By Catherine Salgado

Written by Catherine Salgado

From Lexington to Warsaw, from Dublin to Concord, freedom lovers throughout history chose the month of April to stand up to tyranny and make the choice for liberty or death. We could benefit from their dauntless spirit today.

Passover began this past weekend and Easter this upcoming weekend, a time for new beginnings and moral redemption. Indeed, on April 21, we mark the 753 BC anniversary of the founding of Rome, the Empire that executed Christ only to become the conduit for the spread of Christianity. And we also remember several uprisings of freedom fighters against murderous tyrants. Some of the freedom fighters survived to see their dream realized, and others died. For just as Christ died that we might live, so Patriots and heroes must some of them sacrifice their lives that a new generation might live in freedom. The question is whether we are willing to risk being the Patriots who have to pay the ultimate price.

On April 19, 1775, the shot heard round the world rang out on Lexington Green, and its echoes reverberate to this day. At Lexington and Concord that fateful day, the American Revolution began, and the world would never be the same. Some Patriots died that day, while others, including Peter Salem and John Buttrick, lived to fight another day. All of them were heroes, without whom this nation would not exist. Ever since America launched her revolution, peoples around the world have sought liberty. Some of them gravely misunderstood freedom (see the French Revolution), and others understood and championed it admirably. But the world was changed that day in 1775, and, forever afterwards, tyrants and aristocrats have had to contend with the thirst for freedom inspired by American Patriots.

Among the men inspired by the Americans and the Declaration of Independence to take on their own oppressive overlords were the Irish Republican fighters who captured the Dublin General Post Office during the brief Easter Rising of 1916. The British ended up causing so much bloodshed that the leaders of the Rising surrendered to stop it, and were subsequently killed. But no brave death is in vain, and Padraig Pearse and his fellow Irish patriots sparked a wave of Irish nationalist fervor that later in the century would bear fruit in Irish independence.

Likewise, the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of Jews against the Nazis was ultimately unsuccessful, but it has inspired thousands of people since then, and the brave fighters were rewarded by the God of Israel in the next life. While April 19 is the anniversary of Lexington, the Warsaw Ghetto Jews chose that day to launch their rebellion because it was the eve of Passover, when God saved the Israelites from slavery and slaughter in Egypt (Exodus). Great men might lose the battle against a certain evil for the present, but other great men will take up the task and accomplish the dreamed-of victory.

 

 

We saw just such a lengthened struggle against slavery in America. While the Revolution that created our nation began in April, the Civil War that saved our nation from an early death ended in April. It was the bloodiest war in American history, and the Confederates committed egregious war crimes, and often the future must have looked dire indeed. “Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,’” said Lincoln. And at last the war did end.

On April 26, 1865, rebel Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered at Bennett Place to Union Gen. William T. Sherman, the largest Confederate surrender of the war and one that effectively ended the war. Sadly, Lincoln did not live to see it, as he had been assassinated April 14, but though he and many other patriots died, the United States would live and countless slaves would taste longed-for freedom.

Jews and Christians, Europeans and Africans, Asiatics and Americans, all have had a dream of freedom and fought for it during the Aprils of bygone eras. Let us vow that their sacrifice will not be in vain, and that we too will fight the cultural, moral, political, and military battles of our time with the heroism of all those freedom fighters gone before us. The first step is spreading the stories of the heroes of our past, for, as Jesus Christ said two millennia ago (Jn.8:32), “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

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