In the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, Abraham bargains with God. He does not pray — he bargains. Fifty righteous men. Forty-five. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten. Each time God agrees: for the sake of that many, I will spare it. Sodom fell. Not even ten were found.
The question has stayed open ever since. Jeremiah searched Jerusalem for a single one — and did not find him. Francis of Assisi turned out to be that one for his own century. The Russian New Martyrs numbered in the thousands — and yet the world they knew perished. This route is about what the righteous actually do. And about why the chain is never broken.
Abraham learns that God intends to destroy Sodom. And he does what no one before him had done: he argues. “Wilt Thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked?” This is the first bargain in history struck over human lives — not a prayer, not a sacrifice, but an argument.
Fifty righteous men. God: I will spare it. Forty-five. I will spare it. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten. Every time — I will spare it. Abraham lays down the principle: a righteous minority can save a wicked majority. One righteous man is worth ten. Ten are worth a city.
“Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, look and take note! Search her squares to see if you can find a man, one who does justice and seeks truth: I will pardon this city.” (Jeremiah 5:1)
Abraham bargained for ten. By Jeremiah’s time God had lowered the price to one. One righteous man — and Jerusalem lives. Jeremiah searches for forty years. Under five kings. They throw him into a pit, burn his scrolls, call him a traitor. He goes on searching — and goes on saying that he finds no one.
“You are the salt of the earth. If salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored?” Salt takes up little room. The mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds. The leaven in three measures of meal is invisible. Jesus turns Abraham’s question inside out: not how many righteous men it takes to save a city — but what a single one can do.
His answer: salt changes everything around it by the sheer fact of being there. The righteous man is not a political force and not a majority. He is a quality, not a quantity.
Fishermen, a tax collector, a zealot. Not one of them a priest or a scholar. Jesus chose twelve — not so that they would understand, but so that they would go.
Peter denied Him three times — and became the rock of the church. Thomas would not believe — and preached as far as India. Paul hunted down Christians — and wrote half the New Testament.
Ten of the twelve died violent deaths. Not one recanted. This is the first chain — from one to twelve, from twelve to thousands.
The thirteenth century. The church is rich, politically mighty and spiritually dead. Indulgences for sale. The pope at war with the emperor. The Inquisition only just getting under way.
Francesco Bernardone is the son of a wealthy merchant of Assisi. At twenty-five he strips off his clothes in the middle of the town square, hands his father back everything, down to his shirt, and goes off to feed lepers. No reform from above. No theses. Just one man beginning to live as though the Gospel were written to be taken literally.
Within his lifetime thousands followed. Not because he convinced them — because he showed them what was possible.
1917–1937. Soviet power destroys the church. Not the weak — the strong. The ones who did not break.
Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd, before his execution: “I do not know what you will do with me... But I know this: you cannot take from me my love for God and for people.” Shot in 1922.
Patriarch Tikhon: arrested, pressed, ordered to capitulate. He did not capitulate. Tens of thousands — bishops, priests, laypeople — shot, tortured to death, lost in the camps. This was a whole host of the righteous — not a few individuals.
Warsaw, August 1942. The Germans come for the children of the orphanage on Chłodna Street — two hundred children Korczak had raised for twenty years.
He is offered a way out. Several times. Friends, members of the underground, German officers who knew his books. He refuses every time.
At the Umschlagplatz the children walk in ranks, carrying a flag with the Star of David. Korczak is beside them. One of the Germans asks: are you Korczak, the man who wrote the books about children? He nods. They let him through — him alone. Again he refuses.
At Treblinka they were already gone.
Paris, 1942. The occupation. Mother Maria does not save France. She hides Jews in the convent on Rue de Lourmel. At the Vél’ d’Hiv cycle track — where the Nazis are holding thousands — she gets in disguised as a cleaner and carries children out in rubbish bins.
Dozens passed through Lourmel — forged papers, shelter, escape routes.
Abraham bargained for a whole city. Mother Maria did what she could — here, now, with whoever was near her. A righteous person does not save a city. He answers for the human being standing in front of him.
“One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.” Solzhenitsyn went through the Gulag, wrote The Gulag Archipelago — and was expelled from the country. As Amos was driven out of Bethel. But his chief text is not the Archipelago. It is a small essay, “Live Not by Lies.”
The system rests not on violence but on people’s consent to pronounce words that no one believes. The righteous man’s answer: simply do not lie. Not revolution. Not emigration. Just a refusal to take part in the collective pretence.
Abraham bargained for ten people. Solzhenitsyn says: one word is enough.
Archpriest Alexander Men served at Novaya Derevnya outside Moscow from the 1970s until 1990. In an age of state atheism he taught catechism, baptised hundreds of intellectuals, wrote theological books for the drawer — and had them smuggled out to the West.
His parish was another world inside Soviet reality: living preaching, open conversation, Christianity as an encounter rather than a rite. Thousands of people came to faith through him.
He joined together what seemed unjoinable: Orthodoxy and science, faith and freedom of thought, the Gospel and the modern person. They called him “the apostle to the intelligentsia.”
Fr Pavel Adelgeim went through the Soviet camps in the 1960s — lost a leg, came back to serve. He served in Pskov for thirty years. The only priest in Russia with a legal education, he defended the rights of the laity against church bureaucracy. He wrote, he went to court, he won his cases.
On 3 August 2013 a mentally ill man came to his house and stabbed him. Adelgeim died the same day.
The last in this chain. And not the last.
In your city — how many such people are there? And do you know even one of them by name?