Indeed they cannot die any more, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. (Luke 20.36)

 

Remembrance Day is a time when we remember “the fallen”. Or, more specifically, our fallen. The people on our side who “gave their lives for us”, victims of a horrifying human process called war. Or, as Laurence Binyon so movingly put it:

 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

 

Yes, of course; we will remember them, but the remembering in which we collectively engage seems to me to be a possessive thing, biased, one sided, short sighted; there is something missing. And because it is lop-sided, our collective memories, our contemporary myths, are lop-sided; prone to elicit ill-informed judgements, hatred, racism, xenophobia and so on.

A little over 50 years ago, I stood in a small WWI graveyard on a hilltop in Belgium. It comprised a roughly square plot of land within which lay a smaller square. It was shaded by a crown of mature trees, and, apart from the pathway that separated the inner square from the outer, the ground was covered in ivy.

Three plaques heralded the left, centre and right-hand sections. The left hand one identified a common grave for German soldiers, the right hand one for Allied soldiers, and the middle one for unidentified remains. That discovery left me in awe, because the fallen honoured there were all of the combatants who had fallen in a fierce 36-hour battle. An inclusive memorial to a communion of saints.

And so, today, I endeavour to talk about another kind of remembering, a more comprehensive way, perhaps.

Our Gospel for the day puts resurrection squarely in the frame. It was written by Luke, who also wrote The Acts of the Apostles. Taken together, they provide an extraordinary narrative tapestry.

The resurrection was (inevitably) first proclaimed in Israel, and Luke insists that such preaching presupposed the memory of the crucified Jesus in the repeated use of the phrase, “this Jesus”.

“This Jesus” points to a clearly identifiable man whose sentence of death was enacted within a particular political process and a widely known public event in which Luke’s audience took part. This audience was not neutral, not innocent, for there were no uninvolved bystanders. The apostles in Luke’s narrative are speaking to people with blood on their hands. i

The rhetoric of this preaching assumes that the hearers already belong in the story, that they were agents.

It is also clear that the whole of Acts has a particular focus on the city of Jerusalem. Acts preaches a ‘risen’ Christ directly to the people of that city, the people who condemned him to death, the people who deserted him, the people who killed him, the people who looked the other way.

In Luke, the people of Jerusalem are “Jews and gentiles alike”, the “kings of the earth” (personified by Pilate and Herod), and “all the house of Israel that are gathered in this city”. Judge, Jew and Roman, priest and people, king and commoner; it is the “city” thus constituted, that condemned and rejected God’s holy Child; and it is in this city that the crucified is now proclaimed as risen.

Now, to simplify a long story, the crucified and risen one returns as judge of the judges, of the city. The condemned and the court change places and the victim becomes the judge. That is the point where most of us stop. Hurrah for victory and vindication. But in this, Luke introduces a startling and very profound reversal. The resurrection of the condemned Jesus is presented by the disciples not as a threat but as a promise and a hope.ii

Although the city is under judgement as resisting God’s will, this does not mean that that the will of God ceases to be saving, even though the rulers and the people still “act in ignorance”. As Peter said to the delinquent crowd in the portico:

And now, friends, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. … Repent therefore, and turn to God … so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord,

When we make victims – condemn, exclude, violate, diminish or oppress anyone – when we set ourselves up as judges, we become citizens of Luke’s city, and we are exposed to judgement ourselves.

The problem arising is that when I see that I have exposed myself to judgement, I become my own victim, no less than the one I judge; and the judge-victim relationship needs to be liberated. That, really, is what salvation is all about.

One of the leitmotifs of all the NT accounts of Jesus’ trial is that Jesus did not use counter-violence of any sort. For example, the First Letter of Peter says “When he suffered, he did not threaten”. (1 Peter 2.23). And the Gospel of John elaborates this point in a sophisticated reconstruction of the whole concept of “judgement”.

The tradition is clear that Jesus tendered no violence to any who turned to him in hope: he accepts, he does not condemn, resist or exclude. “His life is defined as embodying an unconditional and universal acceptance, untrammelled by social, ritual or racial exclusiveness”iii. And Jesus’ silent resignation at his trial is underlined.

For John, Jesus is judge because he is a pure victim who can never inflict violence, only suffer it; which means that he is a judge who will not condemn.

The exaltation of Jesus to be judge, to share the ultimate authority of God, is thus God’s proclamation to all earthly judges to the condemning court and the hostile city, that it is the pure victim alone who can “carry” the divine love, the divine opposition to violence, oppression and exclusion.[1] God is always to be found with the powerless. And our hope is that God is to be found as we return to our victims seeking reconciliation, seeking to find in a renewed encounter with them the merciful and transforming judgement of Jesus, the “absolute victim.

It is only a hop and step to the realisation that this judge-cum-pure-victim, Jesus Christ, holds the memories of both judge and victim. And that is where I hoped to arrive, to a transformed manner of remembrance-in-relationship. If our remembrance process is to have any kind of integrity, it must surely include the memories of all who have been involved in our conflicts, be they personal, national or international; be they friend, foe, or non-combatant. The tomb of the unknown soldier is a mute, symbolic, testament to that.

Furthermore, on the national front, we might grace our ceremonies with the inclusion of the conflicts associated with the coming of white people to Australia. Otherwise, our ceremonies fail to recognise the fact that all the people of Australia are human. We share a common humanity, complete with its failings and its beauties. If we do not grasp this, we are not really open to the possibility of ordinary human relationship with an atrociously victimised group, the First People of this land.

The foundational ideology professed by all political parties at the time of Federation was blatantly racist. And although the white Australia policy was abolished in 1973, that racism remains a virulent force. Glenn Loughrey, Chair of the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders Anglican Council recently wrote:

The first People of this land remain outcasts on their own countries, suffering vilification and violence based solely on the contrived category of race. … Race defines who is competent or not and who has the power to decide; who is or is not a human being and who has the power to decide; and who is and is not seen and heard. ii

The “city” to which we belong, the Australian Jerusalem, the city of rejection, the city full of ordinary folk like you and me, would do well to approach our victims in humility, seeking healing and grace for all. What better place to start if not in our Remembrance Day ceremonies.

In the name of the Risen Crucified One.

Amen.   Doug Bannerman © 2022

[1] Rowan Williams Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton Longman and Todd 2002)  [1] Ibid  [1] Ibid  [1] ibid

[1] The Revd Canon Glenn Loughrey, “Wiradjuri Honouring Our Lost – Cassius Turvey “, November 2022. Glenn is the Chair of the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders Anglican Council