“Instead, God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”
1 Corinthians 1:27 · CSB
In AD 177 a savage persecution fell on the churches of Lyons and Vienne in Gaul. Among the arrested was a slave woman named Blandina. Her own community feared she was too frail in body to hold up under torture.
They were wrong in the best possible way. The account — preserved in a letter the surviving churches sent to their brothers and sisters in Asia — says her torturers worked in shifts from morning till night and finally gave up, “astonished that she was still breathing.” Through all of it she kept saying, “I am a Christian, and nothing wicked happens among us.”
At the last she was hung on a post in the arena as bait for wild beasts; those who watched said she looked like one hanging on a cross, and her steadiness put courage into the others. The animals would not touch her that day. She was brought back again and again, and died last of all, after the rest — as though, the account says, like a mother who had sent her children on ahead.
The world sorts people by strength, and puts the frail slave girl at the bottom of the list. God reads the list upside down. Blandina's body was weak and her status was nothing, and she became the strongest preacher in the arena — not by what she did, but by Whom she would not deny.
The one the world counted least, heaven counted strongest.
A note on sources
- Documented: the Letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne, preserved by Eusebius (Church History 5.1).