd during those sweltering days in mid-August. Even if they united, the Greek city-states would have been no match for Xerxes’ awesome force… The quarrelsome Greeks were at war with each other as with the Persians.

So it was that the Persian super-army of perhaps a quarter of a million soldiers was opposed by a hastily assembled, ragtag force of seven thousand Greeks from five city-states. But at their core were three hundred Spartans, trained to stand or die. (“Come back with your shield or on it,” a Spartan mother told her son.) They were led by a fifty-five-year-old Spartan prince, Leonidas. And they took their stand in a narrow pass, twenty yards wide, bounded by the sea on one side and the five thousand-foot cliffs of Mt. Kallidromos on the other. Hot sulfurous springs, which the Greeks called Thermopylae, or Hot Gates, bubbled out of these cliffs at the narrowest place.

For the Persians the whole encounter must have looked at first like a simple mopping-up operation, a tiny dust-storm scuffle. But for two days the unstoppables were stopped. Late on the second day, Xerxes, fearing a calamitous panic, sent in his crack division, “the Immortals” – who were repulsed too at tremendous cost. For two long days the Persian horde had attacked and the heroic handful of Greeks had held firm.

Then, disastrously, the Greeks were betrayed. By night a traitor led the Persians over the cliffs so that at daybreak Leonidas and his men were surrounded. The pass had been sold. The game was up. Death was coming as surely as the dawn. Dismissing most of his army, Leonidas led his own three hundred Spartans and a few others to a little mound from which they could make their last desperate stand and hold back the oncoming avalanche. There lt little band fought to the last man and died. When their swords were gone, according to Herodotus, they fought on with their hands and teeth. But before they died, they sent home the stirring message that has become their epitaph: “Stranger, tell the Spartans that we behaved as they would wish us to, and are buried here.”

Brief, laconic, and to the point, these last words came from a little band of Greeks who had no idea what was to come. The could not see how their example would trigger a surge of pride and inspire their fellow countrymen to decisive victories at Salamis and Platae, that never again would the Persians seriously menace Greece, and that in thirty short years the city of Athens would rise to become the most influential city the world has every known.

Dedicated and courageous, they did their duty. The stood firm in the line of history, and today all free people enjoy a freedom that flows partly from their stand. As the French philosopher Montaigne said of Thermopylae two thousand years later, “there are triumphant defeats that rival victories.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Of course, the question for real disciples of Jesus Christ in all cultures is if we will be able to say something similar. “Passerby, tell our Lord that we have lived as He has wished us to and that we are buried here.”