On This Day March 27 1549

Lijsbeth Dirks Suffers and Dies for Christ

Khen Lim



Image source:aksermonillustrations.blogspot.com

Little did Lijsbeth Dirks realise that her actions would mark her as a courageous woman who stood by Christ through pain, suffering and then, death. Here is a woman who became among the earliest Reformation women ministers, a deaconess no less.

Raised in Tienge, a nunnery near Leer in East Friesland, northwest Germany, the 12-year-old Lijsbeth mastered enough Latin to read and understand the Latin New Testament when she came to the news that a heretic was burned for daring to question church teaching and repudiating the sacraments. Startled by that, she began to comb through the Bible, trying to find answers to why some people would rather die for what they believe than renounce their faith.

However, the more she read through the Bible, the harder it was for her to reconcile with the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. And because this led her to closely examine her own set of beliefs, Lijsbeth became increasingly self-conscious about her personal fears so much so that she found it difficult to share them with others. Among her many revelations, she was now certain that Scripture did not envision monasticism to be the way it was.

After finally finding it too difficult not to share or even ask questions, Lijsbeth confided in the other sisters in the nunnery about the things that had troubled her but all she ended up with was their disapproval of her inquisitiveness. The short answer was to stop all the doubts and to keep her isolated for fear that she would influence others.

Under whatever circumstances (not readily known), Lijsbeth was incarcerated for a year on suspicion of heresy. However due to an overwhelming petition of her colleagues in the nunnery, she was released on good behaviour but kept under close monitoring. 

She knew by then that she had to find her way out. The nunnery was no place to keep someone like Lijsbeth bound and gagged. She needed to get out and find her own answers. And so with the aid of a pocket of sympathetic and understanding nuns, she surreptitiously made her way out, disguised as a milkmaid.

In her escapade, she became a follower of the peaceful Anabaptist movement led by the Dutch Menno Simons (whose name the latter-day Mennonites had borrowed from). She was offered to share a home in Leeuwarden with an Anabaptist woman called Hadewych. Now widowed, Hadewych’s husband was forced to beat the drum to drown out his friend Sikke Frerichs who was attempting to address the crowd even as he was about to be executed. Owing to the horror of the execution he witnessed and the sympathies he harboured for his executed friend, he had no choice but to flee and not to be heard ever again.

Lijsbeth and Hadewych became good friends and though they lived quietly, they had the same strong desire to share their faith. Together, they decided that they must share the Gospel with anyone who was willing to listen. 

Inevitably, by casting caution aside, both women were arrested on January 15 1549 by Catholic authorities. Once they uncovered Lijsbeth’s translated Bible, they knew they caught the very person they were looking for but they mistakenly thought he was Menno Simon’s spouse. While her friend Hadewych somehow managed to escape and ended up living safely in Emden, Lijsbeth was kept under intense interrogation where she gave a moving testimony of her faith.

When the authorities tried to force her to compromise her integrity by oath, she refused, citing Christ’s teaching that a yes should not be confused with a no, and vice-versa. She was summarily tortured because of her refusal to recant or betray the names of her Anabaptist friends. In her interrogation, Lijsbeth’s responses were uncannily Christ-like. When the authorities asked her, “Who were present when you were baptised?” her answer was, “Christ said, ‘Ask them that were present or who heard it,’ which we know came from John 18:21.

When asked, “What then do you hold concerning the house of God? Do you not regard our church as the house of God?” Lijsbeth replied, “No, my lords, for it is written, ‘Ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them and walk in them’,” which came from 2 Corinthians 6:16. She told the authorities that the New Testament did not speak of the bread and wine as a sacrament but instead as the Lord’s Supper. 

When asked if she were saved by baptism, Lijsbeth answered, “No, my lords. All the water in the sea cannot save me. All my salvation is in Christ, who has commanded me to love the Lord my God and my neighbour as myself.” As if that weren’t enough, she also rejected the notion that priests had authority to forgive sins, saying that no man could except Christ.

Because she steadfastly refused to reveal her friends and those she had taught, saying, “O my lords, leave me in peace about my fellow believers, but ask me instead about my faith. I shall tell you gladly about it…” On hearing that, the authorities threatened her with brute force.

Lijsbeth’s dialogue with the church authorities draws an unusual comparison with the Pharisees who asked Jesus many questions, looking to trap Him. 

The Gospel of Matthew says, “Some Pharisees came to Him, and to test Him, they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?’ Jesus responds with ‘Have you not read that the One who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh? So they are no longer two but one flesh…” (19:3).

The Pharisees had also asked Jesus, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” (Mk 2:24) Jesus’ response was, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.”

The similarities in the way Lijsbeth answered her tormentors and how Jesus responded to the Pharisees are uncanny. In such a comparison, the church authorities who tortured her could be the facsimile of the Pharisees while Lijsbeth could be seen as one who certainly follows and emulates Christ. 

Both were under pressure to respond to traps that were poorly masqueraded as questions. Both were tortured before they were executed – Christ was whipped with chunks of flesh coming off and then set to hang on the cross while Lijsbeth was eventually drowned in a bag after going through some horrific pain inflicted by the church authorities.

Because of her refusal to betray her friends or who her baptiser was, she was taken to the torture chamber where a man by the name of Mr Hans set about closing the screws on her thumb and fingers until blood was spewing out from beneath her fingernails. Punishment of this sort involved putting both thumbs into a vice-like device so that their bones are crushed. At times, sharpened objects were used in conjunction with the thumbscrews in order to pierce through the nails to heighten the pain and agony.

Although the ordeal was shocking, Lijsbeth did not relent but instead, she cried out loud to Christ for relief and hence, received comfort. Then they lifted her skirt in order to apply torture to her shins. There they used ‘shin screws’ to crush her leg bones until she fainted. Although not a lot is known about this device, there is a medieval torture instrument called Spanish boots that required the victim to place his legs into it before they were tightened until the shins shattered into pieces.

She fainted but didn’t die though her torturers wrongly thought otherwise. She could no longer walk and her entire body was wrecked with searing pain. Realising by now that she would never divulge anything she didn’t want to, there wasn’t much more they could do other than to condemn her to death. 

On March 27 1549 in Leeuwarden, a Dutch province in Friesland, her torturers decided that instead of burning her at the stake as was the custom, they tied her and stuffed her in a bag before throwing her into a river to drown.

How on earth does one deal with such intense continuous suffering? Christ did. And in this case, Lijsbeth did also. Both were tortured beyond human imagination. In Matthew 5:10, Jesus said, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 

Lijsbeth Dirks stood up for Christ whom she believed with all her heart and soul. She was loyal to her friends by not betraying them even under inscrutable pain and agony. She was, without a doubt, a remarkable woman, a brave human being, who certainly defined what she desired and was persistent to the end in what she believed.