Serving the Egyptians

Is not this what we said to you in Egypt, “Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians”? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.

Exodus 14.12

I first stood in Whitehall on Remembrance Sunday twenty-four years after the end of the Second World War. That occasion, when I was a student in London, was forty years ago. On that day, a young pilot of twenty in the Battle of Britain – if he had survived the experience – was still only forty-eight years old (or thereabouts). Fifty-five thousand members of Bomber Command were not able to be there on that day.

But several hundred men who had fought in the First World War were there, including some of the “Old Contemptibles” from 1914. At their youngest, the oldest of the “Old Contemptibles” must have been seventy-one – unless they had lied about their age to get into the army (which many did). This year the last serving soldier from the First World War died, well over one hundred years old. Very subtly, but inexorably, many things have changed.

There once came a time when there was nobody still living in your town or village – or, indeed, in the whole of England – who had fought at Trafalgar, or at Waterloo. Things changed then. Now there is no first hand witness to the battlefields of the First World War. Things have changed now. A twenty-year-old pilot of 1940 is now eighty-nine, if he has not already made his way to the stars. Things always change.

I once worked in a little village called Cuffley, in Hertfordshire. It was an unremarkable, non-event of a village really… commuters, businessmen, middle-class suburbanites. But there was a memorial stone at the top end of the village where a Zeppelin had been shot down and had crashed during the First World War. It had bombed London and, turning for home over Hertfordshire, it had been met in the darkness by one of the first of the British night-fighters. You may be familiar with how small and how fragile early fighting biplanes were, but imagine having to fly one in all but total darkness, save perhaps for just a moon to reveal the monstrous shape of the Zeppelin ahead of you. Against all odds, you would think, the pilot’s incendiary bullets found their mark and the fire spread rapidly as the great monster airship plunged into the ground.

Once, war was something that happened “over there”. Now it was happening “over here”, as the major cities in Britain could testify during the Second World War. Even Budleigh Salterton in Devon was bombed and the High Street machine-gunned, probably during one of the Luftwaffe’s “Baedeker Raids” on Exeter. Although the Methodists of Budleigh Salterton stopped the church clock’s bell on the Temple in 1939 so that Adolf Hitler could not hear where they were, it didn’t quite work! My father was bombed when he was serving with the RAF in Plymouth. Apparently, the Germans missed all the Sunderland flying-boats of 10 Squadron Royal Australian Air Force, moored out in the Cattewater, and hit the NAAFI instead. There wasn’t that much shrapnel, but there were an awful lot of buns flying about! Now war was “over here” and it would never be just “over there” ever again.

In 1897, H.G. Wells’ famous story, “The War of the Worlds”, was first published. You forget that it was that long ago until you read the opening lines of the novel…

No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own… Yet, across the gulf of space… intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

What you also tend to forget is H.G. Wells’ other great, but far less well-known, novel, “The War in the Air”. That was first published in 1908, and with considerable prescience Wells describes the actions of airships that are so powerful that they can actually fly across the Atlantic and bomb New York. In 2001, when the Twin Towers of New York were destroyed, the Americans could no longer say, “It only happens over there.” As Wells said in “The War of the Worlds”, “Early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.” The age of so-called “Total War” had begun.

The question was then, as it still is now: “What do we do about it?” In the opening years of the twenty-first century, London has been bombed without an aeroplane overhead. What do we do about it? And, having decided (if we can) what to do about it, whom are we going to ask to do it?

This is an ethical and a moral minefield, isn’t it? Perhaps it always has been. Where do Christians begin, on Remembrance Sunday, to think this through so that more and more generations do not have to be remembered as sacrifices? You could start (and probably end) with the words of Jesus: Love your enemy. But what if your enemy only responds to fear, rather than to love? Perhaps you could say: Love your enemy – but resist his evil deeds. And if you were to say that, would the resistance be passive – as in the case of Ghandi – or active as in the case of our Battle of Britain pilots?

In 1903, in a speech in Chicago, Theodore Roosevelt said: “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.” Effectively, that was our policy throughout the Cold War era. Nuclear peace was maintained through fear. The nuclear deterrent worked because of what was called Mutually Assured Destruction. But can a balance of terror still work in the age of the suicide bomber? Should we expect it to do so, especially when we actually think that terror is wrong? The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as responses – tactical or vengeful – to the events of Nine-Eleven, do not seem to have deterred very much, do they?

What of our politicians? Can we trust them any more? What of our church leaders at national level? Can we follow them any more? Apart from the Archbishop of Canterbury occasionally and very briefly putting his head above the parapet, have you noticed any real, effective lead from our national denominational church leaders to help us to think through this question, or to challenge or guide our politicians in their thinking?

You see, I think that we must begin our search for the truth about how to conduct our affairs in these matters a lot further back in human history than you might first imagine. I think that we have to understand the out-workings of human fear before we can decide how to implement divinely commanded love. We want to survive, and that feeling, that imperative, is built into us. Now, consider another group of people over a thousand years before the birth of Jesus, who also wanted to survive…

Moses has led the Children of Israel to the edge of the Red Sea. Before them are impenetrable waters. Behind them, but approaching fast, are pharaoh’s chariots. They are not so much between a rock and a hard place as between a vengeful army and a watery grave. So they rail at Moses: Is not this what we said to you in Egypt, “Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians”? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness. They were effectively saying that it would have been better to appease the tyrant as best they could and to live with him a little longer that they are about to do by resisting him or by attempting to escape from him.

Those in favour of appeasement of tyrants said that in the 1930s. But were any of them right? Len Deighton, author of the great novels, “The Ipcress File” and “Funeral in Berlin”, later wrote a novel entitled, “SS-GB”, in which he imagined a Britain which had lost the war and which was now ruled by a Nazi regime. If it is still in print, I commend you to buy a copy and then to think through the question again.

Some things are worth dying for, and to die with a purpose years earlier than you might die without a purpose is the story of the Passion of Jesus Christ. Although we are made in God’s image, we tend to overlay our human imagery upon him. Children sometimes imagine God the Father as a very old man with a long white beard – The Ancient of Days, indeed – but we never imagine Jesus himself as anything other than a young carpenter. Why? Because he died with a purpose when he was thirty-three years old. Before he died, he confronted the man under whose authority he would be put to death.

This most intense of exchanges of words between Jesus and Pontius Pilate moves the question on from the consideration of mere personal survival – with which the Children of Israel were concerned on the banks of the Red Sea – to the matter of the authority and the principle behind the whole of existence. There is a realm and an authority quite different from that of the tyrants of this world. There is a completely different set of principles that underpins it. Jesus gives the most striking illustrations of these things when he says to Pilate: “If my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight.” The sad irony was that the followers of Jesus may have chosen not to fight for him because of fear rather than out of principle! In the Garden of Gethsemane they ran away out of fear, not out of nobility. They were the descendants of those who said, “We’d rather be back in Egypt.”

People tend to be scathing about Pontius Pilate and about the way in which he handled these affairs, but I have a great deal of sympathy for him. When he said to Jesus, “What is truth?” he described the very crisis on conscience that looms around us on Remembrance Sunday.

We asked earlier, “What are we going to do about the threat of violence in the twenty-first century, and whom are we going to ask to confront this on our behalf?” We shall ask those whom we have always asked – the young! But I do beg you, before you ask them to die for a cause or a principle on your behalf, so to investigate the truth that Pontius Pilate was seeking that you are fully persuaded that it is worth asking them to do this.

On the other hand, you may think that it is preferable that we should all serve the Egyptians. We should allow tyrants to have their way, but try to establish a rigid Fortress Britain… is that even possible any more? Would it actually mean that we were, in the very essentials, no longer British, or even Christian? If, out of principle or pacifism, you opt for appeasement, prepare very carefully what you are going to say to the relatives of innocent civilians suddenly and unexpectedly killed in bombs on city streets, or on buses, or on the London Underground – or at the 2012 Olympics. Prepare to explain why you chose to do nothing.

On Remembrance Sunday, we remember those who died for a cause, for a principle, and for our freedom. We remember those who died in innocence, suddenly, unexpectedly, caught up in chaos not of their own making. We remember our young men and women serving overseas, and those who grieve for them when their bodies are brought back to lie in British soil. We pray for those who have to make the decision whether to ask them to do these things. We pray for the leaders of the world’s religions, that they may ask their people again to search their scriptures and to find out in detail what those scriptures say about love and about peace, about compassion and about reconciliation.

“Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians” is not an option. We have a duty to discover more fully the truth that Jesus knew and which Pontius Pilate wondered about. Let us not be arrogant about this. We seek the mind of Jesus Christ, but let us be humble enough to recognize that all too often we have the limitations of the mind of Pontius Pilate and the fear of the Children of Israel at the Red Sea’s edge.