From the author of the Wandering Gyrovague blog at https://heines.site/st-lawrence-the-deacon/:
These are the simple lines about Lawrence from the Roman Martyrology:
AT Rome, on the Tiburtine road, the birthday of the blessed archdeacon Lawrence, a martyr during the persecution of Valerian. After much suffering from imprisonment, from scourging with whips set with iron or lead, from hot metal plates, he at last completed his martyrdom by being slowly consumed on an iron instrument made in the form of a gridiron. His body was buried by blessed Hippolytus and the priest Justin in the cemetery of Cyriaca, in the Veran field….[i]
It is a shame that prurient interest seems to always emphasize the way the martyrs died rather than highlighting the way one lived because the life of this fourth century Roman martyr was exemplary to the point of being a model for holiness throughout the Church. Let us remember that of all of the Feasts of the church (not memorials or solemnities but those special liturgical days of second rank—the Feast), there are basically only four of those Feasts for saints: St. Lawrence today, St. Stephen the Protomartyr, the Holy Innocents, and Mary Magdalene.
Why does he attain such great honor? As the legend goes, Lawrence was executed during the persecution of Emperor Valerian in 258 AD. This particular persecution was directed at clergy and included the confiscation of property by the state of the convicted. Just a few days after the arrest and execution of the pope of Rome, Sixtus II, Lawrence, the head deacon of Rome was arrested and given three days to gather the riches of the church to pay as tribute. As deacon, Lawrence was an administrator of material goods, his primary mission being the social service aspect of church ministry to the poor and needy. During that three-day period, we are told that Lawrence emptied the church’s coffers by helping the poor to that no resources would end up in the hands of the prefect of Rome. When confronted by the authorities, Lawrence presented the poor, the lame, the sick people of Rome as the church’s true treasure. According to legend, he was placed on a grill to be executed and complained, at one point, that he needed to be turned over, as “I am done on this side.”
While this story is inspiring and charming (and means that Lawrence is honored as a patron for deacons, for cooks, and for comedians) it does not explain why he has a feast day when many others who suffered similar fates are honored with Memorials. I think it has to do with what his life and death began to mean upon reflection over the centuries.
First of all, we have Lawrence fulfilling his role as deacon in an exemplary way. The point of this particular persecution was to “cut off the head” of the church, to cripple the institutional church so that it could not function properly. And yet, in an attack on the institutional church, the response of Lawrence is to expand the notion of the very nature of the church. For the Roman’s strategic mind, killing off the leaders, the hierarchy of the church, would do the trick. But Lawrence knew the real ecclesiology of the Church as the People of God. You can hurt the Church, but it lives as long as the “least” lives. And he reminded people of that.
Furthermore, Lawrence as a deacon was at the service of others. The Church which he served and died for was a church that fulfilled the command of the Lord to minister to others. The persecution of Christians, accompanied by various new laws regarding the confiscation of property came at a time when the emperor was engaged in heavy and expensive conflict with forces in the East which may explain why he sought such heavy fines and confiscations.
At around the same time, plague would also break out in the Empire. Historian Rodney Stark reminds us that the Christian response to plague was always better than that of the state, with Christians taking great risks to serve the sick and suffering.
In this context, Lawrence emerges as a model of how sanctity looks in a world that is riven by social and political turmoil. The church is an engaged Church, one that does not retreat from the world, but seeks to serve the world. Furthermore, it is open to shed its own blood in the pursuit of what is discerned as right and proper.
What we know is that when the persecutions died down and many different spiritual movements began to emerge within what would become a Christian empire, that many times esoteric Christian movements would emerge. These spiritual movements would emphasize the mystical side of Christianity and sometimes they might veer into behaviors or attitudes that many considered vain or overly spiritualistic—a spirituality detached from the world, that rejected the world and that sought purity in the espousal of extreme practices and beliefs.
This has been a perennial problem in the church perhaps best expressed in the expression the Jansenist movement in Seventeenth-century France would often use to describe itself, le petít église, “the little church.” It was a sobriquet chosen to say, “We are the little, faithful church, the true holy ones, while the rest of the church is filled with slackers and compromisers.”
Historically, there are some who have said that over the two, three hundred years following his death, the example of Lawrence and the model of holiness that he set, was often subtly used as a critique of that world-rejecting Christianity which would come to be associated with Arian Christianity or other heretical expressions (or near heretical) expressions of church. Lawrence’s image and story was often used as a model for “ordinary and messy Christianity”, as opposed say to great miracle stories involving angels or apparitions. This is not to disregard those other stories, but merely to point out interesting historical developments. When people began to make Christianity into some sort of elite cult, Lawrence reminded people, it is all about real people in a real world.
Lawrence then became a symbol bigger than himself of holiness that involved facing the world’s troubles head-on, dealing with them in practical ways, and being willing to live the faith even if it meant one might end up dying for that faith. He became a symbol of a hands-on, service oriented, big-tent church which included the messy, the insane, the sick, the less-than-perfect whom he proclaimed as the true treasures of the church’s patrimony.
This is the blessed Lawrence,
who gave himself up for the treasure of the Church:
for this he earned the suffering of martyrdom
to ascend with joy to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Entrance antiphon for today
And so, this is Blessed Lawrence, who was not only an exemplary deacon and leader, but who also reminds us of the obligation we share to get our hands dirty, to remember the social teachings of the church, and to live to our last with humor and love foremost in our hearts.
[i] Catholic Church. The Roman Martyrology. Ed. Benedict XIV. Revised Edition. Baltimore: John Murphy Company, 1916. Print.
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