The Remembrance of God’s Sacrificial Love
John 19:30 Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
It is approaching that time of year again, when we gather at cenotaphs and war memorials and in churches around the country. We come to remember those whose lives have been lost through war and the many casualties. We gather this year where war around the world seems to be an ever-increasing reality. There seems to be so much bitterness, hatred, violence and killing.
At the age of 65 I look back on Remembrance Sundays with varying degrees of emotion and connection. As a young child it all seemed ritualistic and sombre, adults gathering to remember something far off and disconnected from the reality of my world. In my early years war seemed to be something that happened to other people in far off places.
As I grew up and my knowledge developed, I discovered the capacity of human beings to inflict great suffering upon each other, through labelling, judging, discriminating and marginalising - a poisonous cocktail leading to hatred and evil - and my perceptions were changed. I had many questions – not least, how killing each other achieved anything. Furthermore, as a Christian I could not easily balance a loving God “allowing” pain and suffering on such a great scale. Now I understand a little more – but only a little, as I watch death and destruction “invading” my TV screen daily.
Jesus’ experience on the cross was a profound and deep encounter with suffering and evil. His cry “It is finished” I believe ultimately marks the end of evil and suffering, even though for us they are realities that we must face with perseverance and hope until Jesus returns.
Much of Jesus’ time on the cross was spent in silence. So, what was going on in that silence?
The German theologian Dorothy Soelle writes, “There are forms of suffering that reduce one to a silence in which no discourse is possible any longer… the kind of grinding relentless suffering in which there is absolutely no control leaves people stunned and without words.”
Sometimes suffering reduces us to silence, where words are no longer appropriate or even possible. We hear of the mounting casualties in the Israel/Gaza war, in Lebanon, and Ukraine and we are “numbed” into helpless silence.
So, as we gather on this coming Remembrance Sunday and bow our heads at 11.00am to remember the fallen, and those broken in body, mind and spirit, let our minds be drawn in our remembering to the silent suffering of Jesus upon the cross. Jesus who stands with us in our own suffering – where he calls us to lament, where our hearts break and our lives remain shattered, but where our hope is found in the words, “It is finished.”As we stand in the chill of an autumn morning may we know, deep within our hearts, the warmth of the knowledge that nothing can separate us from God’s love.
Peace is the work of us all and I pray that we continue to work tirelessly for it, in the knowledge of a God who loves us and where we may, one day, have a generation who come to know the reality of the words of the American poet and writer Eve Merriam:
“I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?"
In Christ
Nigel