November is a gloomy month; the tremendous hymns for All Saints are followed too quickly by the sombre reflection of All Souls which sets the tone for what will follow. The glitter of the commercial run up to Christmas only emphasises this change in mood as the leaves on the trees, exhausted by the final moment of glory tumble down faded, wet and slippery under foot. The earth is retracting and our thoughts are turn to hibernation if not the more permanent sleep of death. Liturgically, we enter the season of the Kingdom when the emphasis is on the famines, plagues, persecutions and wars that will precede the final establishment of god’s Kingdom on earth. So it is in some ways appropriate, although I think coincidental, that today we remember primarily the senseless slaughter of thousands of young men in the mud of Flanders, but also the deaths of so many in the wars which followed the war that they thought so terrible it must end all wars. Can anything positive come from this gloom? Can we discern the coming of the Kingdom?
My temptation with the parables is to treat them as allegories in which every detail should have some significance; they seem sometimes to contain unnecessary and even distracting features which mask the point of the story- or mask the point we think we should be seeing. The parable of the sower is more allegorical than most and, unusually Jesus gives an explanation of the detail. I should probably not, therefore, be struck by a feature which is apparently irrelevant to the point Jesus is making. That is the waste, and the seeming incompetence of the sower. Perhaps we are to see this as the almost profligate generosity of God in spreading the Good News, a profligacy we meet again when clearing up after the feeding of the Five Thousand or in the gallons of extra wine which must have been left over at Cana in Galilee.
Still, one cannot help thinking the sower might have taken care to avoid scattering his seed on the path, among the rocks or in the thorns (or he should have cleared the ground of stones and weeds beforehand). But there is something uncompromising about the Jesus’ proclamation of the Gospel; there is not much attempt to prepare people for it; the preliminary instruction is the Law and the Prophets and it is too bad if you have failed to take sufficient notice of them, just as it is too bad if Satan catches you immediately after you have heard the word; or if you have not had time, or perhaps the preparation, for the word to sink in; or if real and pressing cares make you forget.
The seed which the sower casts with such uncompromising abandon, is the Word of God, the same word that is likened to the bread of life and is left scattered on a hillside in Galilee. And at the Last Supper Jesus breaks that bread as his own body will shortly be broken and be nailed to a cross to die, and he shares that bread with his disciples, and again and again for us at every Eucharist.
For a Christian the most resonating occurrence of “remembrance” must be those words at the Last Super, the words that are repeated at every service of Holy Communion. What Jesus meant by remembrance would in great part have been shaped by the occasion of the Last Supper as the Passover meal. Passover itself is a reminder and re-enactment of the mighty and saving works of God in bringing the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, through the water of the Red Sea and ultimately to the Promised Land. This story is alluded to and retold again and again in the Old Testament and is usually accompanied by an exultation over the drowned flower of the Egyptian Army; the saving of one nation was the destruction of a good part of another.
Holy Communion is rich meanings, which is part of its mysterious strength, but there are two elements that are always present. It is a means of grace, a way in which God brings salvation to us; and it is a memorial, perhaps much more, but at least, a memorial of Jesus’ death; the two elements are inextricably connected; the imparting of grace and sacrifice go together. So we should perhaps see the wasted seed as necessary for the germination of that which falls on good ground. God’s word like, his grace, is scattered freely and must be received freely, so waste is inevitable, whether it be drowned Egyptian charioteers or infantrymen stuck in mud in front of machine guns. How can remembering the dead of two world wars bring us grace?
Every year I am moved by Lawrence Binyon’s haunting words “They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old…” but I have a disagreeable feeling that I am really indulging in guilt. Binyon’s poem is ostensibly a “Proud thanksgiving” and lasting memorial to his dead comrades who, in the last verse appear as stars, brightening a dark night and marching on a heavenly plain while we are dust. Underlying the memory is the unspoken feeling of relief that pervades the poem; relief that we have been allowed to grow old, and underlying that relief is a gnawing guilt that better men have died.
Guilt may often be a rather negative emotion; It may be a useful antidote to the unreflective misplaced patriotism which has only assisted darker ambitions in causing wars. More importantly, some sense of guilt is vital as the groundwork for contrition; prepared by it we may be more ready to accept and nourish the seed. Guilt and contrition may also help us to understand how the Good News is not unambiguously joyous. To see the joy of the resurrection we must first acknowledge the place of tragedy and death in our lives. This reflection on mortality is only any use, however, if it can nourish promise of the Kingdom. When we see the fallen leaves turning to rich soil we reflect that birth and decay are part of the same cycle, but this will remain merely a metaphor unless we can by our mental and spiritual effort bring about this change. We will only be part of that productive cycle if the experience of war and the remembering of the war dead enable us to accept and realise the Gospel of Peace.
We need to strive for a transformation of ourselves and our world. Our remembrance today will play a part in that transformation if it can make us new people both contrite and, perhaps paradoxically, capable of forgiving and forgetting, so as to break us free from the shackles of history. Our acts of remembrance, the re-enactment in our minds of the sacrifice of so many young men will prove truly redeeming if they can bring about that change in our hearts, if it can turn us into the good soil that brings forth fruit a hundredfold.
Amen.