Texts: 1 John 3.16-24; John 10.11-18
How sweet and honourable it is to
die for one's country:
Death pursues the man who flees,
spares not the hamstrings or cowardly backs
Of battle-shy youths.
Death pursues the man who flees,
spares not the hamstrings or cowardly backs
Of battle-shy youths.
So wrote the
Roman poet Horace in his Third Ode. And
if you visit the chapel at the Royal Sandhurst Military Academy at Berkshire in
the UK, you will find the first line of Horace’s poem inscribed on the wall there,
in the original Latin: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. This concise epithet has been trotted out
to justify the deployment of every soldier in every major conflict involving
European nations since Horace became the apologist of Roman imperialism in the
first century BCE. It is an epithet that was deployed liberally in both the
recruitment and conscription of soldiers for Britain in the Great War of
1914-18. It is an epithet that makes it very clear what a soldier’s life is
ultimately about: the service of the nation and its interests, even unto death.
As a Christian, I am obviously deeply uncomfortable with any view of
the world that elevates allegiance to the nation above allegiance to Christ. In the ancient Roman empire, whose ideology
Horace helped to both form and express, many thousands of Christians were
martyred precisely because they refused to so worship the Roman state.
The ancient Christian confession ‘Jesus is Lord’ has its origin in precisely
this repudiation. If Jesus is ‘Lord’, if it is Jesus and his
kingdom of peace to whom we owe our very lives, then there is no other power in
heaven or on earth to whom we can legitimately bend the knee in service. Especially if such service involves a
repudiation of the fundamental Christian conviction: that the God who loves and
forgives every sinner calls such sinners to love and forgive one another, even
and especially those whom the state may designate our enemies.
The idea – endlessly invoked in the two world wars - that a Christian
can fight for ‘God, king and country’ must therefore be subjected to the most careful
theological suspicion. Fighting for God
is, for Christians, simply a contradiction in terms: at best, the Christian is
called to fight, with Christ himself, against any tendency to judge or condemn our
fellow human beings rather than to love them.
And while Christians are certainly not republicans, nor can we serve the
kings and chieftans of any tribe, nation or state. For the very notion of the
tribe, the nation and the state contradicts the vision of a universal
commonwealth of peace with justice, which Jesus proclaimed to us under the name
of the ‘reign’ or ‘kingdom’ of God.
Jesus, our Good Shepherd, laid down his life for that vision. He
sacrificed himself for the sins of the nations so that they would never have
need, again, to take up arms against one another. How quickly ‘Christian’
Europe forgot Christ’s legacy! How quickly the pride of nations reasserted
itself! Forgetting Jesus’ sacrifice - in
the first and second world wars, certainly, but also in the many other wars
that followed them – nations have instead chosen to sacrifice their young
people on the blood-red altars of national pride.
I’d like to conclude today’s sermon with a poem written by Wilfred
Owen, perhaps the greatest of the poets of the First World War. An English soldier, he served in France and
was ultimately killed on the front line in November 1918, just one week before
the armistice that ended the war. His
reflections remain for us a permanent reminder of war’s absurdity. I read it now as an act of grief and of mourning
for all who have been sacrificed on the altar of state.
Parable of the Old Man and the Young
So Abram
rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the
fire with him, and a knife.
And as they
sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the
first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations,
fire and iron,
But where
the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram
bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded
parapets and trenches there,
And
stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an
angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay
not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do
anything to him. Behold,
A ram,
caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the
Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old
man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the
seed of Europe, one by one.