Readings Job19. 23-27a
2 Thessalonians 2. 1-5
13-end, Luke 20. 27-38
The Great War did something to the language of the sun. Poetic awareness of the sky and the glories of sunrise and sunset was a 19th century innovation inspired in part by the paintings of Turner (and the writings of John Ruskin.) In the trenches sunrise and sun set became synonymous with ‘stand to’ and ‘stand down’. That is perhaps why Lawrence Binyon’s poem ‘For the fallen’ says, ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them.’ But in the trenches sunrise meant you could see the silhouettes of German patrols in the east, whereas at the end of the day the German troops could see the British patrols silhouetted against the setting sun – a time not for appreciating natural beauty but for increased anxiety. The red of the sunset became all too easily a reminder of the redness of freshly shed blood.
Something in the mud of the trenches, was changed in our sensitivity to what it means for one human being to take away the life of another in war. Poets and novelists have had a lot to do with it. Words they discovered could no longer be used in the way they had been. Words could no longer carry the experiences they were meant to convey. Words cracked under the strain and began to seem sentimental or pompous or empty where before they had been heroic. As one of the principal characters says, in Susan Hill’s novel, ‘Strange Meeting’, “You can’t make a pattern out of it, you cannot read a book and get comfort from fine words, and great thoughts, and you shouldn’t bloody well try….. I’ve been trying to set everything apart, make it grandiose, give it a point and a purpose where there are none.” That officer was feeling ashamed of what he was becoming and diminished by the death around him – he had learnt what John Donne meant when he said ‘Every man’s death diminishes me.’
But if the language of literature was changed by the experience of that war what about the language of theology – might that also be in danger of trying to provide comfort with fine words and great thoughts, making it all grandiose? In the order for the Burial of the Dead we find the words which must have been said over and over again by service chaplains in war; ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ It has been said that of the three theological virtues, faith, hope and love, that if love was the great theme of the Middle Ages and faith of the Reformation, then hope ought to be the great concern of theology in the modern age, the sure and certain hope of the burial service. But if that is so, how are we to talk about hope without becoming grandiose, seeking comfort in fine words and so avoiding the reality of death and destruction?
So now I want to try to draw attention to two ways in which we should try to talk about hope without making an unreal pattern of fine words.
The funeral service talks about the hope of the resurrection almost paradoxically. Here in the presence of a body from which the life has departed we continue to talk about the importance of the body to God. In this context it is important to get talk about souls right, if we are not to get talk about death wrong. The soul does not have a body – it is a body; the soul is the form and meaning of this body and without the body the soul has nothing to mean. If we do not grasp that fact perhaps we shall never cherish the human body, respect, care for and defend it, as the God who creates the body would have it respected, cherished and defended. When we say in the Creed that we believe in the resurrection of the body we must at least realise that bodiliness is important to God. When we say that we look for the resurrection of the dead we must at least be expressing a deep sense that in the loss of the body in death we have lost all, we have come to an end from which only God can raise us up. What it might mean to have a body in the timeless presence of God is totally beyond our grasp – but that is important. For this is the true force of hope – hope is properly for something we cannot yet see or understand. If we could understand, it would be a simple looking forward. But hope is a trust in and commitment to something we don’t see or understand. And in the mean time, in the light of that hope, we do all in our power to resist and bring an end to those causes of violent death in the world we do know about. We try to ensure that people do not die for causes which are not worth so many deaths.
And the second thing about our hope for eternal life, is that it is not a hope that life just goes on after we die. When we die we leave time behind – if we go to God we enter the timelessness of God. The Bible may speak as though God has a history but that is because the Bible is the story of our experience of God in time. But God is eternal and therefore not of time, as Jesus indicates in our gospel reading. The Sadducees put to Jesus an absurd but difficult question hoping to catch him out. Jesus answer is in several parts. First it is an assurance of the bodiliness of our hope – we are children of the resurrection; then it is an indication that the life for which we hope is not simply a continuance of the present pattern of our existence and our relationships; and finally our hope is supremely for a relationship to the God in whom Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have a simultaneity of being with God, a timelessness with God. At this point, however, our language about God begins to show signs of crumbling, and yet again this is part of what hope looks like. In time we can have no concept of timelessness, other than the hope that eternal life is a life of joy and gladness which includes but goes far beyond what we have ever known of joy and gladness in this life.
It has been suggested that the reason why we have two minutes silence today is because we need one minute for looking back and one minute for looking forward. One minute to look back, to remember and to learn; one minute to look forward to a hope beyond words because that hope rests in God. Amen.