Shahbaz Bhatti's Voice for the Vulnerable

In the early years of this century there lived a man who carried the weight of an entire forgotten people on his shoulders, and he carried it in a country where doing so could cost him his life. His name was Shahbaz Bhatti, and he became Pakistan's first federal minister for minorities. He was a Christian in a land where Christians are a small and often frightened minority. He could have kept his faith quiet. He could have let his office become a comfortable seat. He did neither.

Bhatti spoke for the vulnerable. Not only for Christians, but for Hindus, for Sikhs, for the poorest and the least defended. He raised his voice against the abuse of Pakistan's blasphemy laws, laws that could turn a rumour into a death sentence. He stood beside people accused, people imprisoned, people no one else would touch. And everyone understood what that meant. Everyone understood that men who threatened such people did not make idle threats.

The threats came. They came openly, by most accounts, in letters and in warnings whispered and shouted. He was told to be silent. He was told what would happen if he was not. And here is the thing the listener must hold. He knew. He was not a man stumbling blindly into danger. He saw the danger clearly, and he kept walking toward the people who needed him.

There is a recording he is remembered to have made, knowing what might be coming, in which he said that he was ready to die for his cause and that he would rather die for his principles than live in fear. Whether or not we have every word exactly, the shape of his courage is well documented. He had counted the cost. He had set his face.

Now push in close. It was a March morning in 2011, in Islamabad. Shahbaz Bhatti had left his mother's house. His car moved through ordinary streets, an ordinary day, the kind of day that asks nothing of anyone. And then the gunmen came. They opened fire on his car. They did not stop until the work was finished. Shahbaz Bhatti, the minister who spoke for those no one spoke for, was dead. He was forty-two years old.

Do not rush past that. A son. A brother. A man who prayed. A man who had eaten breakfast that morning. The streets were loud, and then they were quiet, and a voice that had defended the defenceless was silenced by the very violence he had stood against. This was not a triumph. It was an evil. The grief was real, and it belonged to a family and to a frightened community who had lost their loudest friend.

Now pull back, and let it stand. Shahbaz Bhatti did not save himself, and his story makes no promise that the faithful are always spared. He was not vindicated in a courtroom. He was not rescued at the last moment. What he left behind was something quieter and harder to kill. He showed that a believer in public office can make that office a place of neighbour-love, even when neighbour-love costs everything. He showed that Christian justice does not guard only its own tribe, but reaches across every line to the image of God in every person.

The people of God have always lived as a vulnerable witness among empires and courts and the cold machinery of power. Bhatti took his place in that long line. He did not exaggerate his danger, and he did not flee it. He simply kept telling the truth and kept standing where the wounded were. And though the gunmen had the last word on that street, they did not have the last word over his life. For Christ is not absent from the places where power claims to rule unchallenged. Shahbaz Bhatti believed that to the end. And his witness still asks us whether we believe it too.