Articles - From the Vicar

On each side of the river was the tree of life, which bears fruit twelve times a year, once each month; and its leaves are for the healing of the nations. (Revelation 22. 2)

The year turns inexorably and once again we reach November, a month whose late autumnal weather matches exactly the solemn mood of Remembrance Sunday, observed this year on 9th November. This day reminds us of what Wilfred Owen called 'the pity of war' and evokes in many a renewed sense of the fragility of peace as we contemplate the continuing human cost of conflict around the world. The 'healing of the nations' of which St. John speaks at the culmination of his great vision of the New Jerusalem seems as far away as it always has: too many of God's children are still condemned to know what another First World War poet called "the heart-break at the heart of things."

The ambivalence that many Christians feel about Remembrance Sunday is a reflection of the moral dilemmas about war that have been present in our tradition from the earliest times. Christian pacifism can be traced back, in part, to the command of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane when he told Peter to put his sword back in its sheath after the impetuous disciple had cut off the ear of the High Priest's slave. On the other hand there have also been many devout Christians who have considered violence to be a legitimate means of furthering a just cause: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, joined in the plot to assassinate Hitler because he thought that not to do so would be a greater crime. The moral dilemmas are present for us today as well: opinion continues to be divided among Christians about the legitimacy of attacking Iraq. What surely can not be doubted by any of us is that warfare and violence, the fruits of fallen humanity's tragic disfigurement of the divine image, point us away from the Kingdom of God and blur our awareness of what God has created us to be.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay