Remembrance Sunday: Today and tomorrow

Job 19.23-27a, Luke 20.27-38

I’m sure that over the next few days, in this season of Remembrance, we will all hear at some point the famous words we know as the Kohima Epitaph, 

When you go home, tell them of us and say

‘For your tomorrow, we gave our today.’

The Epitaph is inscribed on the memorial at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Kohima, on the India-Myanmar border, the site of a crucial battle in WW2, and they are especially treasured by those who fought in the Far East, but they are powerful words for all of us. 

They capture perfectly that sense of loss not only of the lives those who died were living then, but of the futures they might have had, the lives they would have gone on to live, which were laid down for the futures of others – our futures, the lives we lead now.

They are a reminder that Remembrance Sunday isn’t just about death; far more fundamentally it’s about life. Every year, it is a wake up call to us all to be aware of what we treasure, of all that is precious in our everyday lives, and how easily it can be lost when hatred and division spiral into violence and bloodshed. 

My father served in the Royal Navy throughout the Second World war. He was part of the evacuation operation from Dunkirk, sailing seven times across the channel to rescue soldiers from the beaches, and then served on small Motor Torpedo Boats off the coast of Yugoslavia, trying to distract German U-boats so that the Yugoslavian resistance could do its work. It was dangerous work. Like many other veterans, he rarely talked about it, and certainly never glorified it, so I wasn’t sure what reaction I would get when I asked him once if he would talk to my son about his war for a project he was doing at primary school. He agreed, and I remember him saying “It’s good that they learn about it” he said, “so that it doesn’t happen again.” What mattered to him wasn’t just remembering the past, it was remembering the past, in the present, so that the future could be different, and I’m sure he wasn’t unusual in that.

Our Bible readings today are about the past, present and future too, about life and death. 

Some Sadducees come to Jesus, with a very strange question. The Sadducees were one of a number of religious groupings in first century Judaism and were largely drawn from the elites, the upper classes, the people who ran the Temple. As Luke helpfully tells us, they didn’t believe in life after death. That may come as a surprise, because that’s often assumed to be an intrinsic part of religious faith, but it was an idea which had only very slowly taken hold in Judaism. The Jewish scriptures – our Old Testament -  are rather vague, and not always consistent about what happens after death.

But by the time of Jesus most people did think there would be some sort of general resurrection and judgement at the end of time. It was only really the Saducees who held out against this view though. 

They come to Jesus to see where he stands, with a rather ridiculous scenario. “So,” Jesus, “what if a man dies without heirs?” By Jewish law, if this happened his brother was supposed to marry his widow, and her children would count as heirs for his dead brother, so there was someone to carry on his name. But what if the second husband died before she had a child, they asked Jesus, and the next brother married her, and the same happened again and again and again until she had gone through all the brothers? If there was a resurrection, whose wife would she be?

You can almost hear Jesus sighing. Where to begin? His answer is blunt – he knows a strawman argument when he hears one. Basically he says “what happens after death is nothing like anything you can imagine – it’s not just more of this life, it’s something completely outside your ability to understand. All that matters is that whether we live or die, we are the presence of God, “to whom all are alive”. 

In our Old Testament reading Job says, “I know that my Redeemer lives…in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold and not another.” He has lost everything – family, wealth, health – and he knows that ultimately, like all of us, he will lose even his life. There will come a time when - “worms destroy my body” as the King James version of the Bible puts it,  which I think is rather more vivid than the version we heard today “after my skin has been thus destroyed”.  But living or dying, he knows he can’t lose God, and God can’t lose him, and that is what matters most to him. Living or dying he is with God; that’s all he needs to know to help him in this present moment, to get through this time of pain and sorrow.

On Remembrance Day we look back to the past, of course, with gratitude to those who have gone before us, those who gave their today so that we could have a tomorrow. And we look forward to the future, to the peace of God “whose will is to restore all things” as the collect put it. But most importantly we are called to look at the present, to look for the God who is the God of living, the God who is with us now, calling us to live this day well, to see and deal with the things which prevent his peace from becoming a reality; the resentments, the prejudices, the words and actions which diminish others, and, left unchallenged, grow into hatred and war. The present is the only thing we have any control over. Today is where we can make a difference. 

We may never – please, God – have to lay down our lives in war in the way that those soldiers commemorated by the Kohima Epitaph did. We may never have to give our today physically so that others can have a tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean that our “today” doesn’t matter, because our “today”, however unimportant is might seem in the grand scheme of things, shapes tomorrow for those who come after us. The God who is present with us today calls us to take it as seriously as he does.

Amen