Jan Hus was tortured and executed in 1415
because, as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, one of the things he did
wrong was to offer his congregants both bread and wine, known as “communion in both
kinds”. This mattered to the authorities
because in doing so he disobeyed their rules – and they felt that their power
and their communities were threatened by his actions.
Jan Hus had read the Bible for
himself and had noticed that, at the Last Supper, celebrating the Jewish
Passover, Jesus had invited his followers both to take and eat the seder bread and to take and drink the wine,
and to continue to do that in his name until he returned in glory. At Mass, therefore, Jan Hus fed his
congregants both bread and wine, in defiance of the Catholic instruction of the
time, which was that only the priests should drink the wine at the Mass.
Such things may seem trivial to
us but – as Dean Jonathan Swift pointed out in his satire about the big-endians
and the small-endians, who fought over which end of a boiled egg should be broken
into with a spoon – every culture has its blind spots and taboos, over which
the most terrible wars can be fought. Optional
approaches, that come to be seen as “right” or “wrong,” are often bound up in
our own sense of who we are and who we include in our tribe.
In remembering Jan Hus and the
ultimate price he paid for thinking for himself about religion, and making his
stand in witness to what he believed to be right, let us look at ourselves a
bit more closely. What are the arbitrary
habits and assumptions that we hold so dear, that are so much part of ourselves
and our identity, that we feel frightened when someone does them differently? How realistic is our fright? How likely is it, that what is being done will
damage our identity or the conditions under which we live our lives? And how do we express our fear? Finally, how do we behave towards the person
who is doing things differently?
