I was about ten years old when I first learned about Joan of Arc, the 14-year-old peasant girl who, against all odds, led the army of France against the British in the Hundred Years War. I had checked out from our school library a little cloth-bound book (A Candle in the Sky) that told her story, and I must have read it a dozen times, she so fascinated me. Her audacity, her courage, her unwavering faith was both inspiring and horrifying to my young mind. I am now aged well beyond that point, and she still haunts me.
On May 30th of 1431 Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. The English, who were vying for the throne of France, accused her of witchcraft (a conveniently vague charge). They accused her of wearing men’s clothing — a suit of armor, evidently a capital offense. Her main flaw was success at what she set out to do -– to lead her army to vanquish the English, and to crown the Dauphin at Orleans. She was just 19 when she died.
On Passover roughly 2,000 years ago Jesus Christ was tried in six illegal trials, and even though the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, exonerated him, Pilate gave in to the mob and crucified him anyway. The Pharisees convinced themselves that Jesus was healing lepers and paralytics and driving out demons all by the power of Satan. If it was true that He did those things because He was God, then He was an existential threat to their power. They couldn’t do those things. Jesus could. He too had succeeded too well and upset powerful people.
On May 30th of 2024 Donald Trump was convicted of 34 counts of unspecified misadventure. The trial was as illegal as the trials run by the Pharisees and the Romans, as vague and abusive as the tribunal that convicted Joan.
I’m not making a moral equivalence argument here. Trump would lose that contest for sure. Nor am I relegating Christ to mere human status. He was both man and God. It is interesting that the trials of both Jesus and Joan were meticulously recorded by eyewitnesses at times not known for record-keeping. It’s good that we know what happened.
Quite frankly, I’ve never known what to make of Joan of Arc, but the timing and the parallels are quite striking. And foreboding. Are we to take this as a warning of things to come? Is there a way to prevent a similar end for Donald Trump? Is our government now so convoluted, so tangled in its own petty double-binds that it can’t just act on the basis of justice alone?
I am grateful for the fact that we no longer crucify people or burn them at the stake, but Trump will be just as dead if he’s attacked some night by a jailhouse suicide ghost. His family will be just as bereft of him, his country even more so. The Donald, just like Joan, will not rise from the dead. And like both Joan and Jesus, his charisma, his panache, his energy can’t be duplicated by anyone else. He is the man for this time. His name is even appropriate for the task he’s been given.
Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. She teaches writing, logic, and literature. She can be contacted at 1window45@gmail.com
Image: American Thinker
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