Remembering through fragments
Remembrance 2021, Mattins: 14.11.21
Job 19.23-27a
Luke 20.27-38
Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail.
Remembrance is of course about calling to mind. But there’s also a kind of folk meaning of the word that gives us overlays of re-membering – of putting back together. Of making the person we call to mind whole again.
Today, as we recollect the savagery of war, this idea of re-membering can seem like a bitter irony.
It’s a grimly interesting piece of social history, that cremation only became commonplace after the First World War. Before the war, the idea of not keeping a body whole at its committal raised real anxieties about bodily resurrection. After the war, new thinking, new theological reflection needed to occur, to begin to address the fact that the bodies of millions of our dead were blown to smithereens. And it was accepted that this fact surely had no bearing on the love of God or on his ability to restore them to wholeness in Christ. In the relatively short time that has elapsed since the Great War, rates of cremation have overtaken those of burial.
We know that we cannot put back together the maimed and blasted lives, surrendered to carnage and horror which we only dare imagine by sideways glances, and then, perhaps, only once a year.
And the fact that we can’t put them back together can induce in us a sense of powerlessness – perhaps of despair. Wars continue. Hatred continues. The folly and self-advancement and cruelty of man continues.
Aside from these horrors, many of our narratives as people and as nations are infused at the moment with a pall of despair, born of a sense of failure, and of the fragmented and maimed nature of earthly existence. Covid has atomised us through a potent combination of isolation and fear. Debates have become shallow and unnecessarily polarised. Individual identity has become an obsession, self determination a driving force. And yet there is an increasingly urgent realisation that as individuals, we cannot make our world whole: we cannot live lives of peace, free from harsh words and misunderstandings and fracture. Our young people in the west are taking on an earnestness which is quite disturbing to see – their childhood and adolescence overcast, their brows furrowed by the sorry state of our existence. We want to be able to fix the planet, our lives, our society – but making things whole seems to be an ever-receding goal.
This morning, we hear Job responding to the latest of his comforters, at a time when his life is completely fragmented, his sense of identity hanging by a thread. He has lost family and friends, and everything dear to him. And yet, from the depths of his darkness, he knows that he will see God. Job, from his worldview, was not talking about bodily resurrection, but about the conviction that even if he had nothing else left, not even life, he would nonetheless behold the Almighty. It is perhaps only by having everything stripped away, by being broken himself, that he gains insight into this reality, perceived through, but present beyond, his earthly trials. And Job’s words convey not only conviction but desire: as he reflects on his condition, his greatest longing here is not to be made whole but to see God. From that encounter will come all the wholeness he needs.
From this, we too can glean a sense of where our primary focus should be: we can remember where we need to look, especially when life is fragmented and darkness presses in upon us.
And as we focus on God, nowhere is this sense of wholeness through brokenness seen more powerfully than in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus who identifies that his own body is given for others. Given to so great an extent that he surrenders his earthly remembrance to his disciples, enjoining them to break bread so that they might know the fullness of his life – so that by his brokenness, they and we might be healed. In our Gospel reading, the Sadducees, who do not believe in the resurrection, try to catch Jesus out through a logical but absurd scenario, and as he cuts through their cod legalism and scriptural gymnastics, he prefigures his saving work, speaking simply and beautifully of a realm in which all are alive to God, re-membered by his presence.
We cannot, in this life, attain the wholeness we crave. We must continue to live in a world where wars, sometimes necessary, sometimes not, continue. Where famine and greed and pollution and the misuse of power are all part of our existence. Where differences in creed and culture and language have the power to enrich but also to divide. We cannot put things back together by ourselves. And that is why, in our earthly lives, we remember through fragments. The truth of our faith is that what is broken becomes whole through the brokenness of Christ’s body on the Cross. Despair becomes hope through the despair of the grave. And death becomes life through the death of God’s Son, because God is God, not of the dead, but of the living, and to him all of them are alive.
The Love that makes all of this possible, that blazes new dawns into the world’s darknesses, also makes it possible for us to live in freedom: the freedom of those who know that ultimately it’s not, thank God, up to us to save the world.
The sacrifices of war which we commemorate today bring home to us how costly our freedom is: how much we must give thanks for it, and how little we must take it for granted. The same is true of the freedom won for us by the ultimate sacrifice of Christ. And so, as we recognise that wholeness is not in our gift, we also know that our salvation charges us with the grace and the compulsion to be bearers of God’s justice, his unity, his peace, his love, in any small or great way we can.
This we remember today as we pray for the world’s tomorrows. Amen.