No Greater Love

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

For me to read this text on Memorial Sunday is to remember the many times as a schoolboy in our military marching band I blew “Last Post” at our town’s war memorial. Before I knew they were from the gospel of John I knew these words as a glorification of death in war. A version of these Gospel words was carved on the monument, and appears on similar monuments throughout the erstwhile British Empire. To my young mind they meant that the most admirable, the most noble, the sweetest and most honorable thing I could do with my life is to lay it down in the wars of the Empire. “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” 

The pagan equivalent of such words is the line from the Roman poet Horace, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – “It is a sweet and honorable thing to die for the fatherland.” Let me read you this fragment from a poem by Wilfred Owen, a decorated British officer in WW1 who was killed three days before the armistice. You must imagine the poet walking behind a cart that bumps along, on which lie boys poisoned by gas. “Gas! GAS! Quick boys!…/ If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/ Come gargling from the forth-corrupted lungs,/ Obscene as cancer, bitter as cud/ Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-/ My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory,/ The old lie: Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori.

Wars and lies go together, says Owen, and we have seen clear evidence of that truth once again. Dare one ask at last why we went to war in Iraq? What shall we tell the loved ones of the 150 plus US casualties, the 50 plus British casualties, and the many more Iraqi casualties when their loved ones ask why they died? Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Where is the advantage in combating global terrorism? Where shall a Western democracy come from there? At last an honest word from the Administration, “We did it to make a statement.” “What statement?” we ask, and the answer comes in terms of a neo-imperialism. They died not to defend home and hearth but to extend power and influence and make the world safe for Greater Israel. They died as the victims of the lies of big government, big media, and big egos. They died to make a statement.

“Oh,” you say, “no politics in the pulpit!” Have your read the Bible lately? What do you think the prophets of the OT spoke about? Why do you think Jesus cleansed the temple, because he wanted to stay out of politics? And, concerning today’s text: why should we let the political powers of this world steal and manipulate our Christian texts and not protest? Why should we allow them to get away with a political interpretation of this saying that makes it justify, even glorify, death in war, without crying out, “Enough! Stop! You are blaspheming God!” It has always been, and still is, the duty of the prophet to speak clearly against the idolatry that identifies God with our particular politics. Who are the idolaters at present?

Not only Bin Laden but also George Bush! They are mirror images of each other, those two, each claiming to be guided by God, each cavalier with the blood of people, each claiming to be doing great good. Bush said recently that we are a great nation not because of our military power but because we do not hate but rather love one another; we do not wish to punish Iraq but to liberate it; and nobody had the courage to laugh out loud, probably because we fear being punished by our loving fellow citizens (cf. the “Dixie Chicks”). We dare not even hint, for fear of our fellow citizens, that our leaders are liars who spend human blood not in justified defense against an immediate threat but for imperialist ambitions, as if blood were like money, to be spent to make a statement. The last time great powers behaved this way was in the days of the Empires; this is imperial policy not American democracy.

This Memorial Sunday I believe is a dark time for America, because we are driven by imperial ambition. We are submerged in a sea of lies, greed and violence, sanctified by false religion, and deep in economic distress. Our president glorifies the military, quite contrary to our tradition, appearing as the ludicrous and proverbial “President on Horseback,” well known from banana republics, a stance that the great generals who became president, Washington, Grant, Eisenhower carefully avoided. Now we have a president who never went to war addressing the nation from the decks of a warship on which he landed like top gun! This is a dark hour because we are now led by an imperial policy spearheaded by the military (cf. Rumsfeld), like the ones that drove the Roman Empire (which crucified Jesus), the Stalinist Empire, and the Third Reich. Might makes right and we are mighty so whatever we choose to do is right, and reasons given might as well be big lies as small.

This is a dark hour because our state has become a threat to us, its own citizens. Perhaps some of you saw last week parts of the network TV miniseries on the rise of Hitler. Even with all its kitchiness the fragment I saw chilled me. I saw how easily power gets out of control, and how willing good citizens are to trust the government. We have people in Federal custody at present without charges being brought, without recourse to lawyers, that is, without the protection of habeas corpus, which is pretty much the cornerstone of our democracy, the law and custom that the government shall not take you away early in the morning never to heard from again. Last week for the first time in my experience the airline I reserved with told me that it would send my itinerary to the government. Is this still the land of the free? Do we care? Is not vigilance still the price of liberty? (See the United Church News for June, pA3, for an account of the impact of the Patriot Act on the community of Hillsboro, Oregon, where Maher Hawash, a Palestinian American citizen and software engineer for Intel was terrorized by the FBI, arrested and detained for more than a month without any charges being brought, his house searched at gunpoint while his wife and three young children were there. Read also what the First Congregational UCC in Hillsboro did to defend this Palestinian American Muslim, and ask whether our congregation could conceivably do the same thing, or do we believe that the government is right to do this to its citizens, or interpret such concern as partisan criticism of a Republican administration, or what? See also the website: http://www.ucc.org/justice/civilliberties/). I have just finished a moving memoir of a soldier in the German army on the Russian front in WW2 (Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier). The suffering is indescribable, the destruction unspeakable. I thought, “How much horror could have been prevented if good citizens and conscientious pastors had resisted Hitler at the very beginning of his rise!” But the church was mostly silent, keeping out of politics, and good citizens trusted the political parties. This is a dark hour for our republic, when citizens must fear the government.

Now let us change the context of interpretation, and look again at our text in another context, of the Bible and the church. So far we have interpreted it in the political context, to which it was hijacked by the state’s pagan cult of human sacrifice, in order to refute this blasphemous misuse, which makes a saying on Christ’s love for his friends to glorify death in battle. Now we ask, “What does the Bible itself tell us about who these friends are for whom we lay down our lives?” In John’s gospel they are our fellow-Christians, and the point is that since Jesus laid down his life in order to make us friends we should maintain that friendship with him and with one another even if it costs us our life. He made us his friends not his servants, and we remain so if we obey his command, and that command is simply, “Love one another.” So the friends in this passage are not our fellow soldiers, or fellow citizens, or our fellow Republicans, as the politicians want us to believe so that they can make Jesus complicit in their violence, but our fellow believers who love us as we love them, and live obedient to the Bible, as we read it through Christ. The saying is a teaching on the nature of the Christian community, the central place of Christ and the essential importance of love in that community, and on the confrontational stance that that community must take towards a world of lies that parades as a world of love.

When we compare this saying with some others, in Paul and in the gospel of Matthew respectively, we see what a special case the setting in John is. In Paul (Romans 5:10) and in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:43-47) we are commanded to love not our friends but our enemies. Paul says that God shows his love for us in that while we were his enemies Christ died for us, and in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus assumes that we love our friends, that that is nothing remarkable, but what is remarkable, and what is demanded, is that we love our enemies. Unless John’s Jesus intends to contradict Matthew’s Jesus, and to say that Paul got it all wrong, John’s “friends” must be different from the human race in general, a very special, intimate group - the group of those who by their love are intimate with Jesus and with one another, the core group of the real church.

Let me summarize: To the state, which loves war because war gives it its chief reason to exist, our text says, “Stop using me to idolize yourself and to enlist Jesus in the depravity of your wars.” To the church it says, “Remember, what holds your community together is the love of God in the death of Jesus! The world will always try to turn you to its own service, to make your love of Christ into the love of country, the truth of God into the lie of government, but you can resist because we have overcome the world, “…This is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith…” and our faith is this, “…that Jesus is the Son of God,” (1John 5:4-5), that Jesus is Lord of the church, not lackey of the state, that Jesus is king of all nations, not prince of the patriots.

Amen.