In September 1938, as the crisis over Hitler’s claim to the Sudetenland deepened, the Archbishop of Canterbury called the nation to prayer. Westminster Abbey was kept open late into the evening, and pews were set out in a hollow square around the tomb of the unknown warrior. Among those who came to pray was a rather sallow-faced theological student and a bustling little teacher, who might perhaps have become his wife, except that the scrap of paper with which Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich did not after all bring ‘peace in our time’. On the contrary, there was war, and in September 1940 the young man died on duty as an air raid warden. The young woman must have felt in her despair that their prayers had been cruelly ignored, and although she gradually put her life together again, it was nearly sixty years before she was sufficiently healed to tell her story. Now, whenever I pass the tomb of the unknown warrior, I remember them both with affection and gratitude. Seventy years on we can all be very thankful for the long years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of that generation and the generation of their parents.
‘I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.’ It may seem strange to speak of joy on Remembrance Sunday. When we read of a love that may lead to the laying down of one’s life for one’s friends, and when we recall what that meant for so many families and friends, it is their pain and sorrow that comes first to mind. Yet joy is at the very heart of tonight’s new testament reading. Joy is indeed the focus of the pivotal verse by which Jesus moves from the parable of the vine and the branches to the discussion of what it means to be one of his friends. The promise of joy is surrounded by the commandment to love one another. Before it we read: If you keep my commandments you will abide in my love (v 10). And afterwards: This is my commandment that you love one another, as I have loved you (v 12). Love, which is the source of the purest joy we know, goes hand in hand with willing obedience, since it is in and through obedience that we express our love, just as Jesus was moved to obedience by his love for his Father. We are not ordered about like servants, we are loved as friends, and as friends we respond to the generosity of His love by seeking to do those things which will please him.
What do we mean by joy? Clearly it is not the product of external circumstances. Some of the most joyful people I have encountered are those who have known great sadness, but in C S Lewis’ terms they have been ‘surprised by joy’ in the still centre of their lives. The old lady who told me the sad story of a love which was cut short before it could fully blossom, took many years to come to terms with the pain and loss which she had suffered. For a while she was very ill, but slowly, as she learned to embrace her personal share of the world’s pain and suffering, she discovered a deeper sense of what it meant to abide in Christ’s love. She had not been asked to lay down her life for her friends in the traditional sense, but the loss she had to bear was not unlike a life laid down. As she offered to Christ the future life which she had dared to envisage, she was surprised to discover that she had been given back a new life of loving service to the children in her school, not a family of three or four as they had jokingly imagined, but three or four hundred. By the time I got to know her, the serenity of her spirit bore a quiet but powerful testimony to the joy which she had found.
Reading our first lesson, about Gideon and the defeat of the Midianites, I was struck by the parallels with the defeat of the Communist regime in Eastern Germany in 1989. With a trumpet in one hand and in the other a torch inside a jar, Gideon’s men were unarmed – they had no spare hand for a sword. What a way to go into battle against an enemy with vastly superior forces, as thick on the ground as a swarm of locusts. And yet, that is pretty much how it was when the people emerged from the Monday prayer meetings in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig to demonstrate peacefully in the streets outside – they needed one hand to carry their candle and the other to shelter the flickering flame from the wind. Facing the overwhelming power of the state, they had denied themselves any possibility of opposing force with force. The risk was real. It was only a few months since the massacre in Tienanmen Square in Peking, and indeed to start with the leading demonstrators were rounded up and taken to prison. In one sense they were hopelessly vulnerable. Yet viewed from a different perspective, they were uniquely empowered, as were Gideon’s men, by their reliance on God’s protection. Like the three men who faced Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace, they trusted God to save them, but even if they were not saved, those who remained would not cease to hold their peaceful prayer meetings.
We pray for peace continually, knowing that that is what God wants for us and for all his children, and we do not give up just because peace may be slow in coming. The Monday prayer meetings in Leipzig had been going on since 1982. Even if the prayers which were offered around the tomb of the unknown warrior in 1938 were not answered immediately, or not answered without the further sacrifices which were made in the Second World War, we can and do give thanks to-day for the peace which most of us have enjoyed since 1945. Now, as the world shrinks, and the pressures grow on our limited resources, we need to keep praying for the development and implementation of policies towards one another that will be just and fair and sustainable.
We have seen that if we abide in the love of Christ, even our pain and sorrow can be turned to joy. That is the alchemy of God’s love, working within us and within the world which he loves, but there is even more to look forward to. Reflecting the origins of this discourse in Jesus’ teaching about the vine and the branches, there is the further promise to those who abide in his love, and are therefore obedient to that which his love requires, that we shall bear fruit, fruit that will last. ‘You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.’ As branches of the vine through which his love courses, we are bound into a way of life in which loving obedience may cost us all we have, even life itself, but the vine is very good and very strong. It must at last bear fruit, particularly if it has been severely pruned. And nothing is more joyful than the harvest of the vine. Therein lies our hope and our joy, even on Remembrance Day, perhaps indeed especially on Remembrance Day. In the words of the psalm, they that sow in tears shall reap in joy. She that now goeth on her way weeping and bearing good seed, shall doubtless come again with joy, and bring her sheaves with her.