A Sermon Preached on Remembrance Sunday
11 November 2007
“She was not intending to remove the gauze, but as she loosened it, the heavy sterile towel beneath it slid away, taking a part of the bloodied dressing with it. The side of Luc’s head was missing. The hair was shaved well back from the missing portion of skull. Below the jagged line of bone was a spongy crimson mess of brain, several inches across, reaching from the crown almost to the tip of his ear. She caught the towel before it slipped to the floor, and she held it while she waited for the nausea to pass. Only now did it occur to her what a foolish and unprofessional thing she had done.”
My last visit to the cinema was to see the remarkable adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement. The book is a study in sin, guilt and the search for redemption; it is a love story; it is a forensic examination of English culture, exhibited by a particular class, illustrated at a particular time. It is a novel about the act of writing a novel. But it is also, as many critics have pointed out, a war story: one of the finest in our language for a generation. The few lines from the book with which I began are set in the hospital in which Briony – who we might call the ‘anti-heroine’ of the piece – is working as a nurse, ministering to the casualties brought there from the battlefield. Some have severe shrapnel wounds. Some must suffer amputations. Some are burned or gassed. Some, such as the young French boy to whom Briony is asked to minister here, have such severe wounds that death is inevitable and imminent. McEwan writes with unsparing and unflinching simplicity and accuracy. He could be describing one of any number of scenes or situations, coolly, lucidly, dispassionately. But what he is describing is the wrecked skull of a man perhaps twenty years old, a man who has, literally, had part of his head shot away. We read captivated by the prose, even as we are repulsed by what is set before us. Here is the consequence of war, written in flesh and blood.
In that brilliant piece of cinema, the part of the film set at Dunkirk as the British forces, exhausted and defeated, await evacuation across the Channel back to England, what strikes the viewer is the chaos. Men mill about, with little or no sense of order or purpose. They squabble, they fight, and they try to amuse themselves. One hangs, absurdly, off the inside of a fairground Big Wheel, glimpsed in the distance. Orders are given and contradicted. The search for a drink of water is all-consuming. Horses, patiently, nobly, but pathetically, wait their turn in line to be shot, for there is nothing else to be done with them. In the book, McEwan writes, simply, ‘Who could ever describe this confusion?’ Everything is out of joint; and the most confusing, the most chaotic thing of all, the sign that madness has overtaken the world and gripped all things in its terrible embrace, is that a young man should lie dying on a makeshift hospital bed with his skull shot away and nothing but a bloody bandage between the soft tissue of his brains and the stale air.
On Remembrance Sunday, we recall particularly such cruel and horrible examples of death: examples of death which mock, outrage and offend our sense of reason, dignity, and humanity. In that solemn recollection, those old enough to do so do not need to cast their memories back to the theatre of McEwan’s imagination, the Second World War; nor do those who are younger need to dive into the history books. There has been only one year since 1945 in which no British serviceman or woman has been killed in conflict, and they continue to be killed today – in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and wherever the forces of the Crown are engaged. It is almost ninety years since the guns of the Great War fell silent, and only a handful, blessed with extraordinary longevity, are left to tell the tale of that time of madness and sacrifice. But there is no shortage, in this generation, of those who will be able to tell others yet unborn of acts of heroism and desperation, and of comrades who did not come home. As the Head of the Army and the Chief of the Defence Staff have forcibly reminded us, whatever our views of the politics of the situation, it is incumbent upon us to honour, to support – and, we would add, to pray for – the servicemen whom the Government sends into conflict on our behalf.
If on Remembrance Sunday we are, rightly, calling to mind those outrageous deaths – the young soldiers, sailors or airmen, those starved or tortured in prisoner-of-war-camps, the victims of terrorism, military or civilian – then we might be further prompted to consider our response to death wherever it comes and however we encounter it. Our language offers us numerous illustrations of man’s eagerness to soften and to hide from the reality of death, expressed in euphemism and circumlocution. We speak of passing away, passing on, falling asleep; moving to another room or just beyond the horizons of our sight. While Christians have used and sometimes even encouraged such evasive expressions in the name of the pastoral care of the bereaved, they do not express a truly Christian theology of death. Christians must say two things. First, that death is an outrage, an affront to God’s good purposes in the creation of mankind. Death – the separation of body and soul, and the catastrophic damage done thereby to the human person – is the consequence of sin. Unfallen Adam, unfallen Eve, were not destined for the grave.
But second, in his incomparable and incomprehensible goodness and mercy, God in Christ has provided us with a remedy for death, a remedy which brings us to a state more wonderful than that from which our first parents fell. This is resurrection to eternal life; and this is why the great hymn of redemption sung at the Easter Vigil, the Exultet, can speak of the ‘felix culpa,’ the happy fault which led to Adam’s fall.
Of this teaching, and this hope, the lections for today – providentially coinciding with this Remembrance Sunday – furnish us with precisely the right passage from the Gospels. Among the strategies which men and women – even Christian men and women – have employed to avoid the reality and affront of death is that which attempts to diminish what death is. In this conception, death becomes little more than a blip in our existence, a momentary interruption after which everything carries on just as before. The reading from St Luke’s Gospel which we heard just now exposes this belief in a kind of smooth continuity between this world and the next for the misunderstanding, and false comfort, which it is. The Sadducees challenge Jesus to say which of the seven men to whom she has been married will be the husband of a widow woman in the life to come. And Our Lord meets the challenge – and avoids their trap – by pointing out that the resurrection life is not simply the old writ large: it is something new. Theologically, we might put it like this. The vision of God – the state of beatitude – to which we are called, and which we are promised in heaven, will so transform us into God’s new creation, that our experience of love will no longer be limited, even by the most intense and important expressions of love that we have known here, such as we might know in marriage. We will be incapable of doing anything other than reflecting back that absolute Love which is God Himself, not only to Him (and we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him face to face), but to all those redeemed and perfected in Christ with whom we are sharing the vision glorious. And this is the real miracle of death and resurrection: that we shall not regret or resent this at all. In fact, we shall desire it with our whole being, because we shall have grown into the stature of the fullness of Christ, as St Paul writes to the Ephesians. We shall have become entirely Christ’s: still one with our mortal selves, but yet as different from them as our adult lives are from those we lived as little children.
Having a proper understanding of what Christians do and do not believe – or should and should not believe – about death and resurrection will help us on Remembrance Sunday. First, it will teach us not to belittle death, or to treat it with indifference. Treating death lightly is the short path to treating life lightly, casually or indifferently. Stalin could condemn millions to death by starvation, in the prosecution of his drive for growth and industrialization in the Soviet Union, because the death of human beings meant no more to him than the death of dogs or cattle. In the words of Dostoyevsky: “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.’ Second, it will ensure that we do not use the promise of peace in the hereafter to justify, excuse or allow aggression and bloodshed in this: for God is the God of the living. Third, it will help us to cleave to the true resurrection hope. This is not about a post mortem sticking-plaster, an analgesic or a strong paracetamol which will allow us to carry on just as before, but feel a little less pain. It is about nothing less than the transformation of the entire creation and the fulfilment of the redemptive purposes of God: and of our part in that divine work of all-consuming Love. It is about the top-to-bottom re-ordering of all the disintegration, degradation and chaos of this world. It is not domestic, measured, manageable but – and here language of course breaks down – it is electrifying, spell-binding, utterly new: as new as the resurrection of Our Lord from the dead appeared to those who saw him on the first Easter morning, and could not comprehend what they had seen. So wide is the abyss, so great the gulf, between life and death that only the one who is both God and man could span it, and allow us to cross over the bridge which, in his own body, he had laid.
That this is so is hope indeed: for surely if Remembrance Sunday, with all its foregrounding of the horrors of war teaches us anything, it is that nothing less than this will be required to right the wrongs of the consequences of human sin. Only God’s action, God’s initiative, God’s perfect love, can put right what we have done amiss. That is not to evade or ignore the obligation on us to seek, by virtue of the practise of reason and conscience, to live responsibly as human beings. We are endowed by God with the capacity to choose, and to exercise our wills for good or for ill. But it is to recognise that today is not about what we can do, but about what we cry to God that He will do. In that extraordinary passage from the Second Book of Maccabees that we heard as our first reading this morning, we meet men who are being tortured most cruelly. The lectionary spares us the details – but were we to go to the complete text, we would find dismemberment and disembowelling, mutilation and being burnt alive. All that sustains the victims is their hope in God, and in his promise of resurrection. As we survey the wreckage of human life ruined by conflict, violence and war, we put our faith, on Remembrance Sunday, in the hope of resurrection held out to us in Christ – resurrection for the individual dead whom we honour today, resurrection for a horribly disfigured world. We pray, aloud and in the silence of our hearts, Lord, have mercy. And we plead for all the departed, and especially for those killed in war, the sacrifice of the One who died and rose again, to bring us all, with him, into the Kingdom of his Father, where war shall cease.
Amen.
Father Jonathan Baker Principal