Remembering because we must

Remembrance Sunday 2025 - Micah 4.1-5; John 15.9-17

It is true to say that, as the World Wars recede beyond the first-hand memories of all but the most senior among us, becoming effectively as distant in time as the Battle of Agincourt, so our need to remember them, and to imitate the wartime generations’ qualities of bravery and sacrifice, become ever more urgent. We remember because we must. But this remembering is not just casting our minds back to recreate moments in the past, as we might remember our 18th birthday; or the day the dog stole the Sunday roast. This remembering forces us to ask questions of ourselves. Could I have done what they did? Do I make the most of the freedom they won? Are we humans (as St Augustine thought) addicted to destructiveness as surely as we are capable of creativity?

From time to time, public figures are criticised for saying that our times are becoming just like 1930s Germany. We do perhaps begin to see what they mean, when we witness the election of populist leaders across the world, and an observable rise in nationalism. (We even hear of something called ‘Christian nationalism’, which is of course a contradiction in terms, as anyone who has tried to follow Jesus and love their enemies will tell you.) What should also concern us are the appalling levels of division, derision and hatred observable in our political discourse, especially on social media, with the commonplace condemnation of anyone who takes a different view from our own as a ‘traitor’. The recent festooning of lamp-posts with hundreds of Union and St George’s flags, while welcome to some as a timely sign of a resurgence in proper English patriotism, is condemned by others as a brutish and exclusive marking of territory for native white Britons: a return to the age of the skin-headed, bovver-booted thugs of the National Front.

At the heart of all of it, as always, is fear: fear that (especially medical) resources will not stretch to include a growing national and global population; fear that immigration (driven by warfare, catastrophe, and climate crisis) will threaten the very character of British society; and fear that the white working-class will (once again?) be sidelined and short-changed, and sold down a river that many fear will soon burst its banks and inundate us all.

And, as if matters were not thoroughly bad enough, we must contend with the pulling of our strings by superpower billionaires and trillionaires, driven by personal greed and corporate ideology; empowered by a technology that can, with utter plausibility, erase or create history before our very eyes, eyes glued to the ubiquitous screens sold to us by these very masters, and to which we willingly, even eagerly, yield ever more time and attention the more they enslave us.

But into the darkness shines the bright light of the familiar words of Jesus, imploring us to love one another as he has loved us, laying down his life for friends and enemies alike: a love greater than which there can be none conceived. This, he infers, is the love that will bear much fruit, taking up the idea of an abundant harvest, promised by the Prophet Micah through the beating of swords into ploughshares, and the recommissioning of spears as gardening implements. They are words that sound simultaneously to be the only sane way forward, and an impossibly naive fantasy.

But they are, undeniably, words from a long tradition that offers a coherent alternative to the mutually-assured destruction of war’s tribal hatred and ethnic cleansing. They are words, moreover, born out of, and exemplified in, the lives and sacrificial deaths of those we gather to remember. Not for nothing does the ‘Greater Love …’ quotation (John 15.13) appear on so many memorials and cenotaphs. It echoes that other great Christian dictum that it is only those who are prepared to give their lives away who will preserve them for eternity (John 12.25). Producing abundant fruit requires the grain of wheat to fall into the earth and die, not necessarily literally, in war; but certainly in some definite service of one’s neighbour. (And they asked him, Who is my neighbour? …)

Of course, this may all be just a bit full-on, a little bit too Christian, if all we are wanting is a dignified Last Post and a stanza or two of Wilfred Owen. But the alternative to lives lived in service of neighbour (and that includes neighbours who don’t look like us, as well as those who do) would appear to be unremittingly grim. Indeed, if we are to avoid a future descent into desolation and destruction, orchestrated by powerful individuals and oligarchies, we must learn urgently from the Glorious Dead. The devastation of land and life through warfare may have been ideal for the abundant cultivation of poppies, but war always brings with it another harvest of deplorable loss, wholly avoidable grief, and bitter despair. This makes the poppy a truthful and eloquent symbol of our remembering. But it also teaches us that our own future fruitfulness, and that of the entire world, will require a courageous enactment of Jesus’ words of love, rather than any insular aggression towards our fellow humans, or the conversion of ploughshares and pruning hooks into swords and spears, simply to enforce our own fear-fuelled quest for a security based on domination.