"Remember my name": Iran sentences a student to hang for blasphemy

It is the middle of the night in the high priest's house in Jerusalem, and the trial is going badly for the prosecution. The witnesses brought in against Jesus can't get their stories to agree (verse 56). So the high priest asks the prisoner straight out whether he is the Messiah, and Jesus says, "I am" (verse 62). The high priest rips his own robe, the old sign that a man has just heard God insulted. He stops bothering with witnesses, and the whole council votes for death.

On October 14, the Guardian and WORLD reported on another court. In Mashhad, in north-east Iran, a judge has sentenced Najmeh Amini, a 23-year-old accounting student, to hang for insulting the Prophet Muhammad in a social media post. Nobody outside the court has published what she wrote. Iran's own penal code spares people who speak while intoxicated, and she told the judge she had taken hallucinogenic mushrooms with friends. The judge set that exception aside, asking why, in that state, she hadn't insulted "America and Israel" instead.

A Christian reader may want to file this under someone else's religion, but the Christian Bible won't allow it.

Leviticus 24:16He who blasphemes the name of Yahweh, he shall surely be put to death; all the congregation shall certainly stone him: the foreigner as well as the native-born, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death.

This is the law the high priest's court had behind it that night, and Christian Europe went on to burn and hang people for blasphemy for centuries. Mercy crosses lines too. On October 14, Saudi Arabia's Supreme Court spared a Sri Lankan worker sentenced to death on the same charge.

What Christians can't do is watch the high priest's court as neutral spectators. It was defending God's name, and the man it condemned as a blasphemer was, by the church's own confession, God himself. So what did he do with the insult? That night the guards spat on him and beat him (verse 65), while Peter warmed his hands in the courtyard below (verse 66). Peter lived to write about it: when Jesus was cursed he didn't curse back, and he left the judging to God (1 Peter 2:23). On the cross Jesus prayed for the men who put him there (Luke 23:34). A God like that needs no rope to guard his name, and every court that kills for his honor stands where the high priest stood.

Amini's sentence is on appeal to Iran's Supreme Court. From Vakilabad prison she sent out a recording: "I only want one thing: be my voice." Her parents, she said, turn every night into morning, afraid of losing her. Then she asked strangers for one more thing: "Remember my name, I may not speak again." Christians already remember the name of a man a religious court found worthy of death, which gives them every reason to remember hers.