For the Fallen of War

Not always, but sometimes, the instincts of the nation and the instincts of the Church come into harmony. And today - Memorial Day - is one of those times.

War disrupts and cuts off too many lives far too soon. More than forty million have died fighting for this country in its many wars beginning with the revolution. The nation’s instinct has been to honor and remember these fallen soldiers with ceremonies and by visiting and decorating their graves. This eventually became the annual civil holiday first known as Decoration Day and now known as Memorial Day.

This, as I say, harmonizes with the instincts of the Church.

War has been a part of human behavior for all of history. And even before the coming of Christ, the people of God knew to remember and pray for those whose lives it claimed.

Attributed arms of David, Joshua, and Judas Maccabeus,
three of the "Nine Worthies"

The Old Testament books of Maccabees tell of the Jewish Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire and against their oppression of the Jews. Many who died in one of the battles of this war had committed the sin of idolatry and when Judah Maccabee discovered this, he and his men “turned to prayer, begging that the sin which had been committed might be wholly blotted out” (2 Macc 12:42). He then saw to it that a sin offering was made for them in Jerusalem (12:43). He did this because he expected the resurrection of the dead and he knew therefore that the men who had died were not without hope and had a future.

We also believe in the resurrection of the dead. We know that our fallen men and women whose lives were cut short by war will one day rise again and those who believe will rise in Christ and live in him forever. And so now today we pray for them, even as Judah Maccabee prayed for his fallen men.

Even if they had sinned, they can yet be forgiven by the mercy of God. For them and for all the Lord Jesus offers his one perfect holy sacrifice and oblation of the cross, death, burial, and resurrection. In his resurrection is their hope of resurrection and life. In his mercy, is their hope of forgiveness and salvation. Let us commend them all to him and to his grace.

Violent Prayer

“The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent bear it away” (Matt. 11:12). What does this mean?

This runs somewhat against our usual way of speaking as Christians, even though these are the words of Jesus Christ. This is no pacifist blurb, but a warcry! When Jesus says things like this, if we have a pacifist tendency, maybe we get embarrassed and don’t know how to respond. Or, if we are disposed the other way, maybe we get heated and take it as a justification for the violence we do or long to do or see done toward others. But I don’t think Jesus is talking about doing violence against others as a path to heaven.

I think he may be speaking rather about the spiritual warfare of the ascetic life. He’s talking about John the Baptist, after all - a great ascetic (for whom I’m named, by the way) who lives in the wasteland and not in a palace; who dresses in coarse robes of camel’s hair and nothing soft and luxurious; who fasts constantly - eating only locusts and wild honey (Matt 3:4; 11:7-8). (By the way, did you know that we can eat insects during fasting seasons? No one ever wants to take that up for some reason….) This ascetic way of life involves a kind of intense striving that may well be called violent.

St Gregory of Sinai says, “No bodily or spiritual activity without pain or toil ever brings fruit to him who practices it, because ‘the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.”

He’s speaking of the effort involved in prayer. Our prayer must be joined to effort, to work, to toil, to striving, even to violent striving. We must pray even if it is inconvenient or uncomfortable - especially if it is inconvenient or uncomfortable! We must join our prayer to fasting and ascetic discipline. Otherwise, we’re telling ourselves and the whole world that other things are more important.

But nothing is more important than God and entering into union with him, entering the kingdom of heaven, taking it by force.

 Icon of the Third Finding of the Head of John the Baptist (bottom, center),
surrounded by St. Onesiphorus and other saints
Konetz, 19th century, Russia

Yet, today is a feast day. The Church feasts as well as fasts. Today is not a fast day, but a double feast day! It is the feast of the third finding of the head of John the Baptist and it is a post-festive day of Pentecost. Even though today is Friday, we do not fast even from meat today because of Pentecost. This is one of only a few Fridays of the year when we traditionally eat meat.

But we are celebrating a great faster! So that’s a bit paradoxical. We feast to celebrate finding the head of one who always fasted.

The other similar feast - the feast of the first and second findings of the head of John the Baptist, we also feast. (They kept losing his head! First he lost his head and then the Church kept losing it again!) It usually falls during the Great Fast, so we mitigate the fasting on that day if it does.

Then there is the day of his beheading. On that day we fast! Our Church commemorates the Beheading of John on August 29th with a strict fast - traditionally, we also eat nothing head-shaped on that day and nothing from a plate, in remembrance of John’s head, which was put on a platter for Salome.  

So, for losing his head we fast, but for finding his head we feast. There is death and there is also resurrection. The two are intertwined. You can’t have one without the other. As Paul says today, “we are… always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:10). This is a violence in us as Christians - the violent death of Jesus is always within us, because we are baptized into his body.  If we would rise with Christ, first we must die with Christ (Rom. 6). If we would enter the kingdom of heaven, first we must become a people of persistent, fervent, violent prayer, make war against our own sinful passions, and take it by force.

The Mystery of Good and Evil

Why do we suffer? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why is it that babies sometimes die before they get a chance to live? Why is it that sometimes they are born blind, like the man in today's Gospel?

Healing of the man born blind
Codex Egberti, Fol 50

Theologians know that God does not make death – that no evil comes from God – that God is the author of every good and only good. In other words, theologians know that God is not to blame for our suffering or for death or for blindness.

Whence come these things into the world, then? Well, the wages of sin is death, they also say with St. Paul (Rom 6:23). So, it would seem that sin, which is missing the mark, is the origin of every injustice – every instance of a good person suffering evil maybe rightly blamed on sin – either on their own sin or on someone else's sin. It's clear that it's not always our own sin that causes us to suffer, though it often is. But if someone persecutes or abuses you, you suffer even though you have done nothing wrong. Everything that Jesus suffers is like this. Jesus is altogether sinless. Yet, he suffers greatly from the sins of others who persecute him and mock him and torture him and crucify him. When we suffer at the hands of others, we do well to remember that Jesus has identified with us in that – and has taught us how to respond to it – with forgiveness.

Nonetheless, people usually do not respond that way to the injustices they suffer. Most people, when they get hurt, lash out and hurt others – often the ones they hurt aren't even people that did them any harm. Sometimes, for example, a boss will humiliate someone at work and, too fearful and cowardly to respond like a Christian to the one who has wronged him – with courage and honesty – and without animosity or resentment, instead they swallow the humiliation and shame and anger and resentment and bring that home to their spouse and their kids – snapping at them and humiliating them, though they're totally innocent and only want love and kindness.

Sometimes, we're not even good at revenge. Revenge is a bad thing but taking it out on the innocent is even worse. Yet many times this is what we do.

In this way, our sin sends out ripples of harm into the world. That's clear. When one person gets hurt, it often leads to them hurting others. Hurt people hurt people. It's not a justification, by the way. There is no justification for us to hurt each other – to be nasty to one another, or unforgiving, or judgmental. It's not a justification, it's just an observation. This can all be easily observed in our own lives.

Partly extrapolating from these experiences, many theologians have concluded that all suffering results from sin. I have often counted myself as one who agrees with them. There are the obvious ways in which this is the case, such as the examples I have described, but there are also hidden ways in which our sins hurt other people and ourselves.

We are spirits as well as bodies and so our sins have spiritual ramifications in the spiritual world as well as physical ramifications in the physical world. Sin is a break with our true created nature, which is both spiritual and material. We cannot even begin to imagine how much suffering each of our sins, voluntary and involuntary, brings into the world – into the whole cosmos. With our sin, which is unnatural, we disrupt the whole created order of nature.

So if we understand that sin is the cause of all human suffering, the disciples' question to Jesus about the man blind since birth seems to be a reasonable one: "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John 9:2). You see, they understood that blindness results from sin. That's true.  It's true of both physical blindness and spiritual blindness. 

And they understood that we suffer from one another's sins as well as from our own. In Exodus, the Lord says he will visit “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children” (Ex 20:5; 34:7). So they suggested that it might be the sins of his parents rather than his own sins that resulted in his blindness. Again, it’s not unreasonable, especially if we understand that this man's parents include not only his mother and his father but even all his ancestors back to his first parents Adam and Eve. Surely the world is broken and sometimes people are born blind into this broken world because of sin.

We might also add the sins of demons to our consideration. Their sins too – and not only the sins of us humans – yield great suffering in the cosmos. They too are at war with God and with their own created nature.

In any case, despite all of this, Jesus once again confounds conventional theology. He says, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him" (John 9:3). Jesus later says the same thing about the illness of Lazarus, saying that “it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it” (John 11:4).

I am left gasping at this explanation which confounds all my reason. I can dance around it with cleverness and point out that Jesus does not altogether deny the role of sin in the origin of blindness. He only says that it wasn't the sins of this man or his parents. One could argue that perhaps the sins of others or the sins of demons are to blame. But Jesus doesn't blame any sin at all in his etiology of the blindness. My reason wants to chirp, “If sin is not to blame, then what? If no sinner is at fault, then who? God?” I cannot blame God for this man's blindness. But Jesus says that he is blind so that the works of God might be made manifest in him.

I understand very well that Jesus heals him – and that this is a work of God that reveals the divinity of Jesus. I understand very well that the Lord uses the man's blindness to teach the world to see. This is what the Lord does again and again. Out of the darkness, he brings light – as on the first day of creation. He says, “Let there be light.” And there is light. I see that, out of death, the Lord brings life. By death, he tramples death. And so, how fitting that through the blindness of one man, he gives many the eyes of faith. The man whose eyes are opened testifies to the healing and that Jesus is of God, and he believes and worships Jesus (9:11, 25, 30-33, 38).

The Lord brings good out of evil. That's what the Lord does. But he is the origin of no evil. So today, when he says that the man is blind so that God can heal him, I don't understand. That's a mystery to me. It's rather like the mystery of the cross.

I want to ask Jesus after he gives his explanation, "Yeah, but, had it not been for sin in the world, surely this man would not have been born blind?" But that's not the kind of question we're going to hear from Jesus or his disciples. That's the kind of speculative theology they don't get into. Maybe that kind of thinking is more Greek than Hebrew – or maybe it's more a curse of this age than that to be vexed by such questions. You won't hear them saying things like, "Well, if reality were other than it is, what then would this or that be?" That's not their shtick – not at all. Jesus is much more interested in healing this man than in theoretically analyzing his condition.

We ought to be like Jesus in this. Simply love, show compassion, heal, deliver, all to the glory of God, rather than trying to subject everything to our finite analytical human understanding, as if reality, or even God, were subject to us. If instead, we seek to glorify God, then God blesses us beyond all understanding.

The mystery of good and evil is beyond our comprehension. And there comes a time to accept that we cannot understand everything and that every answer we can give is a lie. Perhaps we can understand best in silent contemplation of the awesome mystery when we stop trying to figure everything out and abandon ourselves completely to God.