The Goose From Goose Town

The Goose from Goose Town

He was nicknamed the Goose. Maybe it was because he hailed from Goose Town. Perhaps it was his fiery temper. When he flew into a rage, he looked like an attacking goose. Yet this peasant dreamed of becoming a gentleman. A single question haunted him: how does a goose become a swan? When he decided that religion was the answer, he became a priest. His sermons packed the Bethlehem Church of Prague, and his bishop bragged that he was the best preacher in Europe. Still Goose felt like he couldn’t do enough to be God’s swan.

Everything changed when he read a book by the English Reformer John Wycliffe, who claimed that regular folk could get to heaven through faith in Christ’s work alone. In Wycliffe’s radical theology, Goose found his answer to being transformed into heaven’s swan: if his goodness wasn’t enough, there was more than enough goodness from heaven!

When he began to preach Wycliffe’s message, the Goose ignited a firestorm that got him labeled an archenemy of the faith. He was arrested and imprisoned in the archbishop’s palace. In November of 1414 the Vatican convened a council at Constance to deal with him. There, he was jailed in a Dominican monastery, where raw human sewage from the latrines rained down on him. Though he was suffering from pneumonia, he was dragged day after day to face the full fury of a church gone mad. During a break in his trial, he was moved to a castle dungeon where he was shackled for several more months. When the council reconvened, he was carted off to a Franciscan priory, where inquisitors tortured him in a last-ditch effort to break his resolve. Goose still refused to recant.

Finally, he was excommunicated and condemned to the stake. As he neared the place of execution, someone used his nickname as a taunt: “Your goose is cooked!” Wood and straw were piled up to his neck, and a fire was set ablaze with Wycliffe’s books as kindling. The Goose died singing an old, traditional hymn. Later, his tormentors scattered his ashes in the Rhine River. But that didn’t stop Czech patriots from rising up with the shout, “Remember the Goose!” With that cry of freedom, they threw off the shackles of the medieval church to establish a free nation.

There is an inspiring epilogue to Goose’s story. As he was chained to his stake, he uttered a prophecy: “You may cook a goose today, but a hundred years from now a man will rise up whose call for reform cannot be suppressed.” Exactly 103 years to the month after Goose was arrested, Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to a door in Wittenberg, igniting a reformation that could not be suppressed. On that day a cooked goose rose from his ashes and soared like a swan. Some six hundred years later the world remembers Goose by his given name, John Huss. If you long to see changes in your life, start with a secret that John Wycliffe gave to the Goose:

When your goodness isn’t good enough, there is a goodness from heaven more than good enough.

He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

2 Corinthians 12:9, NIV