Remembrance Sunday, November 9 2014
Joshua 24.1-3a, 14-25; Psalm 78.1-7; 1 Thessalonians 4.13-18; Matthew 25.1-13
St Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church, Jerusalem
On November 11 1918, the guns of August fell silent; and we are here this morning to remember that silence, and all that went before it, and all that came after.
Every Sunday we remember the death of Jesus of Nazareth on a Roman cross. This Sunday we remember the deaths of millions in the Great War and in all the wars since.
We know how to do the first of these rememberings. We take bread and wine, give thanks to God, and eat and drink as the sign of our common life, a sign in which we share Christ’s risen life.
But how do we remember our war dead?
In CS Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters, the elderly devil writes to his young nephew Wormwood, “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”
Appropriate remembrance demands that we open our minds and let these things in.
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On August 4 this year, many churches held vigil services to mark the centenary of the British declaration of war on Germany. The Church of Scotland tried hard to distinguish these vigil services from Remembrance Sunday.
“The vigil,” it suggested, “is an occasion when we reflect on the catastrophe of the war. It… is primarily a lament or an occasion on which we ask God to forgive us for our pride and our reliance on violence to resolve the difficulties between the nations… [It] is different from Remembrance Sunday, on which we primarily reflect on the sacrifice of those who gave their lives.”
But we can’t so easily separate the sacrifice of those who died in the war from the catastrophe the Great War was. When we try, the results are often unfortunate.
The Great War killed 16 million people and wounded another 20 million. The slaughter in the trenches was on an industrial scale. Given such casualties, it is difficult to acknowledge the war as a catastrophe. It had to be for something. It had to mean something.
Some thoughts have to be kept out of our minds.
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Yesterday I took part in the service of remembrance at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery on Mount Scopus. It was a touching service; but there were moments where suppressed thoughts threatened to surface to disturb our tranquillity.
So we told ourselves that those who died in the service of their country died “for their families”, “for the good of other people”, and “in the comradeship of a true cause”. And we may even have believed this.
But our historians know better. Here is the opening paragraph of John Keegan’s magisterial book about the Great War:
“The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict. Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms, had prudence or common goodwill found a voice; tragic because the consequences of the first clash ended the lives of ten million human beings, tortured the emotional lives of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and left, when the guns at last fell silent four years later, a legacy of political rancour and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots.”
One of the officers who served under General Allenby in Palestine said of the Treaty of Versailles, “After ‘the war to end war’ they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a ‘peace to end peace.’”
In 1922, Adolf Hitler threw down a challenge to a defeated Germany: “It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain … No, we do not pardon, we demand – vengeance!” Seventeen years later, he realised that challenge in another world war, five times more destructive of human life and incalculably more costly in material terms than the first.
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If we turn to the Great War in this land, things were no better.
On December 11 1917, General Allenby entered Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate, humbly and on foot. Just over a month earlier, the British government had issued the Balfour declaration, in which it said:
“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…”
The contradictions in this declaration are plain, and it has led to a conflict between Jews and Arabs in this land that shows no sign of being resolved anytime soon.
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So how do we mourn our war dead?
We need, I think, to remember who we are, and where we are, and what time it is.
We are like the Israelites in Psalm 78 or gathered together by Joshua. We have chosen not to forget the works of God but to keep God’s commandments, to have steadfast hearts and a spirit faithful to God. We have chosen to serve the one true God and forsake false gods.
These idols include the nationalisms that reduce God to a tribal deity and reduce us to slaves, and too often to canon-fodder. We are called out of such bondage into the freedom of a life in covenant with God.
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Scholars argue about the parable of the 10 bridesmaids. Is this a story about the coming of God or the coming of Jesus? Is it about the coming kingdom of God or the second coming of Christ?
We can cut the Gordian knot and say that it’s about both, provided we recognize that the context in which Jesus tells the parable is not the same as the context in which Matthew retells it.
Some excitable Christians today get all worked up about the end time, the culmination of human history they think is happening now or is just around the corner. For Jesus and for Matthew, this end time began two thousand years ago and is not done yet. Nor can we say when it will be done.
Jesus preaches the kingdom of God, Matthew euphemizes this as the kingdom of heaven; but in both cases, they mean that God is at work in a broken world to set things right, and this time definitively right.
For Jesus, the kingdom begins with him and his gospel but will culminate in a time of trial followed by a time of triumph in which God vindicates him and his gospel; and the parable as he tells it tells us to be prepared for both this crisis and this resolution.
For Matthew, living on the other side of Easter, trial and vindication are past, present and future. The originally simple vision of Jesus becomes more complex; but Easter is the promise and the guarantee that the kingdom will indeed come in its fullness. Jesus will be vindicated and his vision put into effect.
Matthew’s time is our time. We still live in the interval between resurrection and second coming. We still live in the tension between a kingdom that has already come and a kingdom yet to be fully realized. The time of realization is not known, not to Matthew and not to us. The certainty and significance of its coming, however, Matthew takes for granted.
We still live in an evil and unjust age, but the teaching of Jesus and the Christian view of God insist that evil and injustice do not get the last word.
War is part of the present evil age. It is sometimes a necessary evil – but hardly ever, and not nearly as often as we want to believe.
In Glasgow Cathedral on August 4, John Chalmers, the moderator of our general assembly, asked why it is that when there are differences between countries and between philosophies, we often turn to deep conflict as a way of resolving them. 100 years after the start of the Great War, he hoped that the lessons of history could restrain us from heading towards conflict every time there is a difference, so that lives would not be squandered.
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What matters is the character of God and our response to it.
In the book of Exodus, Moses and the Israelites he has led out of Egypt have their backs to the sea, and the Egyptians with their horses and chariots are in hot pursuit.
Exodus tells that the Lord has set up this crisis to gain glory. The Lord turns the sea into dry land so the Israelites may cross to the other side and then turns the waters back onto the Egyptians and their chariots, drowning the whole Egyptian army.
Moses, Miriam and the Israelites sing a victory song:
Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea. (Exodus 15.21)
But the Talmud tells us that when the angels in heaven want to join in the chorus, God rebukes them: “My children are drowning and you want to sing?”
This is how we remember our war dead: by turning from conflict and war to work for justice and peace, and by refusing to demonize our enemies, or those we call our enemies.
Sources
David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace. The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Owl Books, 1989)
John Keegan, The First World War (London: Hutchinson, 1998)
CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942)