Bible Text: Matthew 13:57 | Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living |
“And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor.” Matthew 13:57
In 1974, Time magazine called Alexander Solzhenitsyn “the world’s most celebrated writer.” Only four years before, he had received the Nobel Prize. Then in 1976, the Solzhenitsyns were allowed to immigrate to the United States via Switzerland, and the U.S. press had its hero—one who anathematized the Soviet Union for wreaking its vengeance on this fiery spirit.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born in the North Caucasus, six months after his father had died as the result of a hunting accident. In 1951, he completed a university degree in science and joined the military, where he rose to the rank of captain. Then, he made a political blunder. In a letter which fell into the hands of the secret police, he described Stalin as “the mustachioed one.” That was it! And this brought exile in the Soviet prison system for eight years.
During that period of time, however, Solzhenitsyn underwent a transformation which resulted in his regeneration—spiritually and intellectually. In prison he saw both the absolute baseness of humanity and “great courage and comradeship among fellow prisoners” along with the “fearlessness of those who have lost everything.”
Speaking of his losing battle with the system, Solzhenitsyn once told of the progression which came as he first lost his friends, then his position, his books and papers, then his wife and family, and finally his personal freedom. But he said that he was never stronger than when all his treasures were within, where they could never be taken from him.
This he described as “the heavenly kingdom of the liberated spirit,” and he warned that even a food package “transforms you from a free though hungry person into one who is anxious and cowardly.”
After he had come to the U.S., in 1978, Solzhenitsyn was invited to speak at Harvard University in a both widely acclaimed and denounced message which partly ended the love affair that the free world had with this bearded modern Jeremiah. He scathingly denounced the shallow values, the materialism, and the withering spirit of the West.
He blasted “destructive and irresponsible freedom” which has “little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as: misuse of liberty for moral violence among young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror” and so forth.
Telling the unvarnished truth has never been popular no matter where it is proclaimed. In 1991, Communism collapsed, and the Solzhenitsyns eventually felt they could return to their native Russia, but after a brief honeymoon with the new government, they received the same “we don’t know what to do with you” treatment they encountered at the hands of the Western press.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is not an angry man who only hurls angry words at the world. He’s his own man. His analytical and penetrating analyses go to the very heart of society and life. “The line separating good and evil,” he said, “passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between parties either—but right through the human heart.” Human nature, he believed, “changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.”
It is questionable that Solzhenitsyn’s fiery rhetoric changed the course of either the East or the West, but it has had the same effect as the preaching of John the Baptist, whose generation may have not repented but knew fully well they had turned their back on God. Thank God for a man who made a difference, who spoke and wrote with the conviction of conscience whether it was in the Gulag of a Soviet prison or the hallowed halls of Harvard. Jesus said, “Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor” (Matthew 13:57). But if a measure of disdain is a measure of true greatness, Solzhenitsyn must be close to the top— a prophet with honor in God’s sight.
Resource reading: 1 Peter 3:8-22
