Love in a Prison Cell

In the middle of the twentieth century, when half of Europe fell under a power that ruled the mind as well as the body, there lived a pastor who would not call any man Lord but Christ. His name was Richard Wurmbrand. He was a Jewish Romanian who came to faith in Jesus and became a Lutheran pastor. His wife, Sabina, was also a Jewish believer, and she carried the cost of that calling beside him through fascism, war, and finally the long grey weight of Communist rule. When the new regime came, it did not only want taxes and obedience. It wanted the soul. And it pressed the churches to bless it.

Many bowed. Richard would not. He stood up in a great congress of religious leaders called to praise the state, and instead he praised God. He said the duty of the church was to honour Christ, not Caesar. Everyone in that hall knew what those words would cost.

In 1948 the door closed behind him. Fourteen years. That is the number the ministry he founded has always given. Fourteen years of imprisonment, much of it in solitude, much of it in cruelty no plain sentence can hold. Let one restrained sentence carry it. They hurt him in his body, and they meant for it to break his faith. Sabina was taken too, sent to labour, her strength spent on the canal works of a regime that did not care whether she lived. And their young son was left in the world without a mother or a father to hold him. Remember that. Persecution is never borne by one name alone. It is borne at the dinner table that now sits empty.

Here is the heart of it. In that cell, where hatred would have been the most natural thing in the world, Richard Wurmbrand refused it. He testified later that the believers in those prisons prayed for their guards. They longed for the conversion of the very men who tormented them. He never pretended the evil was small. He had felt it in his own flesh. But he had seen something clearly. If the persecuted began to hate, they would become a mirror of the system that crushed them. So they would not hate. Enemy love was not weakness in that cell. It was the last freedom no jailer could take. It was resistance under the sign of the cross.

At last, the long captivity ended. Christians in the West paid a ransom to bring him out of Romania, and Richard Wurmbrand walked free into a world that could scarcely imagine where he had been. He carried the marks of it on his body. And then he did the thing that startled the comfortable church. He turned to believers who could gather freely, who could own Bibles, who could preach without fear, and he asked them a simple, piercing question. Would they remember the ones who could not?

In 1967 that conviction became a ministry, the work known today as The Voice of the Martyrs, built so the suffering church would not be forgotten by the comfortable church. His witness stands at a crossroads of history. A Jewish man who suffered under the cruelties of his century, who found Christ, who faced an empire that demanded his soul, and who answered with the oldest faithfulness there is. Honour where you can. Refuse where you must. Love even the enemy who holds the keys.

Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand are gone now, but the question still hangs in the air where it was first asked. The state may demand your obedience. Fear may ask for your silence. And still, Christ is Lord in the prison cell as surely as in the sanctuary. They proved it with their lives. The only question left is whether freedom has made us faithful, or merely comfortable.