What he stepped forward for

The man selected to die was crying.

Not from weakness. Franciszek Gajowniczek was a Polish soldier, not a man given to easy tears. But he had a wife. He had children. And standing in the courtyard of Block 11 at Auschwitz in the summer of 1941, he understood that he would never see them again.

The SS commander had finished counting. Ten men. One for every prisoner who had escaped the previous night. That was how it worked — collective punishment, the arithmetic of terror. The ten would be taken to the underground bunker, stripped of food and water, and left to die. The sentence was already written. There was nothing left to do but wait for the names.

Gajowniczek was one of the ten.

Then a priest stepped forward.

He was small, frail, already visibly ill. Prisoner number 16670. He walked toward the commander and said, quietly, that he was a Catholic priest. That he was old. That the other man had a family. He asked to take his place.

The commander stared. No one did this.

He shrugged and said yes.

The priest was Maximilian Kolbe — Franciscan friar, founder of Niepokalanów, the largest Catholic publishing operation in the world before the war. A man who had already surrendered everything to the Church before the Nazis stripped away his habit and his name and replaced them with a number. He had arrived at Auschwitz in February 1941. He had been there five months when he stepped forward.

In the bunker, the other men died slowly. Kolbe outlasted them all. He led them in hymns. He led them in prayer. The guards who watched through the peephole reported that he was the calmest man in the room. After two weeks, when the Nazis needed the cell for other purposes, they injected him with carbolic acid. He offered his arm.

He died on August 14, 1941. The feast day of the Assumption.

Franciszek Gajowniczek lived to ninety-three. He spent the rest of his life telling anyone who would listen what Kolbe had done for him.

   ***

There was another man who stepped forward to die in someone else’s place.

He did it not for one man, but for every man. For every woman. For every child born into a world that had been broken since the garden. He stepped forward for the frightened and the faithless. For those desperately seeking a savior and for those who would never thank him. For people who wouldn’t believe it happened.

He went anyway.

The comparison to Kolbe is intentional, and it is not a small one. But the comparison also shows the distance between the two.

Kolbe died to save one man from death. Christ died to save every man from something worse than death.

Kolbe died and was buried. The stone stayed where they placed it. Christ died — and on the third day, the stone was gone.

Kolbe gave his life. Christ gave his life, and then took it back, and offered life to anyone willing to receive it.

And then there is this.

Kolbe was fifty-seven years old when he stepped forward. Tubercular. Already diminished. He had given his best years. The Nazis had not broken him, but the disease was doing what the Nazis could not. The man who stepped forward was not a man in his prime. He was a man who understood, with clinical clarity, that he was going to die in that prison one way or another. What he chose was not whether to die but how. That does not diminish the act. It was still heroic beyond measure. But there is an honest accounting to be made.

Christ was thirty-three. Strong, clear-eyed, in full possession of everything he was and everything he could do. And he was not merely a good man or a brave man. He was the Son of God. He had spoken the world into existence. He could have ended the trial with a word. He could have stepped down from the cross. He could have said no at any point from Gethsemane to Golgotha and no power on earth or beneath it could have stopped him.

Isaiah saw it seven hundred years before it happened.

He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth.

The servant who suffers not because he has no choice but because he will not exercise it. That silence before Pilate was not resignation. It was decision. Every moment of the scourging and the thorns and the nails was a moment he chose not to stop. Not because he was weak. Because we were the point.

Kolbe had one exit and took it with grace. Christ had every exit and took none of them.

  ***

This is what Easter is.

Not the end of Lent. Not ham and colored eggs, though there is nothing wrong with ham and colored eggs. Easter is the hinge of history. The morning when everything the world had accepted as permanent — sin, guilt, death, the grave — was shown to be temporary.

Kolbe walked into a bunker and did not walk out. Christ walked into a tomb and did.

The covenant — to our Creator, to one another, to the truth that human dignity is not granted by the state and cannot be revoked by it — holds because Easter holds. Because the One who made it is not in the tomb. Because the price was paid and the proof was the empty grave and the folded cloth and a gardener who wasn’t a gardener.

Gajowniczek wept in a courtyard because he thought it was over.

He was wrong.

The disciples wept behind locked doors because they thought it was over.

They were wrong too.

Happy Easter.

— Jonathan

Maximilian Kolbe appears in Chapter 10 of Courage to Stand: Across the Ages, available at CourageToStandBooks.com and wherever books are sold.