4 Maccabees 14

The chapter opens on a courage the author finds almost harder to credit than the endurance of pain - that the brothers mastered the emotions of brotherly love (v. 1). That phrase is the surprise. It is one thing to overcome the fear of your own suffering; it is another to overcome the anguish of watching a brother suffer, and the pull to spare him by giving in. The whole argument of 4 Maccabees is that devout reason can rule the passions, and here it rules one of the strongest and tenderest of them - the love of brother for brother.

They felt it fully, and still each one urged the next toward faithfulness, never toward escape. The author breaks into direct address at the wonder of it: O reason, more royal than kings and freer than the free (v. 2). A king commands others; this reason commanded the deepest impulses of the self.

To say what he sees, the author reaches past the language of the battlefield and into the language of music. The seven are a sacred and harmonious concord (v. 3); they move like the hands and feet… in harmony with the guidance of the mind (v. 6), one body answering one will. Then the image opens wider: just as the seven days of creation move in choral dance around religion, so these youths, forming a chorus, encircled the sevenfold fear of tortures and dissolved it (vv. 7-8).

It is a remarkable picture - seven brothers as a single choir, ringed around the very thing meant to terrify them, and by their unison dissolving its power. Their faith did not merely survive the sevenfold dread; it surrounded it and sang it down. And the author is honest that this is no comfortable spectacle: even now, we ourselves shudder as we hear of the tribulations of these young men (v. 9). The fire was real and quick - the power of fire is intense and swift, and it consumed their bodies quickly (v. 10) - and the wonder is precisely that something in them was untouched by it.

Having praised the seven, the author makes a turn that governs the rest of the chapter: do not be most amazed at them. The greater wonder, he says, was the mother - the mind of woman that despised even more diverse agonies (v. 11). The brothers each bore one death - their own. She bore seven by watching them in her children's bodies, which is its own kind of torment. The mother of the seven young men bore up as each one of her children was subjected to the rack (v. 12).

Seven times she stood at the edge of a child's agony with the power, surely, to end it - a word of denial from any of them would have stopped the wheel - and seven times she held. The author's measure of courage here is exact: greatness is gauged by how strong a love one must overcome to stay faithful. And the love she had to master was the strongest one there is.

To show how strong a thing the mother overcame, the author does not argue; he points at the world. Observe how complex is a mother's love for her children, which draws everything toward an emotion felt in her inmost parts (v. 13). This love, he says, is not peculiar to the wise or the pious - it runs through all that lives: even unreasoning animals… have a sympathy and parental love for their offspring (v. 14).

Then comes a small, almost tender natural history. Some birds, the tame ones, nest on the housetops; others build in precipitous chasms and in holes and tops of trees, and there they hatch the nestlings and ward off the intruder (vv. 15-16). And when warding off fails - when the predator cannot be driven away - they do not flee: they do what they can to help their young by flying in circles around them in the anguish of love, warning them with their own calls (v. 17).

It is a picture anyone who has watched a bird defend its nest will recognize at once: the frantic circling, the cries, the small creature putting itself between danger and its young. The author wants the reader to feel how deep this instinct goes before he tells what the mother did with it.

The author presses the point past the birds to the smallest defenders he can name. Why even bother proving parental love by the example of unreasoning animals, he asks (v. 18), since even bees at the time for making honeycombs defend themselves against intruders as though with an iron dart, and sting those who approach their hive and defend it even to the death (v. 19)? Down to the insect, creation is wired to guard its own, even at the cost of its life.

This love is not a weakness or an accident; it is built into the order of things. And that is exactly what makes the last verse land with such weight: But sympathy for her children did not sway the mother of the young men; she was of the same mind as Abraham (v. 20). She had every instinct the birds and bees have, every “anguish of love” that makes a creature circle its threatened young - and she did not let even that move her off her devotion to God.

The comparison to Abraham is precise. He did not love Isaac too little. He loved God enough that he would not withhold even the son he loved (Gen. 22). The chapter does not ask anyone to despise the love it has just spent six verses honouring. It asks something harder - that the strongest, holiest natural love be held in the open hand of one who loves God more.