Passion Sunday: 1944/2021

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Jeremiah 31:31-34, Psalm 51.1-13, Hebrews 5.5-10, John 12.20-33

In preparation for the arrival of the baby, I’ve been putting up photographs in the downstairs loo. This has included a photo in some respects I’d rather forget, from the rather challenging all-arms pre-parachute selection course I found myself on exactly 3 years ago. The course mostly involved running up and down hills carrying half your body weight, while being screamed at. A particular joy of the course was that, as a padre, I had to carry an iron cross, the same weight as a rifle, – for fairness. By the end of the course, my back was black and blue, which given that the course was in Lent, was highly appropriate. A very literal interpretation of taking up your cross. It’s a peculiar trait of the British Army that it makes a particular effort to commemorate historic battles, and on a free weekend in the course, after a particularly destructive 10 mile yomp over the Yorkshire hills, I drove down to Portsmouth and caught the ferry to Normandy, joining my battalion to take a service of Remembrance at Bruneval.

Normandy has a place of special importance for the Parachute Regiment. They were the first on the ground at D-Day in 1944 and had the critical task of securing the beaches.  The battalion 9PARA had a particularly interesting time. On the eve of the drop with all very nervous, their padre led a service beginning with the well-known lines: “Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. There was no one there.”

Afterwards, the brigadier James Hill addressed them: ‘Gentlemen, in spite of your excellent orders and training, do not be daunted if chaos reigns. It undoubtedly will.’

As it turned out, everything went wrong for 9PARA. Their jump was woefully handled by the RAF – standard. Of a battalion of over 600, only 150 made it to the Rendezvous point. Over 200 dropped into water and drowned. More than 200, stranded miles from the drop zone, were rounded up by the Germans as Prisoners of War. Many were killed by misdirected Allied indirect fire. With only a quarter of his battalion the Commanding Officer then led an attack on their primary target, the Merville battery. The battery overlooked Sword beach, the beach onto which the D-Day British forces were landing in just a few hours, with the potential to wreak havoc on the incoming Brits trudging up the beach. 9PARA took the battery and managed to destroy or damage most of the guns but lost half their men. Reduced to less than 70 men, they withdrew to a defensive position where they dug in to protect the Allied invading force from the German counter-attack, and waited for reinforcements. The battalion did not make it back to England for three months, by then a very different set of men.

Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. There was no one there.

What is faith in this context? If we turn back to 1944 we see there’s something of a crisis moment in theology. Liberal theology had become very popular. There was a chap called Rudolf Bultmann, who argued for a demythologised Christianity.  He wanted to take out all the miracles and superstition, and cut it all back to the ethical teaching. The world had come of age. It had grown up and could now explain everything in terms of predictable, repeatable laws of science. The realm of God, which for most of human history had covered everything, was now this very small fiefdom, which people could ignore altogether if they wanted. But there were also conservatives who argued that liberal theology was the problem. The first half of the twentieth century was a judgement upon an arrogant humanity. The great atheisms of Nazism and Communism were apocalyptic, and only Christianity prevents humans from sliding into war and barbarism. Returning afresh to the Bible will return us to stability and decency.

But there was also a German theologian called Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was one of the first to argue that the Nazi party were unchristian and incompatible with Christianity. He was involved in a plot to kill Hitler, imprisoned and executed in a concentration camp shortly before the end of the war. But his theology, mostly written informally in letters to a friend, has become very influential.

The question that most concerned him, was who is Jesus Christ today? He didn’t accept the liberal premise that the area of God was the ever-decreasing sphere of activity that science couldn’t explain. But he didn’t want us to simply return to the Bible and a way of looking at the world that had been dead for 2000 years.  Nor did he feel that Christians should turn in on themselves and be satisfied with putting on lovely services with organ music and tell once again the old stories. He wanted to look at the world as it is. Which in 1944 was pretty horrific. Europe was burning. Life was cheap, in some cases valueless. Nothing was certain. He was in prison, engaged but never to marry, in an ever-worsening situation.

And it’s the right question. In a concentration camp in 1944,  In Covid-stricken-2021 – Who is Jesus Christ today? Where is Jesus Christ today?

After ten years of resistance to Nazism he wrote: ‘It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled,  in short from the perspective of the suffering. [we have learned] ‘that personal suffering is a more useful key,  a more fruitful principle than personal happiness for exploring the meaning of the world’.

Now I suppose the point is this. People don’t come to faith after making some rational decision of the likelihood of the Bible being true.  It’s also a mistake to think there’re certain areas of life we call religious. If the only time faith is going to impact your life and decisions is Sunday morning, You’d be better staying in bed.

Faith is less a subject to be studied, than a pair of spectacles with which to understand the world. As our Old Testament lesson advised: ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.’ So faith means putting on its spectacles to look at the world and ask — who is Jesus Christ today? 
Where is Jesus Christ today?

Let me put it this way. Say you woke up this morning with a blinding headache. A liberal Christian might say, ‘Well the Bible talks about pain, but science gives us a better understanding. So take pain killers to solve the problem, but maybe pray about it because that might have a psychosomatic effect, and there are some aspects we don’t understand about human experience of pain and maybe God acts there.” The conservative Christian thinks: “Ach! I have a blinding headache! Where does this happen in the Bible? Well Jesus went around healing people who were sick right? So if I pray and have faith like the centurion then Jesus will heal me and I’ll feel better.”

In both these examples, the Christian is experiencing the world and then turning to religion to find help. But our faith teaches us to see the world through the lens of faith. So, not to read about the crucifixion and say, what terrible suffering! But when you’re in pain or grief, see the cross; when you see someone affected by homelessness, see Christ. When someone forgives you, even if it’s for something silly, to feel something of the joy of resurrection. When you feel inspired to see the rush of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Which is not to say don’t take painkillers. But see the resonance of these bible stories in our lives. understand that every experience of human suffering is cruciform; that it matters;  to God, to all of us. And until every human suffering is eradicated we still live in a world dominated by Good Friday.

So where is Jesus Christ today? Don’t be like the liberal who only brings him out on a Sunday morning. Don’t be like the conservative who sees the world then tries to force it into ancient texts not designed to be read in that way. But find the suffering of Christ in the experiences of suffering we are all aware of. Find the washing of the disciples’ feet in the acts of service you’re able to perform and in those you see going on around you. Find the joy of resurrection in the new life that is constantly being reborn in and around us. That is what it means to have faith. Not to find Christ in an old book, but to see Christ in the world today.

This Sunday is Passion Sunday.  The story of Christ told each year has moved to those final events. I would invite you to enter into those stories this year.

Life may have become very difficult for you in this last year. In 1944 the reality of good and evil, of betrayal, of triumph and adversity, of suffering, cruelty, the via dolorosa and death, were all too evident. The passion narrative was told by a nation. And in these fearful days, the omnipresence of death is still with us.

But Easter is just around the corner.

Chaos reigns. And fear still knocks at the door, waiting for an answer.