Alastair's Adversaria

I attended a Remembrance Sunday service this morning. As a just warrior I generally have mixed feelings about Remembrance Sunday. It also seems that the correct balance between public remembrance and Christian remembrance is a very hard one to maintain. For we do not remember as the world. So often the remembrance of the world seems to be a sterile one, to be palliated by vague platitudes about ‘a better place’ or something like that.

Christian remembrance is primarily seen in the Lord’s Supper. We remember Christ and His victorious death, not primarily as an act of inward meditation, but as a public proclamation. However, I believe that the remembrance spoken of in connection with the Supper is not essentially our remembrance, but God’s. We celebrate the Supper as Christ’s memorial, so that the Father might remember Christ’s sacrifice. When God remembers He acts.

In an important sense, remembrance is always re-member-ance. When we have had loved ones torn from us we are left broken. Re-member-ance is the means by which we are put back together as whole persons. True re-membrance is impossible for the world. The story of the world is always ultimately a tragic and broken one. The world can never truly escape the tragic cycle, because the world does not now the radical for-givenness that comes through the cross of Christ. Only in the light of such for-givenness can we have our lives renarrated.

For we can never renarrate our own lives. Renarration is a gift, not a right that we have for ourselves. We are not the masters of our own stories. If we had the right to renarrate our own lives we could violently expunge our own violence.

Our remembrance should not be autonomous remembrance. We can never re-member ourselves. We can never put broken bodies back together. Any attempt to do so is an arrogation of divine prerogatives to ourselves and can only be achieved at the expense of others. Only when a God who raises from the dead takes the initiative is true re-membrance possible. We can only serve to remember and forgive others because we ourselves have been re-membered and for-given.

In the Supper we are remembered by God in the light of the sacrifice of Christ, just as Noah was remembered by God in the ark, or the children of Israel were remembered by God in the land of Egypt. God re-members us in the Supper. Many members become one Body. Past scars are healed. Our brokenness is overcome. In the great Gift of God’s grace we can give our own gifts of grace to one another. The Supper is a participation in the body of Christ, both as a participation in the Gift of Christ Himself and as a participation in the gifts of one another. The Supper is the healing of the wounds sustained between God and man, man and man, God and earth and earth and man. It is the Great Remembrance.

True remembrance brings the past and the future into contact. In the Supper remembrance is ‘until He comes’. Indeed, each Supper is a mini-’coming’ itself. Such a fusion of remembrance and anticipation is only possible in an order where death is not the end. For the world the past dies, never to be raised again. It may leave its traces in the present, but even those traces hasten towards the tomb. For the world the tomb is the place of no return, the maw that swallows even the greatest gift.

The Church proclaims a Gift that is greater than death. For the Christian the tomb is always paralleled with the womb. So it has been from the very beginning. The curse on the ground is paralleled with the curse on the womb. Job came naked from his mother’s womb and naked, he said, he would return there. David was knit together in the lowest parts of the earth. Those who sleep will one day awake. By the power of the Spirit the groaning earth will one day be delivered of her children. Indeed we ourselves are the firstfruits. Consequently, the death of those in our past is never final. In remembering them we anticipate their resurrection. We find healing in the communion formed by the Holy Spirit between all saints, dead or alive.

How then do we celebrate a Remembrance Service for non-Christians who have died? How can we remember with the world, whilst not remembering as the world? Is there a healing of wounds to be found here or is there no way in which Christians can remember in a Christian way the deaths of those who rejected Christ? Is there a sense in which even the death of the wicked is not completely in vain? God promises the bringing together of all things in Christ: will He rescue all deaths from complete meaninglessness? I believe that He will. I believe that there is cause for thanksgiving and firm hope for healing to be found even for these sorest of scars. Someday I hope to be able to give clear expression to an understanding of this matter, but for the time being I want to give myself time to ponder.