Holocaust Memorial

The following is the text of the sermon preached in Saint Matthew’s on the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time 2002 - Holocaust Memorial Day.

Sitting on a hill overlooking the old city of Jerusalem there is a sort of a theme-park.  The beauty of the grounds belies the gruesome theme, although those who are familiar with crematoria might recognise the style.  For this is Yad Vashem – the Jewish memorial to the Holocaust.  For many, to visit there is one of the most moving experiences available on God’s earth.  The complex in its entirety is not without its tendentious aspects, but the memorial itself and the children’s memorial are at the same time truly heart-rending and beyond assimilation as one tries to contemplate the sheer quantity of brutality to which they bear witness.  However, the horrors of the Holocaust were not the first time that the Jewish people endured the oppression of others.

The first reading this morning from the Prophecy of Isaiah is extracted from a larger unit.  To understand the full impact of the Great Light, you need to read what goes before.  The confusion of desolation has reigned.  People had found that those to whom they felt that they could look for help and protection had failed them – had betrayed their trust.  They walked in darkness.  They wondered whether there would ever be a time of hope again.  And yet, the Light of hope did rise.  The oppressor was crushed and they walked free.

As a succinct statement of the history of European Jews in the thirties and forties, little could rival this.  Jews of all classes found that their country, their friends, even members of their family turned on them.  The excuses and reasons have been legion, but in the end, the result was the same; for many, death in the gas chambers was the least of the horrors of the Holocaust.

Then suddenly it fell away.  The military fortunes of the Nazis faltered and plunged; the state-sponsored framework of oppression fell away, well, largely so, at least in Western Europe.  The Light of hope rose in the lives of those who were left, though adjustment to liberty and human dignity was not always easy, as Roman Frister makes clear in his book, and the scars in the characters of many survivors are still all too visible today.

It would be impossible here even to start on an account of the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany that culminated in the Nazi atrocities; but having said that, it must also be said that such a study would have to take in more than the Germans and would sweep much closer to home.  What is clear, however, is that it represented a complete and utter breakdown of humanity.

Although, in its horrified disbelief, the post-war world demanded that such a thing should never be allowed to happen again, we have seen shades of it, in Rwanda, in the Balkans and elsewhere.  We, of course, are civilised and cannot conceive of such a thing in our midst, but it is not difficult to find within ourselves the seeds of racism and envy and hatred, which if nurtured could take us down this path again.

For the Christian, this should be unthinkable, but Christians - clerics and laity - have taken part in all of the atrocities.  How can this be?  How could people who claim a loyalty to the Christ Who preached a love that should bind together all humanity connive in such wicked deeds.

In short, the answer is that those Christians took their eye off the ball, which is the Gospel.  In the second lesson this morning, one of the most famous bits of Paul’s writings, we can infer the beginning of such a process – and Saint Paul warns them against their folly.

We may guess that after Paul had established the Church in Corinth, other Christians had dropped by: Apollos, maybe Saint Peter or representatives of his church.  They had brought with them new fashions, new perspectives, which appealed to some of the folks in the Corinthian Church.  These charismatic figures had attracted popular support and tensions had begun to develop in the community as the different styles jostled for ascendancy.

In this process, the fundamental Christian principles of unity and love had begun to sink below a rising storm of competition, envy and bitterness.  Their founder warns the Corinthian Church that this is the road to ruin.  In the battle for supremacy, the various factions are undermining the very foundations of their Faith, which is their fellowship in Christ.  They are placing loyalty to the messenger above their allegiance to the One in Whose Name he claims to speak.

Something of this can be seen underpinning the Holocaust.  The principle of the dignity of every human being was lost as political fashions and attitudes based on irrational envy and hate began to command the loyalty of significant sections of the European population.

The charismatic orator, Adolf Hitler, buttressed by a brutally efficient administrative machinery, attracted a devotion and following that drowned out the natural revulsion that one human being should have at the mutilation of another.  The bigger picture of the family of humankind was obscured by the perceived attractions of the Nazis.  The Allied victory shone some light into the pall of darkness that had descended over Europe, though it would be precious to think that the fate of the Holocaust victims was the principle preoccupation of those prosecuting the military advance.

As Christians, we look to Christ as the focus of the Light that rises in the darkness of human despair.  In the Gospel this morning, He is identified as the Light of the Isaianic Prophecy.  If we keep His Person and His teaching as the primary focus of our loyalty, then we will not allow ourselves to be hi-jacked by the siren voices of political and social fashion, which can clothe the truly evil.

We should realise also, that Christ is not the initiator of the principle that one human being should not abuse another, but the embodiment and revelation of it.  In the Gospel reading, as Jesus embarks on His ministry of preaching, he does not say something new, but echoes and develops the teaching of Saint John the Baptist, who Himself stood in a line of prophets, which stretches back through Isaiah to the early times of the Israelite Kingdom.

The principle that one human being should not abuse another is woven into the very being of our condition – it is not a specifically Christian precept, but one that holds good for the whole of humanity.  As you wander along the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, you will see that some of the heroes of the Holocaust were lay and clerical Christians, inspired in their actions by their devotion to their God; others were not.  Oskar Schindler’s almost reckless heroism emerged from his wide-boy corruption.

The events of the Holocaust are a terrible warning about how inhumanly human beings can behave.  As Christians, we are called to bear witness to the Light that illuminates a better way that is not only a possibility, but an imperative from the God Who made us.  It falls to us, to bear witness to that Light by rejecting all temptation to follow a different path and trying by our words and deeds to shine that Light into the darker places of our world.

Since the totality of the Holocaust is too much for any of us to comprehend, I leave you with one scene from the darkness:

It was sometimes the habit during these years [for a soldier to hold a baby] at arm’s length by the leg, shooting it with a pistol.  Sometimes the mother looked on in horror.  The tiny corpse was then dropped like so much trash and left to rot.

God forbid that we should ever have any part, however small, in such a thing.

Home page: http://stmatthewsnewcastle.org.uk/