Remembrance Sunday
1918-2008
And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.
Many years ago, I came across what purported to be a list of general advice to those about to use a rented car. The list contained such gems as…
Should you find such advice even faintly amusing, it may be for one of two reasons. Perhaps you treat rented cars like this, and I have guessed your unfortunate anti-social habits. Or perhaps you are amusedly appalled that anyone might treat other people's property in such a cavalier way. That is why I am always very reluctant to borrow other people's books, because I worry about spilling coffee on them, or dropping them, more than I worry about doing the same to my own. Mind you, I am reluctant to lend my books to anybody else, because I have adequate experience to know that other people tend not to treat books – their own, or other people's – as carefully as I treat mine. And when it comes to looking after and watering other people's African Violets for them when they are on holiday… No! I can kill African Violets at thirty yards' distance just by looking at them.
If you do have the slightest conscience about how you treat other people's material possessions, should you not have an infinitely greater conscience and care about how you treat human beings who may be related to them? That is the schoolteacher's constant anxiety – that no child of whom they are in loco parentis should come to any harm. Once it was on the grounds of human compassion and caring, although now it often seems it is based on a fear of being sued for the slightest mistake, such is the nature of our compensation culture today.
My mother was a primary schoolteacher all her working life, and she taught in an era when taking children on school outings was considered to be part of everyday school life. Once she took a class of children for a day in London – museums, the Royal Tournament, etc – and she was just getting them all off an underground train when she saw that the carriage doors were beginning to close. The dimmest specimen in her class had been dawdling, and she saw to her horror the train leaving and his vacant face disappearing in the carriage into the tunnel. She left the class on the platform in the care of accompanying parents and caught the next train in the same direction, hoping that the lost child would have enough intelligence to get off at the next station and wait. Fortunately, he did. She found him, and brought him back safely, and I had the feeling that she would have worried more about losing him than she would have done about losing me. But that would be quite right and proper though, wouldn't it? That is what having care of other people's lives and safety involves.
However, we fret about the safety and welfare of our own children too. What parent would not? We worry about them when they are children – and we still worry about them when they are adults. That fact is what makes the story of Abraham and Isaac so poignant and so painful. Take your son, your only son… What sort of God would demand such a proof of loyalty? What human being who did not have a heart of stone would provide it? And yet Abraham was prepared to do so, and we wrestle with his deeper reasons for his decision.
Perhaps the boy never was in danger. If Abraham had refused, then God would have chosen another ancient patriarch in his place. There was always going to be a safety factor, although Abraham did not know it at the time. That was the unusual, and perhaps, to us, the rather incomprehensible trial of faith. In the act of raising the knife… Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.
One of the great poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen, used the story of Abraham and Isaac to illustrate the insanity of the carnage of the Western Front pursued by elderly politicians and generals whose pride seemed to far outweigh their concerns for the scale of the sacrifice they were inflicting on human beings. The first fourteen lines of the poem, "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young", relate the verses from the Book of Genesis with remarkable accuracy. The final lines strike to the heart with a radically poignant alternative interpretation of the story…
Amongst the slain was Wilfred Owen himself. Was there ever a point to the First World War? The rescue of Belgium, the resisting of Teutonic imperialist aggression, the defence of France, the principle of liberty? But the sacrifices demanded were horrendous. Men followed their officers when they believed that they were fighting for something worthwhile, or when they preferred to be shot by the enemy rather than by their own side on a charge of cowardice. When did it change to the point that Wilfred Owen identified the insanity of pride? Offer the Ram of Pride instead. But the old man would not so…
General Pershing, the leader of the American forces in Europe, thoroughly disapproved of the Armistice that came into force on November 11th, 1918. He contended that the allied armies should have borne whatever sacrifice necessary to take them to Berlin itself and demand an unconditional surrender rather than an armistice. "Otherwise," he said, "Germany will never believe that it has been defeated, and in a few years' time we shall have to do this all over again." The six million dead of the concentration camps less than thirty years later might have had an opinion on that. So too might the citizens of Dresden… but would it have been the same opinion?
Ninety years after the end of the First World War, Wilfred Owen's words still call us to immense caution, because those who do not learn the lessons of the mistakes of history are forced to repeat them. Nothing is simple any more, if it ever was. The dead of the twin towers of 2001 seemed to request resistance to evil as surely as the dead of Belgium did in 1914. The military power structure of Iraq that showered Israel and Saudi Arabia with rockets during the first Gulf War appeared to be capable of doing much worse in the twenty-first century. But I am highly suspicious of any conflict where a superpower fuelled by Christian fundamentalism opposes a culture fuelled by Islamic fundamentalism. In such a case, there seem to be an awful lot of Rams of Pride about, who could be sacrificed before the lives of men and women are lost, on battlefields or on London buses and underground trains.
Today we remember the men and women who lost their lives in a cause they believed in, or who lost their lives in a cause that their leaders believed in, and whom, out of loyalty, they followed. If their leaders did have the option to sacrifice their Rams of Pride before they sacrificed their men and women – our men and women! – then they will have to face a far higher judgement one day than we can pronounce upon them.
Out of the carnage of war, even out of often quite unnecessary sacrifices, heroism flowered. In the darkness of the deepest tragedy, there was a faint gleam of redemption. Even when the Last Enemy swung his scythe and took millions, something was germinating in the earth that had been soaked with the blood of the honourable and the just.
The Christian Church, from its earliest years, took the story of Abraham and Isaac as an anticipation of the Passion of Jesus Christ… the blameless sacrifice, who looked from the height of the cross and could see no ram in a thicket to take his place… no culpable pride, no other victim… There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin. In innocence he died, in the darkness at noon, his blood flowing down the cross and into the waiting earth after the thrust of the soldier's spear.
What precious blood began something there! What power and potentiality stirred throughout God's creation when his Son died! And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. But the difference was God had no ram to offer instead of his Son… so he offered his Son to the hammer and nails of our pride. In that divine sacrifice is our undeserved hope. In that redeeming death is found the promise of eternal life for those whom we remember this day.