Victory in Europe, Victory at Easter

A response to the 80th anniversary of VE Day, 8 May 2025

The commemoration of VE Day always occurs during Eastertide. So we find ourselves commemorating not one victory but two on May 8.

Like the Easter victory, the victory over the Nazis was a victory over sin and death. Over sin, because they imagined that one race could be superior to another, forgetting that all men and women are created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1.26f). It was a victory over death, because the Second War ended an evil culture in which the sick and the supposedly inferior could be exterminated without a second thought. Having first dehumanised people who were mentally ill or disabled or homosexual or Jewish or members of the wrong political tribe (and we might add many groups to this process throughout history), the Nazis found it breathtakingly easy to exterminate them. Thus the destruction of Nazism was the destruction of destruction itself. But unlike Easter, this victory had not been won ‘once, only once, and once for all’. We can never rest on the laurels of the victory of 1945. As recurrent as Original Sin, the barbaric philosophy of nationalist racism, of believing that ‘people like us’ matter more than ‘people like them’ is a philosophy that never wholly dies out. Even today, only eighty years on, we see a flirtation with a kind of neo-Nazi chic, as billionaire men-children and power-hungry populists dare one another to say and do the unthinkable. Here a Nazi salute, there a call to put migrants into camps. Like a rogue bacillus, the Nazi creed lies dormant until conditions are ripe for its return: another people in another uniform; but the same godless creed of death and destruction.

Those who are called to be Christ’s ambassadors, themselves made new through his death and resurrection, will celebrate whenever an evil vision for humanity is sacrificially replaced with signs of the Kingdom of God, such as those that followed 1945. The independence of India, the creation of the NHS, Mrs Roosevelt’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and the ever-growing awareness of the inviolable dignity of workers, women, and vulnerable minorities: all are fruits of Easter, and a recapitulation of Christ’s creative love.

We know that, as life on earth becomes more fragile and challenging, the desire will grow to hoard resources for one’s own tribe and abandon others to their fate. This is not a Christian response, and the gospel can never be compatible with a racist agenda. As we give thanks, we who enjoy peace today note the need to make our own sacrifices for peace with justice tomorrow. Followers of the Way have no alternative. Mother Julian of Norwich, whose feast-day is also May 8, taught in the 15th-century that ‘all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ If she is right, then it is by our participation in Christ’s death and resurrection that it shall be so. And that will demand a full and final sacrifice from us all.