Message.

John Steinbeck, the Nobel Prize-winning author of “The Grapes of Wrath” said: “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal”. He had seen war at first hand as a journalist covering the Allied invasion of Italy in WW2. The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who devised the so-called “Laws of Robotics” (which today’s developers of AI would do well to heed), wrote: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”. Those comments are not new, but just this year the International Committee of the Red Cross sadly declared that “Armed conflict is now a defining feature of our time … Conflicts are spreading, lasting longer, and becoming more complex … (and) civilians are those who suffer the most”. It is in this tragic context, rather than with any sense of complacency, that we worship today.

It seems to me that the Bible takes a somewhat ambiguous view of both war and remembrance. The Sixth Commandment says, “You shall not kill”. We often understand that as a reference to murder, something which should not happen in a civilised society which regards human life as sacred. That interpretation may well be correct, but we must set this alongside the warfare and killing which pervades the entire Old Testament, from the ruthless and bloody invasion of the Promised Land to the ceaseless conflicts on Israel’s borders – not to mention battles between rival forces within the country. This history troubles us, especially when the bloodshed so often seems to have God’s approval or even be encouraged by him. It’s only when we get to the New Testament, and Jesus explicitly forbidding his followers to rise up in rebellion against the occupying Romans, indeed telling them that they should love their enemies, that we get a more peaceful approach. To this day Christian theologians and politicians have argued over how, when and if a country should go to war. In my opinion, they far too often do so for wrong and unjust reasons.

That’s the ambiguity about war. But what about remembrance? Surely the Bible is more positive about this? At first glance it certainly seems to be; for instance the Hebrews in the Old Testament were constantly reminded to remember God’s mighty acts, especially the exodus from Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, the provision of food in the desert, and their military triumphs in Canaan. Indeed the people, newly settled in the land, declared, “The Lord our God brought our fathers and us out of slavery in Egypt, and we saw the miracles that he performed. He kept us safe wherever we went among all the nations through which we passed”. It would be no exaggeration to say that the Jewish nation was founded upon these collective memories, repeatedly invoked by not only Moses and Joshua but also the later prophets, when the people were tempted to stray away from God. The psalm writers, too, in their times of desolation and abandonment, found encouragement in these same memories. They still, for better or worse, have strong resonances today.

We find the same theme of remembrance in the New Testament, where the early Christians are exhorted to remember Jesus’s life and acts and told to build their faith on the foundations laid by the apostles, lest they drift into heresy. They are also asked to remember how they had lived before being touched by God’s grace, and to marvel in the hope and freedom they had been given. Of course the supreme act of remembering, which we still practise today, is the Lord’s Supper or Communion. However we celebrate and understand this, its prime aim must be to centre our faith on Christ’s sacrificial love, his death on the Cross. Without that constant reminder we might soon drift away; after all, as Paul acknowledged, the Cross is a horror and scandal we’d happily dispense with. But we can’t.

Having said all this, we need to recognise that the Bible also contains a strong theme of not remembering, indeed of deliberate forgetting! For Isaiah pleads with God to “not remember our sins forever” and goes on to report him saying, “It is I who blots out your transgressions … and remembers your sins no more”. Equally Micah declares that God “will hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea”. This theme reaches its climax in the New Testament where we told unequivocally that Jesus has dealt with our past history of sin once and for all, “nailing it”, as Paul says, “to his cross”. In other words, when God forgives sins, they are not merely relegated to some recycling bin on his heavenly computer’s desktop from where they can be instantly restored; he deletes not only sin but every trace of its memory.

This isn’t just a theological matter but a thought which, I believe, should have a huge impact on Remembrance commemorations. I’m not of course saying that we should ignore the pain, suffering and, in some cases, heroic sacrifices made by our ancestors (although, from a purely grammatical point of view, I wonder if we can actually “remember” people we never knew?). No; what I am saying is that a deliberate act of forgetting is absolutely vital if we are to see a lasting resolution to the world’s long-standing disputes and conflicts.

So, when Isaiah said, “the former things shall not be remembered or brought to mind”, it was within the context of Israel’s recent history: the Babylonian invasion, the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple, the forced exile of young leaders such as Daniel. These were still very live hurts.

Moving closer to our own times, many of the atrocities we saw in the Balkans back in the 90s were fuelled by memories of the Battle of Kosovo between Serbia and the invading Ottoman army, which took place in 1389. Equally the Arab nations’ distrust of the West is informed not only by the way that European colonial powers carved them up (and promoted the establishment of the state of Israel on land which was not uninhabited) but also by the older memory of the Crusades. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was at least partially driven by his belief that it was the historical heartland of Russia and should be an integral part of it. And just this week we’ve seen how memories of the appalling slave trade is influencing conversation between Britain and the Caribbean nations. Should this be forgotten when it’s been swept under the carpet for so long and is only now being discussed openly? Probably not -it isn’t always easy knowing when it’s best for us to remember and when it’s best to make the effort to forget!

So where do we go from here? It’s often said that we must remember past history if we are to avoid repeating its mistakes. There is some truth in that statement, but it can also be misleading. For instance we have seen how drones and cyber-attacks have changed warfare in drastic and unexpected ways over the last few years, meaning that apparently well-thought-out defence plans based on historical analysis have had to be torn to shreds. Equally there is the danger of looking at world events and saying, “Ah, this looks like Europe did in 1939” and making predictions about the future when, in fact, the similarities between “then” and “now” are superficial, the differences huge. Memory can be a great teacher – or it can totally mislead us.

Well, I don’t think it’s possible or even desirable to forget the past. Good memories are to be treasured, while painful memories, whether personal or national, cannot easily be obliterated. (In passing I must say that we should be careful of false memories settling in our minds; for instance I sometimes feel that the media conspire to give us a rose-tinted view of the Second World War which is far from reality). Nevertheless, while we don’t ignore the past, we cannot allow it to dominate or imprison us; “we are where we are” and must look to the future. That should be particularly true for Christians who believe in future glory, a renewed heaven and earth, but it applies to us all.

To conclude, and to attempt a balance between the two positions the Bible seems to take about remembrance: can I suggest that we somehow seek to remember while taking away memory’s sting, to look back without letting history hold us captive, to look forward in hope despite past pains and disappointments? I’m not saying for a moment that that will be easy – but, hopefully, Christians can find help from God to do it. The Dutch watchmaker Corrie Ten Boom, who lost her beloved sister in the squalid horror of a Nazi concentration camp, and later travelled the world with a message of Christian forgiveness, wrote: “You don’t just need a good memory. Sometimes you need a good forgettery, too.” Can we, just possibly, cultivate both?