In Budapest there is a monument of the Swedish World War II diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. After having risked his own life by saving thousands of Jews from being sent to the Nazi death camps by giving them Swedish passports and citizenships, he was captured by the Soviet Army and disappeared without trace.
Instead of being brought home and receiving
gold medals from the king, and being interviewed by journalists and rewarded,
he was taken away, probably to a Soviet prison, where he died shortly afterwards.
On the monument his lonely destiny is illustrated by a Latin inscription, a
quotation from Ovid’s Tristia: “Donec eris felix multos numerabis amicos. Tempora si
fuerint nubila solus eris.”
which means: “As long as you are lucky, you will have many friends, but if
times become cloudy you will be alone.” A sentence many can relate to, even
people with less heroic and dramatic lives than the one of Raoul Wallenberg.
Hebrews
11.32-12:2 points us beyond this crass conclusion. The cloud in this passage is
not a cloud of loneliness and isolation but a cloud of witnesses, of suffering
and struggling people who have gone before us, inspiring and cheering us not to
give up. When we try to do good and suffer for it, we are surrounded by peers
from all ages and we also have Jesus himself behind us (as the author of our
faith) and before us (as the perfecter of our faith).
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