Letter from the Manse 

Dear Friends,

November is upon us and with it Remembrance Sunday which often includes the following familiar words:

'When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For Your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today.'

The Kohimah Epitaph. I did a little digging and found out some interesting facts about the epitaph. It derives from North East India where it is engraved on the Memorial of the 2nd British Division in the cemetery of Kohima. It is attributed to John Maxwell Edmonds (1875-1958), and is thought to have been inspired by the epitaph written by Simonides of Ceos to honour the Greeks who fell at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC. It is a World War II War Cemetery.

Kohima is where the Japanese advance was halted and the cemetery is a memorial to the 1,420 soldiers, including 917 Sikh and Hindu combatants, who gave their all for our tomorrow.

This year as we approach this special day I find myself in desperate anguish over the senseless destruction of lives and livelihoods we witness on a daily basis in our lounges as fighting and conflict rages all over the globe. I don’t know about you, but I can’t bear to look anymore. I wonder what the fallen of World War II might have to say to us today?

Why are we so powerless at preventing this? Why are we so quick to strike or strike back? Why does fear – fear for our safety, fear of deprivation, fear of the other, fear of some ill defined loss – drive us so inexplicably into destructive behaviour that turns cities into rubble and indiscriminately maims and kills human life without a second glance never mind thought?

I wonder if it might just be that at the heart of our faith lies an event that we might have just maybe misread?

The Cross.

The accepted wisdom, for the most part, is that the Cross is God’s way of dealing with our sin, our brokenness. God, who cannot bear to look upon sin, smites God’s only Son in order to assuage God’s wrath at our wilful disobedience. Jesus is the sacrificial Lamb who pays the price for our wrongdoing in his own blood and the deed is done. Even the sacrificial lambs slain in the Temple had a more dignified end than Jesus did.

If this is sanctioned violence in the full glare of the public eye then it is no wonder we have not found another way to deal with our disagreements and differences of opinion.

Here’s the what if – the other way of looking at the cross.

What if the Cross is not God’s idea but ours? What if Jesus’ death is not demanded by God, but by us? After all, who was it that stood baying for that outcome before Pilate that fateful day? It wasn’t God, it was us! We do that. Something beautiful, something different, someone who challenges our small thinking comes along and demonstrates, in all its beauty and glory what humanity is meant to be and we can’t stand the contradiction so we do the only thing we know how – we obliterate it.

That, I put to you, is the reason Jesus died. We couldn’t stand the contradiction. The challenge was just too great. It had to be done away with.

Richard Rohr, Brian McLaren and others have described Jesus death on the cross as the greatest act of non-violent love ever witnessed. The greatest act of non-violent love. Jesus does not lift a finger to defend himself even though he could have. Why?

Because the ultimate lesson of the Cross is simply this: Love NEVER dies!

So, what if that becomes the narrative rather than the previous one? Maybe, just maybe, I think, we’ll find the answer we’ve been searching for.

Blessings, Gavin