It is said of Alan Bond, the famous 80s business tycoon, that, with his yacht Australia II trailing by three races to one in the final of the America’s Cup, he reminded his team of Gallipoli and then said: ‘We had our backs to the wall there and we won that one...’Bond’s mistake is forgiveable: it is certainly strange that Australians and New Zealanders choose to celebrate a military disaster. But I think it is a happy oddity. Anzac Day is a great day for a war remembrance because we are reminded by it of the moral ambiguity and futility of war. We not tempted by the memory of April 25th 1915 to indulge in a sickening triumphalism; neither is it a day that brings old resentments bubbling to the surface. This day tells us that it is hard to make sense of war, because war itself is a grim absurdity.
The generation that lost its young men in the trenches recognised this. As the task of memorialising the dead began, the sheer horror of what had occurred evidently sank in. There were heroes, but not many. How do you honour the deaths of those who were evaporated by heavy explosives, or who drowned in the mud? What honour was there in dying that way, or of lying falling on a piece of ground that would be lost to the enemy in a few months?
And so, the one Bible verse that is most frequently found on war memorials and graves is the one from John’s gospel – a saying of Jesus himself: ‘Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends’. This almost makes sense: it speaks of sacrifice for others in a way that isn’t saying something about dying for love of my country, or the empire, nor for love of some great principle or cause, whatever that might be. We modern people in our ignorance and inexperience of the real world are now more hesitant to accept that these things are worth dying for in the first place. But, to die for your friends? – It’s a thought that resonates with antipodeans, because we know what counts is your friends – your mates. But can those whose intent it was to kill others really be given credit for the greatest of all loves? That was their calling as soldiers, after all. Can applying this verse to the fallen give their deaths meaning, or redeem something for us from the absurdity of war? I confess that I feel more than a little disquiet when I read these words on a memorial of war.
Whether it can or no, the memorial makers at least knew where the template for loving sacrifice of a life was to be found. They knew, in a way that we have perhaps forgotten, that Jesus’ death on the cross was the sacrifice of love par excellence. Jesus dies ‘for his friends’ – in their place and for their benefit. He dies for his friends because they are threatened by great enemies – evil, sin and death – and helpless to battle them alone. These enemies are more fierce and more insidious than Turks, or Germans, or Viet Cong or the Taliban. They have us in their grasp and won’t release us.
He was not a conscript, but a willing volunteer. He left the safety and comfort of his Father’s throneroom and faced down the things that threaten us with with utter disintegration, seeking the reconciliation of human beings with their God. He himself suffered the indignity and apparent futility of a cruel and violent death, offering his own body as a sacrifice for the sins of humankind. Yet this was not meaningless suffering. This was the greatest of loves: it was selfless, painful and costly. But it was not pointless: it was a death that defeated death. Death and sin were outflanked by this divine man’s death.
War continues: and it stands as evidence of the spiritual darkness that still besets all of us despite our potential for noble and valorous action. We should remember on Anzac Day that the most glorious things human beings do are found next to the most obscene. Courage and inventiveness lie side by side with incompetence and bloodthirstiness. Remembrance of war should never be a comfortable thing, if we are to be honest. It should never be romanticised. As the generations of those who actually witnessed the two world wars passes on, we may be tempted to forget how awful war was for them; and to remember not the real Gallipoli, but the Gallipoli that Mel Gibson was at. It’s a temptation we would do well to resist.
When we pause at a war memorial, however, and read the text ‘Greater love has no-one than this’ we have reason to feel something else, too: gratitude. Gratitude to those who served and died to protect others certainly, whatever we feel about war itself. But, moreso, we be can thankful to Jesus Christ who died to set us free from sin, evil and death: all the components that go to make up a war. The death of the soldier may or may not have been in vain; it certainly did not bring an end to hostility between human beings. But by using this verse, even wrongly, the survivors are bearing testimony both to the inescapable power of the evil which brings us down and also to a death which did make a real difference. The death of Jesus Christ signals the end of enmity – between God and humankind, and between human beings themselves. There is the possibility for us now, in accepting his offer of friendship, of experiencing for ourselves the greatest of loves – an offer we have only to receive.
