Christ Church

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends”

The significance of this day should not be lost on any of us. To remember is to be aware about who we really are. That means, paradoxically, to pay attention to others. It is especially hard in the attention deficit culture. Memory is increasingly the lost and neglected faculty of our humanity.

Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. The intention of All Souls’ is to remember our common mortality, to commemorate all who have died and to do so within the greater context of All Saints’, the celebration of our common vocation to holiness. The intention of Remembrance Day in the secular aspect of our culture is to remember those who died for the sake of our political freedoms and civic life.

To say that Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day is not to say that our remembrance is not religious. It is, and profoundly so. It reminds us of the spiritual and, specifically, Christian principles which underlie the modern national states even in their contemporary confusion and disarray. To remember the fallen is to honour what they fought and died for in far away places and in scenes of absolute horror far beyond our imaging, despite the efforts of the film industry and even the purple prose of preachers.

We remind ourselves of the hell of war and of the destruction and evil which we inflict upon one another. The dust of our common humanity is soaked in blood. But if, and ‘if’ is the big, little word here, if we can remember in a spirit of forgiveness, so much the better. For then our remembering will be joined all the more surely to God’s forgiving remembrance of all our follies, all our sufferings and all our griefs. We will be remembering them in the greater sacrifice of Christ for the whole world, a remembering that enters into all that we do at the Altar.

What we are remembering are the sacrifices for the rational freedoms of our political and social life, to be sure. But what underlies that remembrance is something profoundly spiritual. It is, perhaps, best captured in the scriptural phrase which adorns a thousand cenotaph in a thousand villages throughout the world. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

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“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God”

In the somber grey of November, in the season of scattered leaves and the culture of scattered souls, God’s Word gathers us and challenges us about the nature of our Christian lives. Should we somehow think that it is enough simply to hear God’s word, then we are rightly and roundly reminded not “to be hearers only” but to be “doers of the word” as well. Likewise, if we should be so foolish and brain-dead as to think that worship and public prayer and all the things belonging to religion are peripheral and really nothing worth, then we are rightly reminded to “receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your souls”.

The point is ever so clear. It is almost a commonplace. We are called to be what we believe and that means both hearing and doing; in short, it means both faith and works. Such is the strength of the message of James. It is a kind of sermon, and, indeed, one which complements beautifully The Sermon on the Mount, the gospel which has been read for more than a thousand years on All Saints’ Day.

To suppose that we can absent ourselves from where the Word of God is proclaimed and celebrated is as absurd as to suppose that we can hear and receive that Word without acting upon it. That is the strong message from The Epistle of St. James. He is calling us to scriptural wisdom. “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God”. For “of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth”. We live from that word of truth.

If anything is lacking from our contemporary world, I fear, it is wisdom. We immerse ourselves in action. We busy ourselves endlessly in the doing of this and that. We are literally afraid to stop and think, to read, let alone to pray. We easily fall prey to the greatest of follies and superstitions. Ours, too, is a most gullible age.

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Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?

Love gives without expectation of return simply because love is its own reward. The Gospels teach us to love for love’s sake. Love is its own reason. What does this mean?

It means that love cannot be a matter of calculation – giving with the expectation of receiving in return. For then we limit love. We put limits and restrictions on our love and the love of others. It is a poor and impoverished kind of love which constrains and restricts the boundless love, the unlimited love, the love-without-counting-the-cost kind of love shown to us in Jesus Christ.

Does this mean that love is crazy, irrational and without reason? No. Love is its own reason and that reason is known and named. “And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, as he gave us commandment.”

Christ’s love draws us into the company of the Trinity and into the Communion of Saints. The love that is without calculation is the infinite love of God. In this Gospel parable, Jesus uses a finite quantity, seventy times seven – you can do the math – to indicate an infinite quality that is beyond counting. The quality of love is something infinite. It is something of God in us. The love that is of God is always with God and with God all things are beyond mere calculation.

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