NOTES for Dan 3:14-20
Every Christian knows that a time of persecution is a time when fidelity to God and to Christ is put to the test. Hagiographic literature often tells of miracles that accompanied the witness of Christian martyrs. How reliable these accounts are is a separate question. Yet the heroes of the Book of Daniel, as they prepare to bear witness to their fidelity to the God of Israel, do not seem to expect a miracle at all. It is not that they rule one out entirely: they fully admit that God, if He wishes, can preserve them even in the blazing furnace.
But they do not make their witness depend on that miracle, just as the Christian martyrs did not make theirs depend on miracles. Indeed, what is at issue is a witness to fidelity to God and to Christ, not a demonstration of God’s power. God, of course, can always intervene and reveal His power, if He considers it necessary. If He does not, then the martyr’s death itself will become the witness.
Indeed, in a world where life was the highest value, a readiness to die could mean only one of two things. Either, for the person going to his death, the cause for which or the person for whom he was dying mattered more than his own life—but to everyone this would have seemed an obvious absurdity. Death for an idea is a phenomenon of modern times, a phenomenon of the Christian era. Such a death is possible only as a kind of quasi-Christian martyrdom. Or else the person going to his death knows another life, life in all its fullness.
Earthly life is only a small part of that fullness, and the martyr is prepared to renounce the small part for the sake of the whole. That is what witness means: a witness that the martyr’s words about God, Christ, and the Kingdom are not merely words, but reality—his reality, the reality of the Kingdom in which he lives. What his tormentors regard as reality is only a pale shadow and an evil parody of the reality of the Kingdom. In due time it will disappear together with the evil that permeates the fallen world as it becomes the Kingdom once more.