I have long enjoyed collecting the stories of lesser-known and unusual heroes, men and women whose endeavours set them apart in some way from the rest of us. Among the myriad biographies I have lining my shelves, the person who, for me, stands out from them all is Maximilian Kolbe.1
Born in Poland in 1894 into a devout Catholic family, Maximilian grew up to become a Franciscan friar, devoting his life to teaching, writing, and missionary work. When Poland fell to the Nazis at the start of World War II, Maximilian began first passively and then more actively resisting the Nazi regime—publishing articles against them and helping to shelter Jews in his monastery at Niepokalanów. Finally the Nazis grew tired of the troublesome friar and on 17 February 1941 Maximilian was arrested by the Gestapo and thrown into the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, where his name was stripped from him and he was known merely as prisoner number 16670.
A few months later, a prisoner escaped from Auschwitz and when this was discovered at the evening roll call, the authorities were furious. Determined to deter future escape attempts, the deputy camp commandant, Karl Fritzsch, announced that he would choose ten men at random: they would then be locked up in an underground bunker and left to starve to death. This would send a message: if you escape from Auschwitz, this is what we will do to your fellow prisoners.
Guards began to pace up and down the lines of prisoners, pulling out men at random, and when one man, Franciszek Gajowniczek (who had been jailed for aiding the Polish Resistance) was chosen, he began sobbing hysterically. ‘Please,’ Gajowniczek wept, ‘Have pity! I have a wife and two children! Whatever will become of them?’
On hearing Gajowniczek’s cries, Maximilian stepped out of the crowd of prisoners and addressed the commandant: ‘May I make a request?’ Nobody had ever dared speak to the commandant like that before and taken aback, Karl Fritzsch barked back: ‘What do you want?’ Maximilian pointed at the sobbing Gajowniczek and calmly replied: ‘I wish to take the place of this man.’
The commandant stared in sheer disbelief at Maximilian before finally replying: ‘I grant your request’. At those words, Gajowniczek was released back into the crowd of prisoners whilst Maximilian was dragged away with the other nine condemned men and herded into a death cell in the basement of Auschwitz Building 13, where the group were locked up in the dark, without food or water. Over the next few days, Maximilian led the prisoners in hymn singing and prayer, as one by one each succumbed to their fate. Finally, two weeks later, only Maximilian was left alive and needing the cell for other victims, the Nazis executed him by lethal injection.
How do we know the details of Maximilian’s story? Because Franciszek Gajowniczek survived the war, freed in 1945 when the camp he’d been moved to was liberated by the Russian army. He spent the rest of his life spreading the story of Maximilian’s incredible act of sacrifice. On one occasion, asked how he felt about what Maximilian had done, Gajowniczek replied: ‘The immensity of Friar Kolbe’s death regularly overwhelms me. I, the condemned, lived because someone willingly offered his own life for me.’
Why did Maximilian do this? What drove him to offer his life, self-sacrificially, for another? The answer is that, as a deeply committed Christian, Maximilian was doing his best to live out the words of Jesus, who said:
‘Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’
(John 15:13)
LOVE IS NOT CHEAP
Love is a word that is heard a lot these days. It’s a word thrown around all too casually in our culture, so much so that it is in danger of losing its meaning entirely. We talk about loving our jobs and smartphones, our pets and our hobbies, our houses and cars, even—for those who don’t have the misfortune to follow Neasden Football Club2—loving our sports teams. Even when the word ‘love’ is applied to human relationships, it can all too often be used casually or even cynically. Maybe some of you reading this have heard someone declare ‘I love you’, only to then have them let you down badly.
Thus when somebody says that they think that ‘God is love’, as so many people instinctively believe that God must be, it’s important to ask: what do you mean by ‘love’? After all, if love is just a synonym for ‘like’; or a feeling; or a ‘second hand emotion’ (to quote Tina Turner); or just a warm gooey feeling we get when staring into another person’s eyes over dinner at the local Italian trattoria,3 then what does it mean to say that ‘God is love’?
This is why Jesus’s words, defining the greatest, the highest, the purest form of love as self-sacrifice are so powerful and so helpful. They give us a standard, a model, of what real love looks like: namely the willingness to so put the other person first, you would be willing to lay down your life for them.
I find it fascinating that everybody instinctively knows that Jesus was right. From the most pious religious person (of whatever faith) to the most dogmatic secularist, we all know, deep down, that there is something very special going on when one person gives their life for another. Whether it’s in literature, such as Charles Dickens’s story, A Tale of Two Cities, where Sydney Carton bravely substitutes himself for Charles Darnay and is killed in his place so that Charles can go free. Or if we hear a news report of a parent giving their life for a child. Or in the military, when we read the account of somebody like Billy McFadzean, the twenty-year-old soldier who, during the Battle of the Somme in World War I, threw himself on top of some live grenades that had fallen into a trench. They exploded, killing Billy, but his rapid action saved the lives of dozens of his comrades—an action for which he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.4 Or Maximilian Kolbe, who was willing to be condemned to death in the place of another. Stories like these move us deeply, because we know in the very fibre of our being that self-sacrificial love is incredibly impressive. Real love is not cheap, true love is costly, and the highest form of love is self-sacrifice, love that is willing to expend itself for another, even at the price of one’s own life.
So how does that help us begin to tease out what we mean when we say ‘God is love’? Well, think about the famous cry of devout Muslims: ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘God is greater!’) My Muslim friends are absolutely right, God is great, but I also think they are being too modest and we can say more: God is not merely greater, he is the very greatest. And thus by definition, anything that God does must be the greatest example: God is the greatest creator, the greatest judge, the greatest ruler, and so on. Which means that if God is a god of love, then the love that he displays must be the greatest, the highest form of love that there is. And as we instinctively know (and as Jesus clearly explained) that means self-sacrificial, costly love. Only if God has demonstrated self-sacrificial love can he truly be said to be loving. Anything else is just words and when it comes to love, we need more than words.
COMPASSION MEANS MORE THAN MORALISING
Something very similar is going on when we look at a word that is closely related to ‘love’, namely ‘compassion’. As I have written elsewhere, the Qur’an is somewhat reticent to describe Allah as loving, tiptoeing around the term like somebody feeling their way barefoot and blindfolded through a room full of mousetraps. But for all of its nervousness about love, the Qur’an is very happy to describe Allah as compassionate. For example, the very first verse of the Qur’an announces:
In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
(Q. 1:1)
That little sentence is known in Islam as the bismillah and when Muslims recite the Qur’an, it is recited before each chapter (with the exception of the ninth), whilst the formulaic phrase ‘Allah is forgiving and compassionate’ is found in the Qur’an some 47 times. The Qur’an is thus insistent that Allah is a God who is compassionate.
The same is true when it comes to the Bible, which is also clear that Yahweh is a God of compassion. The Bible often pairs the word ‘compassion’ with ‘love’, stating things like:
Yahweh is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.
(Psalm 103:8)
But as with the word ‘love’, we need to ask what the word ‘compassion’ means. How, for example, does it differ from words like ‘empathy’, or ‘kindness’, or terms like ‘not-bouncing-my-son-upside-down-by-the-ankles-when-he-has-left-his-room-in-a-mess-for-the-seventh-day-running’?5
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘compassion’ is what linguists call a compound word—a word that was made by gluing two other words together. In the case of ‘compassion’, it was formed originally by sticking together two Latin words: com, meaning ‘with’, and pati, meaning ‘to suffer’. The word ‘compassion’ literally means to suffer alongside.
Although these roots of the word ‘compassion’ are centuries old, we still instinctively understand them if you think about how we use the word. For example, imagine you are walking down the street when you see a person being racially abused. You shout out to the other passers-by: ‘Racism is wrong!’ And then for good measure, you pull out your smartphone and tweet hashtags like #racismisawful a few times along with a concerned emoticon or two.
Or imagine that on the walk home from work, you pass a homeless person, sleeping rough in a shop doorway. Stunned by such a scene of deprivation in a modern city, you cry out to your fellow pedestrians, ‘Poverty is wrong!’ And then you rush on home and buy a t-shirt with some anti-poverty slogans on it from Amazon.6
In either case, you have not been compassionate. Sure you have been angered by the injustice and poverty. You may have even wept tears as you tweeted. But if all you did was shout and protest, then you haven’t been compassionate. You have just moralised. (And worse, virtue-signalled). Calling out injustice without actually doing anything is not compassion.
But now, re-run the thought experiments. Next time you see a person being racially abused, you rush across the street to defend them from the bullies—even though they are bigger and more numerous than you. Maybe you even get beaten up yourself as you try to defend the victim. But that’s true compassion: you did something, it cost you, and you suffered alongside. Or next time you see a homeless person sleeping rough, you actually stop to help; maybe you buy them a meal or even offer them a bed for the night. Now that’s compassion, because you got involved and it cost you personally.
Compassion means more than just moralising. More than just pointing out that something is wrong. More than just judging the situation. Compassion means getting involved, sometimes at great cost, possibly even with a risk to yourself, and maybe even if it will cause suffering to you personally.
So what, then, does it mean to speak of god as ‘compassionate’? Unless we are simply playing word games, then it is only meaningful to call god compassionate if the god we are talking about hasn’t merely told us what he thinks about injustice and suffering, poverty and pain, but has done something—and done something which has cost him, an action through which he has suffered alongside us.
When we look at the Qur’an, it is clear that Allah has not acted in this way. For sure, the Qur’an tells us what Allah thinks about injustice and our part in it. What he thinks is that it is wrong and that human beings need to wise up, or judgement will follow. But Allah has done nothing about our predicament: he has not become involved, nor has he suffered with us to tackle the problem. In short, Allah is a moraliser, but he is not compassionate.
By contrast, Yahweh is very different. The Bible tells us time and again not simply that Yahweh disapproves of and is angry at injustice and suffering, but that Yahweh cares so deeply for his people that he is moved to action, stepping into history in the person of Jesus in order to do something about suffering and evil, demonstrating far more than words but showing true compassion—suffering alongside us and displaying in the equivalent of letters written miles high across the sky, how great his love is for us. As the Bible unpacks what Yahweh’s compassion and love in action look like, it holds nothing back:
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
(Romans 8:38-39)
Think about who Jesus claimed to be: God come in the flesh, stepping into space and time, God getting his feet dirty with the dust of the world and his hands bloody with the nails of the world. If that claim of Jesus stands up, then what we see in his willingness to go to the cross to deal with our brokenness, sinfulness, and shame is not just the greatest act of self-sacrificial love by the greatest being who exists, but a powerful, beautiful, and practical demonstration of what compassion really looks like. In Jesus, we see displayed a God who loved us so much that even whilst we were his enemies, he was willing to do all that for us. As former Muslim Nabeel Qureshi writes in his autobiography, describing the love of Yahweh that was so attractive to him as he came to the end of his four-year journey from Islam to Christianity:
The good news is that God Himself loves us enough to enter into the world and suffer for us, that despite humanity’s inability to save itself, God saved us. He did not send someone else to do His dirty work. He rescued us Himself. No one else could do it. That is the beauty of the gospel; it is all about God and what He has done out of His love for us.7
THE ATTRACTION OF JESUS
The attractiveness of Jesus that first intrigued Nabeel Qureshi is something that many people have been drawn to, whether they are Christians, Muslims, seekers, or sceptics. It is no accident that leading atheists sometimes speak movingly of Jesus’s character, or why in the centuries after Muhammad, thousands of stories and traditions about Jesus circulated in early Islam,8 and why the Qur’an itself tries to co-opt Jesus. People see in him something unique, attractive, and compelling, even if they don’t know quite what to do with him after they have borrowed him.
Some years ago I was speaking at an interfaith panel at the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa. After the event there was a reception and as I grazed the pluralistic buffet—wholesome foodstuffs like non-alcoholic cheese, vegan wine, and meat-based vegetable substitutes—I was introduced to a distinguished looking lady who was a senior leader of the Baha’i community. If you are unfamiliar with the Baha’i, they are a newer religious movement, founded by the Persian mystic Baha’u’llah in 1863. They are also classic pluralists and have co-opted everyone from Buddha to Muhammad to Jesus into their attempt to teach the essential oneness of all religions.
As we chatted, the lady asked about my PhD and I explained how I had used computer analysis to study how the Qur’an was first composed and put together. She began to look very nervous and eventually asked: ‘So does all this evidence lead you to conclude that Muhammad wasn’t a prophet?’ I politely replied that this was something of an understatement and that this is the kind of problem you have if, like the Baha’i, you grab hold of every religious idea you can lay hands on without understanding it, like a starving student in an all-you-can-gobble-for-a-dollar fast-food joint. ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘my other concern is how the Baha’i faith has tried to shoehorn Jesus into the just-another-prophet box, failing to understand that Jesus never saw himself as one option among many, but as uniquely the way to encounter God.’
The lady almost choked on her gluten-and-dairy-free-low-fat scone and spluttered: ‘What … what … what on earth gives you the impression that Jesus thought anything even remotely like that?’
‘Oh I don’t know, perhaps something like chapter 14, verse 6, of the gospel of John, where Jesus famously said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. Nobody comes to God the Father except through me.”’
There was a brief silence, as she chewed in that determined way that gluten-free-flour products always require to be swallowable, before she replied: ‘Do you know, that verse has always given me considerable trouble.’
She is not alone. Lots of people have trouble with John 14:6 and Jesus’s claim not merely to be just a way to God, nor to be teaching some truth, or to have some thoughts about life, the universe, and so forth, but rather to be the way, the truth, and the life. Once again, we’re forced to make a choice here: either Jesus was breathtakingly arrogant, making even the most self-obsessed celebrity look like a paragon of humility; or else Jesus could say this kind of stuff calmly and rationally because it was true.
But of course the real reason why many people balk at ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ is because it looks terribly exclusivist. If Jesus is all of those things, what about those who think differently, or who are followers of other faiths? Isn’t this terribly narrow?
Not really.
It would be incredibly narrow if Jesus was saying and Christians are repeating words to the effect of ‘Jesus is the only way to God; Christians are therefore better than anybody else because they’ve worked it out and are going to heaven; and the rest of you are a bunch of unlucky fools for not following him.’ It would also be equally narrow if Jesus were suggesting that only the very best, the very smartest, cleverest, or holiest could qualify to follow him. ‘Those of you who make the grade, come on in! The rest of you, there’s the exit, and please don’t leave any sticky fingerprints on your way out.’
But neither of those things are what Jesus is saying.
Rather what Jesus is offering is an open exclusivism. Yes, he is the only way—the only way to really see, in action far more than words, God’s love and compassion, mercy and forgiveness, generosity and kindness. The only way by which our sinfulness and brokenness can be dealt with and the only way by which we are able to call God ‘Father’. But that way is open to anybody: no matter what your background, race, gender, age, or religious heritage—and certainly no matter if your life up to this point hasn’t exactly measured up and you’re dragging more baggage with you than an airport luggage carousel.
Jesus may be the only way: but he is a way open to all who are eager to seek, desperate to find, and prepared to lay down their lives and follow. As Jesus said:
‘So I say to you: ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened."‘
(Luke 11:9-10)
This essay was taken from a chapter in my book, Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God? Find out more about that here.
There are several biographies of Maximilian Kolbe; in what follows, I am broadly following Elaine Murray Stone, Maximilian Kolbe: Saint of Auschwitz (New York: Paulist Press, 1997) especially pp. 71-91.
Neasden FC have been led to defeat after defeat in the North Circular Relegation League by ashen-faced manager, Ron Knee (59). Their sorry history is recorded in Sid and Doris Bonkers, Neasden FC: The Only Way is Up (Privata Oculo Press, 2013).
The idea of Italian restaurants and romance are forever marred for me because in my first year of marriage, I took my wife for dinner at a lovely little pizzeria near where we lived. Leaning in for a kiss at the end of the meal, I got too close to a candle and set my hair alight. ‘You’re on fire!’ shrieked Astrid, which I initially took to be a complement about my rugged charm and general irresistibility, until she followed up by tipping a glass of water over my head.
See ‘William McFadzean VC’, Royal Irish Virtual Military Gallery (www.royal-irish.com/persons/william-mcfadzean-vc).
The Germans are bound to have a single multisyllabic word for just this very thing. This is a nation, don’t forget, that coined the 42 letter extravaganza Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän to denote ‘Danube steamship company captain’. I am pained by the fact that English has no equivalent, as this is a word I am sure I could use on a daily basis.
Because, of course, the best way to tackle poverty is to send money to large corporations.
Nabeel Qureshi, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity, 3rd Edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018) p. 288.
See the extensive collection in Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) pp. 47-220.