Soon they all fell silent

“Soon they all fell silent. There was an eruption from the trench below and another wave went up into the pitted moon-like landscape, perhaps Essex or Duke of Wellington’s, it was impossible to see. They made no more than ten yards before they began to waver, single men at first picked out, knocked spinning, then more going as they reached the barrage; then, when the machine guns found them, they rippled, like corn through which the wind is passing.”

In his novel Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks captures in graphic terms the horror and carnage of the Great War. At the Battle of the Somme, as the characters look out over the battlefield, there is a plaintive cry, “This is half of England. What are we going to do?” 

So many lives were lost during that war, such was the devastation, that when Armistice came, and the Treaty of Versailles was signed at 11 o’clock on the 11^th day of the 11^th month, from that moment people came to refer to the Great War as the war to end all wars. 

And yet, as we gather on Remembrance Sunday, poised for our Act of Remembrance at around 11 o’clock on this Sunday closest to the 11^th day of the 11^th month, we should perhaps ponder the tragedy and the paradox of this ritual. 

We cannot come here today to remember the war to end all wars. Our act of remembrance is compromised and qualified by the history of the last hundred years. I remember, some years ago, Philip Bobbitt, who was then a fellow in War Studies at King’s College, London, wrote a book suggesting that the Twentieth Century was characterized by a Long War that began in 1914 and didn’t really end until 1990. The Long War constituted a monumental struggle between fascism, communism and parliamentary democracy. His analysis proved influential. It provided a counterpoint to Francis Fukuyama’s rather artless phrase about ‘the end of history’. Fukuyama argued that the great ideological battles between east and west were over, and western liberal democracy had triumphed. One can’t help feeling that Fukuyama’s analysis has not weathered well. Bobbitt argued that the long war of the twentieth century was gradually being displaced by other regional conflicts. His analysis was bleak: “War”, he said, “will always be with us.”

So we gather on Remembrance Sunday and we remember not only the Great War, but the Second World War, the Cold War, Korea, the Falkland Islands, Bosnia, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. We contemplate the unfolding horror in the Holy Land, in Lebanon, in Ukraine, and Sudan, and we pray for those who still live with the trauma and pain of past conflicts. Like Job, that great figure of the Old Testament, we know something of the cost and sacrifice of human suffering, and we wrestle with our questions, our doubts and our fears.

When we celebrate the Eucharist week by week, we participate in an act of remembrance. At the heart of the Eucharist are the words ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. We remember that meal which Jesus shared with his disciples on the night before he was betrayed. The events of Good Friday speak of cruelty and injustice and suffering and grief. As our reading from Hebrews reminds us, the cross also speaks of sacrifice and love and hope. 

One of the things that makes me a Christian is the capacity of the Christian faith to take seriously the reality of human suffering and to acknowledge the presence of sin and wickedness and evil. The Christian faith does not evade the precarity of the human condition. It refuses to collude with the fictions and the fantasies and the lies which we so often generate in order to conceal our hardness of heart. 

And this is because Christians are a people with a memory and a hope. At the heart of the Eucharist, at the heart of the Christian mystery, is the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the hope of the resurrection reminds us again and again that “good is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate; light is stronger than darkness; and life is stronger than death”. That is the gospel. That is the good news at the heart of the Christian faith. And that insight has the power to unsettle our moral judgements and to allow our humanity to come more fully into focus.

Like those soldiers described by Sebastian Faulks, soon we will all fall silent. We will remember, and we will remember with a mixture of different emotions. Some of those memories will be a source of thanksgiving. Some of our memories will be too painful to recount. But as we gather in silence, with our memories, our distractions, our hopes and our fears, we listen and attend to the first far sounds of the one one who calls us to repent and to believe in the good news.