In Remberance of You - Lest We Forget

'God of our fathers, known of old,

Lord of our far-flung battle line,

Beneath whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine —

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

            Lest we forget—lest we forget!'

Someone left some ANZAC biscuits, beautifully wrapped in baking paper with a sprig of rosemary, on our door knob. Many would know the symoblic signifance of red poppy flowers as those who fought for us in the Great War would have died, whose crimson blood would have stained the battlefields with a shade of red in Flanders Field. Rosemary also has a particular significance to Australians and New Zealanders as it's found growing wild on the Gallipoli peninsula where Australians and New Zealanders landed early on the morning of 25 April 1915 with allied forces in Ottoman Turkey that marked the start of the Gallipoli Campaign. Rosemary is for remembrance.

"Remembrance is a personal, therefore a subjective, process. It matters all the more to nuture it collectively" wrote Erik Varden in his book the Shattering of Loneliness. This is in rebembrance of Christ who died for us. The Christian condition unfolds within the certainty that ultimate reality, the source of all that is, is a personal reality of communion, not a metaphysical abstraction. Men and women, made 'in the image and likeness' of God, bear the mark of that original communion stamped on their being. The Scripture repeatedly exhorts us to 'remember'. The remembrance enjoined is partly introspective and existential, partly historical, for the God who took flesh to redeem our sins and shattered our loneliness, leaves traces in history.

At the heart of this is the idea of remembrance whereby we must properly remember that we are created, that we are led and guided by God (since Genesis and Exodus) and that Jesus bids us (through the four gospels' description of the last supper and the passion narrative) to do something in memory of Him. The communion of saints is, importantly, a shared and collective experience in remebrance of Christ. As Varden describes, "My capacity for truth, however blessed it may be by nature, however extendable by grace, is inadequate to fathom truth in its fulness. My remembrance, too, is limited. Even the memory of God, maintained in solitude, can disappoint. Anyone who prays the psalms will have been struck by this honest admission: I remembered my God and I groaned (Psalm 76:4). To be consoling and complete, remembrance in truth has to be shared. The spirit performs his consoling, illuminating work ecclesial. His operation is all of a piece: he consoles by creating concord; he leads us towards truth by drawing us out of our cloistered selves into a shared remembrance that sweetens even bitter memories with gratitude. He enables a gradual passage from what is piecemeal towards what is whole. This process, amazingly, embraces the future as well as the past: [The spirit of truth] will declare to you the things that are to come, says Jesus, before he goes on: 'He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you' (John 16:13-14), even though to pursue truth is to swim upstream from Hades, to choose light over darkness, to refuse disintegration." A constant battle. Yet, only by remembering the past will we move forward in the present and continue in our pursuit of truth into the future. As the old testament reminds us, "Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life" (Deuteronomy 4:7-9), we are reminded that a nation never fogets the true source of its sorrow and success in rembrance of the sacrifice for us to have what we have today on this ANZAC Day.

So we pray on this ANZAC Day that: 

O Lord, our ruler and guide in this life and the life eternal, in whose hands are the destinies of this and every nation, we give you thanks for the freedoms we enjoy in this land and for those who laid down their lives to defend them. We pray that all the people of Australia, who are gratefully remembering the courage and sacrifice of those who died for us, may have the grace to live in a spirit of justice, generosity, and peace through Jesus Christ our Lord. Above all, let us be reminded that Christ has been raised from the dead. In the words of Corinthians, since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being - for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. Let us properly remember that Jesus Christ has bid us in the communion of saints, to do so in remembrance that as often as we eat the bread of your body and drink the cup as the new covenant in your blood, we do so remembering your sacrifice for our sake to proclaim death, redeem us and rise again forevermore. We pray all this in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

For Want of Justice

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
    Why are you so far from saving me,
    so far from my cries of anguish?

...

I am poured out like water,
    and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
    it has melted within me.  My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
    and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
    you lay me in the dust of death.16 Dogs surround me,
    a pack of villains encircles me;
    they pierce my hands and my feet.17  All my bones are on display;
    people stare and gloat over me.  They divide my clothes among them
    and cast lots for my garment.
(Psalm 22:1-18)

As a lawyer, I have a cynical veiw of what justice means. The hope of what were once young ambitions for social justice erode overtime as we witness the icy reality of this world. People we look up to as role models sometimes manifest morally dubious behaviours and at worse, unsettling judgements of human iniquity, bringing into question basic ethics in those who are purportedly the guardians of the justice system and admitted under oath before the court into the legal profession. 

When 2 Thessalonians looked at the man of lawlessness as an antichrist who will oppose Christ and substitute himself in Christ's place beofre the Second Coming, the man of sin is described as "The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, 10 and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved." (2 Thessalonians 2:9-10). Perhaps the man of lawlessness embodies the satan within all of us as no one on earth is righteous except for Christ. Yet in the lead up to Christ's passion and crucifixtion on Good Friday, Jesus went through four trials and three declarations of innocence as the man-made system of justice sought to judge a man of God unjustly. In the gospel narratives, Jesus was taken to the private residence of Caiaphas (the sadducee high priest) after his arrest then presented before Pontious Pilot who found no basis for a charge against him and dispensed him to Herod who then sent Christ back to Pilate for an ultimate charge of crucifiction. 

The Sanhedrin is meant to be an established court based in Jerusalem with strict guidelines on how to function, including a prohibition against trials after dark, and a requirement that they occur in a public venue. The gospel accounts paint a picture of the Sanhedrin violating all these and the Torah during the trial of Christ. Matthew 26:57 states that Jesus was taken to the house of Caiaphas the High Priest of Israel, where the scribes and the elders were gathered together. Matthew 27:1 adds that, the next morning, the priests held another meeting. Luke 22:54 states that Jesus was taken to "the high priest's house", where he was mocked and beaten that night. It is added that as soon as it was day, the chief priests and scribes gathered together and led Christ away into their council. John 18:12-14 described that Jesus was first taken to Annas, the father-in-law of Caiaphas, who was the high priest at the time so it appears that Caiaphas sought Annas' confirmation of Caiaphas' actions. So John's gospel has the added scene where Jesus was sent from Annas to Caiaphas the high priest, and Pontius Pilate in the Praetorium.

By the time Jesus was before Pilate, we witnessed a series of weak and cowardly attempt by the Pontious Pilate to be fair but who ultimately succumbed to the damning demand of Jesus' own people. When Pilate said "take him yourselves and judge him by your own law (John 18: 30), he was met by the response of "But we have no right to execute anyone" as the Jews objected and condemned Christ to death. As the religions professed by the Jews and the Romans were different and since at the time Jerusalem was part of Roman Judea, the charges of the Sanhedrin against Jesus held no power before Pilate and only the Roman court had the jurisdiction to crucify a defendant. From the three charges brought by the Jewish leaders (perverting the nation, forbidding the payment of tribute, and sedition against the Roman Empire), Pilate picked up on the third one, asking: "Are you the King of the Jews?" to which Jesus replied with "You have said so" (Matthew 27:11, Mark 15:2, Luke 23:3). Then the hearing continued and Pilate finally asked Jesus "What is truth?". This was said after learning that Jesus did not wish to claim any terrestrial kingdom. He was therefore not a political threat and could be seen as innocent of such a charge. Stepping back outside, Pilate publicly declared that he found no basis to charge Jesus, asking them if the Jews wanted Jesus freed, which they declined, preferring the freedom of Barabbas the criminal. This meant capital punishment for Jesus. The universal rule of the Roman Empire limited capital punishment strictly to the tribunal of the Roman governor and Pilate decided to publicly wash his hands as not being privy to Jesus' death through his declaration of Christ's innocence. Nevertheless, since only the Roman authority could order crucifixion and since the penalty was carried out by Roman soldiers, Pilate (in reflecting the demands of the Jews) was responsible for Jesus' death, a judgment imposed on the innocent lamb through a clear miscarriage of justice.

The trial of Jesus at Pilate's court (according to Luke also briefly at the court of Herod Antipas) showed the wavering of Pilate and his consideration of the crowd's opinion to give Barabbas amnesty and condemn Jesus to death. The abduction of Jesus by Roman soldiers and the mocking mistreatment of Jesus unmistakably point to the sins of Christ's own people who brought about his death as prophesied by Isaiah. Israel's problem was also humanity's problem yet abandoned and alienated by his own people and later by his own Father, “it is he who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.” (Psalm130).  Despite the farcical trial of injustice, God forgave us as Christ pleaded and made intercessions for us to reconcile with God who judges rightly to "forgive them for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34). As Isaiah 53 accounts:

Surely he took up our pain
    yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
⁵ But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.
⁶ We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
    each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
    the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed and afflicted,
    yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
    and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
    so he did not open his mouth.
⁸ By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
    Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
    for the transgression of my people he was punished

So Christ, trialed, humiliated, flogged twice, carried the cross literally and figuratively to his own death for God's atonemnet of humanity's sin. Through the lense of Psalm 69, we are provided with a fleeting glimpse into this moment endured by messianic son of man: "Insults have broken my heart, so that I am in despair. I looked for pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none. They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink." So Christ, poured out like water,  went to the cross for our sake yet sinners like Barabbas walked free. The resounding constrast highlights a divine injustice and love from the Father for us as he sent Christ who was stripped naked to hang on the Cross in utter humiliation whilst other sinners like us divide Christ's clothes among them to cast lots for his garment in caupable ignorance. Yet, the cry of direliection due to the unfathonable abandment by God to let his Son of Man die physcally and spiritually on the Cross in Psalm 22 is followed by an unwavering faith and prayer: "But you, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me. Deliver me from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dogs. Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen...  I will declare your name to my people."

So when there is no faith in any justice of this world, we can have faith in a world that will be and in the righteous judgement of God the Father. For He nailed the only Son of the man on the cross as atonement for our sins so that we can reconcile with God in the Holy Spirit out of an abundance of love we do not deserve. And in this we have faith, Amen. 

With acknowledgement of copyrights subsisting in the St Marks Good Friday service and the sermons by The Rev Dr David Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM2EbDtkfJ0