Memory and Hope

At the heart of our observance of Holy Week is an act of remembrance. The services which have taken place here in the course of the last few days recall events which took place almost 2,000 years ago. On Thursday, we recalled the ‘mandatum’ of Jesus, the new commandment, from which we get the word ‘Maundy’: ‘love one another as I have loved you’. Then we share in the meal of the Last Supper. Those words of Jesus: ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. 

From the upper room we travel to Gethsemane. We watch with our Lord as he struggles with the prospect of his arrest, his trial, and his death. Then on Good Friday, we stand at the foot of the cross, recalling the brutality and cruelty inflicted by human beings then, and human beings now. The memory of these events provokes in us at our best a sense of empathy and compassion. But secretly we also know something of our complicity with the injustice, the violence, the restless competition and anxious self-defence, which characterizes the world we live in. The story we remember is all too real. And we gather the fragments of this story, these memories, every time we gather to celebrate the Eucharist: ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’

In celebrating the Eucharist and celebrating this Easter mystery, year after year, Christians cultivate a kind of corporate memory. These days of course, we barely have to remember anything. We just reach for our phones and we can access all sorts of bits of information on a search engine. And yet, we can access all sorts of misinformation too. It is interesting to reflect for a moment that the Greek word for truth - ἀλήθεια – is a term, which like many Greek words, begins with an alpha privative, a versatile prefix that indicates the negative of what follows. It’s something that we have borrowed in the English language: agnostic, amoral, apathetic. So what is the root of the word which ἀλήθεια inverts? The noun λήθη means ‘forgetting’, and ‘forgetfulness’. In other words, when we speak of ‘truth’, we mean ‘not forgetting’. The Greek word for truth, which is used again and again in the New Testament witness, imposes a deliberate demand to remember. It refuses that willed forgetfulness, which seems to afflict the realm of public discourse in ever more intimidating and destructive ways. While we should not assume that the etymology of a word tells you everything about its meaning, nevertheless, this definition of truth should remind us that remembering is an act of resistance.

I was struck by this when I listened to the addresses given here by the Vice Chancellor on Good Friday. She was musing on that most celebrated question asked by Pontius Pilate during the trial of Jesus, ‘What is truth?’ Professor Tracy said that here at the University of Oxford, we are committed to seeking after truth: “We discover it through our ground breaking research, we disseminate it through our teaching, and we curate it for current and future generations through our libraries and museums.” And she acknowledged that speaking the truth can be threatening to those who wish to dominate, and force people to think like them, and we are living through a period where those institutions which discover, disseminate and curate truth are coming under attack. We live in a world where ‘alternative facts’, disinformation, denial and fake news dominate, where those who stand up for the truth are bullied, threatened, harassed, intimidated and sometimes imprisoned. And yet, if we are completely honest, we must acknowledge our own fragility and frailty because sometimes we collude with this wilful forgetfulness: ‘we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us’. As the poet, T S Eliot says: ‘human beings cannot bear very much reality’. But the consequence of our collusion, our wilful forgetfulness, is that we find ourselves speaking glibly of a ‘post-truth world’, in which we feel increasingly anxious and afraid. 

And yet, at the heart of the gospel of the resurrection, we discover the words of an angel, ‘Do not be afraid’. The gospel story of the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ reminds us that Christians are a people with a memory and a hope. And the reason we remember the story of the passion, with its brutal honesty about human cruelty and violence, is that we discover in the testimony of those first witnesses of the resurrection, a message of hope, that death is not the last word, that nothing can ever overpower the life and the love which come from God.  

And it is this memory of the cross and the hope of the resurrection that sustains our identity as followers of Jesus Christ. This is why our baptism is accompanied by the sign of the cross and the lighting of the Easter candle. For here we discover that there is nothing lost that God cannot find again. Nothing dead that cannot live again in the presence of his Spirit. No heart so dark, so hopeless, so broken, that it cannot be enlightened and brought back, warmed back to the life of love. For as Jesus tells us, this is the truth that will set us free (cf. John 8.32).