What Led to Paul's Martyrdom?

 

Roughly sixty years ago, my parish priest taught the confirmation class I was in that “Gossip is in the same category as murder.” The words have stuck with me all this time. At first, I was intrigued but puzzled. I couldn’t quite figure out what he meant. I thought it a sort of alarmist exaggeration, the way tapping someone with a pencil is different in degree but not in kind from smacking someone full force in the head with a baseball bat.

Then as years passed, I saw the searing damage that gossip can do to others and had done to myself. I was, and remain, utterly amazed at how easy it is for large numbers of people who have known someone for many years  to believe gossip about that person, even when the gossip is markedly in contradiction to their own personal knowledge of the gossip’s target. Even a secular court, as a minimum, at least goes through the motions of allowing an accused person to make a defense, but gossip-mongers and gossip-believers show no awareness of how illogical and unjust gossip is, and even take offense when it is suggested that they might be treating someone unfairly. I’ve seen this many times, in matters great and small.

And then an eye-opening, bone-chilling realization came to me. I read the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Acts, which recounts Paul’s arrest in Jerusalem. First, we see how the leaders in Jerusalem welcomed Paul and rejoiced when he recounted God’s successes among the Gentiles through his ministry. Then they told Paul about the “thousands of believers among the Jews” who are “zealous for the law,” and who have been lied to by unidentified people regarding Paul’s teaching about the law: “They have been told about you” is how that section of the lesson begins. This is gossip. The source of such so-called information is usually introduced as, “I heard…” or “Someone said…” Let’s pull back the vagueness from what it really going on. Gossipers often say they want to “maintain confidentiality”, but that is a foul masked deception for protecting liars.

For gossip to be effective, it must be originated by back-stabbing cowards; then it must be believed by those who hear it and then pass it on. At the time of Paul’s visit to Jerusalem, “thousands” have believed gossip that is, like all gossip, a lie. It was Jewish Christian believers who started the lie, other believers received it, and other believers passed it on. That gossip eventually brought about the violent assault on Paul even in the holy precincts of the Temple, his arrest, his two-year confinement in Judea, his being sent to Rome in chains, and eventually the martyrdom of that generation’s best apostle. It was malicious gossip (that phrase is redundant; gossip is always malicious) that started the ball rolling. My parish priest was right; gossip is indeed in the same category as murder. It is false witness that destroys the innocent. I get it now.

How very easy it is for believers of that time, of every time, of our own time to receive and pass on gossip that is titillating, builds illusive smug self-righteousness, creates a bogus sub-community of “those who know,” and smears another person who is, of course, absent and undefended at the time of the tale-telling. Gossip deserves zero tolerance. It is damnable. Satan is “the father of lies” (John 8:44), but Jesus is “the truth” (John 14:6). Can it be any clearer than that?

Still, as always, evil cannot ever have the last word. Evil is a parasite; it has no life of its own, and to live it must suck the life of another whose life is God-given and preserved.  The manifold wickedness that led to Jesus’ betrayal and eventual death was “in fulfillment of the Scriptures”. It all worked together for good, for the salvation of the world. Those who are the victims of gossip are being treated the way Jesus was, abandoned and denied by friends, and therefore are put into his way by means that nothing else can serve. It is an answer to the prayer, “God, make me like Jesus.”

St. Francis de Sales teaches, with heady wisdom, that the sufferings the faithful endure can be “aromatized with the divine sweetness, benignity, and clemency, and their bitterness most delicious.” Such sufferings must of course include being the target of gossipers. They can cause wounds that can never heal, hurts that can never go away. In the case of Paul, they can even lead to death. May God bring to repentance those who create gossip, believe gossip, and pass gossip on to others. May God keep all of us from falling prey to gossip as either originators, acceptors, or targets.