The Fate of Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani – and of Iran

Conscience, not ideology, will make the ultimate decision on Nadarkhani’s fate. I am praying for the authorities in Iran as much as for our Christian brother.
ICC Note:
“The death sentence for Christian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who has been convicted of apostasy from Islam and ordered to recant, was reportedly reaffirmed by an Iranian court in late February. The court’s affirmation means that the pastor can be executed at any time,” Patheos reports.
By J. E. Dyer
3/4/2012 Iran (Patheos) – The death sentence for Christian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who has been convicted of apostasy from Islam and ordered to recant, was reportedly reaffirmed by an Iranian court in late February. The court’s affirmation means that the pastor can be executed at any time. Western advocacy groups like the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) are pressuring their governments to appeal to the authorities in Iran, and the U.S. State Department on February 23 issued a statement calling for Nadarkhani’s release.
Members of the ACLJ leadership wrote a piece that appeared in the Washington Post’s “On Faith” section on February 28, pointing out that Pastor Nadarkhani’s plight has brought together people of many faiths—and indeed, of no faith—in support of religious liberty. This is undoubtedly true, and the endorsement of religious freedom is encouraging to see.
But will the Iranian authorities respond to the international appeal? I think that is harder to discern than we might imagine. The fact that Christians are subjected to imprisonment and intimidation at all leads us to expect that Iran’s system will not cavil at executing a sentence of death. It has done so before, if not often. Perhaps it won’t recoil from the act—but the decision is ultimately up to humans with consciences and compunction. The Iranian authorities have delayed action on Nadarkhani for years now, hoping he will relieve them of a summary decision. I believe they don’t want to have to make it.
This came to me as strongly as anything ever has last week, as I was thinking and praying about Nadarkhani’s situation. We all want him to be released, freed to be a Christian teacher in Iran, or indeed, wherever he may be led to go. But if that were all that mattered, God could simply open his cell and walk him out. There is more at work here.
The overall situation portends, in a sense, a crossing of the Rubicon by the Iranian leadership. Whatever happens will happen in full view of the world—and the living God. As important as I think Iran’s domestic unrest is, and as much of a threat as its nuclear weapons program might be, I suspect the most significant thing going on in the country right now is the internal debate in the consciences of a very few men over what to do about Youcef Nadarkhani.
What sort of nation will Iran be? If the clerical regime kills Nadarkhani, it will have to keep on killing, very possibly with the brake of compunction fully released. If it whisks him out of the public eye without explanation, it will have affirmed a precedent that can only metastasize and become a cancer on the life of the nation, as demonstrated with the Soviet Union and Communist China in the last century. And if it releases the pastor, it will have to do so in spite of its own laws, opening up the possibility of an unplanned and unpredictable future.
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