Jon Hauerwas – March 11, 2018 – “Because We Can’t Save Ourselves”

Psalm 107:1-3,17-22 and John 3:14-21

Mercifully, the United States and Japan are now allies. But, as you know well, our nations were once fierce adversaries. During World War II, it was the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor. And it was our nation which ultimately dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. The horror and tragedy of those occasions is hard to comprehend.

But, in the midst of widespread casualties are the individual stories of people who lived through these events. Perhaps they were soldiers, trained for occasions such as this, orcivilians living in the wrong place at the wrong time. Somehow, the war found them. And in the process, it seared their memories, changed their lives, and altered everything about existence as they knew it.

Ernest Gordon was a Scottish Prisoner of War during World War II who later wrote a book entitled Miracle on the River Kwai. In it, he describes his experience, and those of his fellow soldiers, at the hands of their Japanese captors as they were forced to build a railroad through the jungle.

Gordon writes:

As conditions steadily worsened, as starvation, exhaustion and disease took an ever-growing toll, the atmosphere in which we lived was increasingly poisoned by selfishness, hatred, and fear. We were slipping rapidly down the scale of degradation.

We lived by the rule of the jungle, “red in tooth and claw” – the evolutionary law of the survival of the fittest. It was a case of “I look out for myself and to hell with everyone else.” The weak were trampled underfoot, the sick ignored or resented, the dead forgotten. When a man lay dying we had no word of mercy. When he cried for our help, we averted our heads.

We had long since resigned ourselves to being derelicts. We were the forsaken men – forsaken by our families, by our friends, by our government. Now even God had left us.

Hate, for some, was the only motivation for living. We hated the Japanese…
In time even hate died, giving way to numb, black despair.[1]

John’s Gospel is filled with many allusions to darkness and light. The word, “night,” “is used metaphorically to represent separation from the presence of God” while “light’ describes its opposite.[2] Fittingly, the Fourth Gospel begins in this way: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

The message here is that even despair has its limits. One day, Ernest Gordon fell ill and was nursed back to health by two other men whose sacrifice became the impetus for a more coherent unit. Still, the difficulties continued until, one day, a shovel went missing. The commanding Japanese officer was enraged, and demanded that the missing shovel be produced or he would kill them all. No one moved until finally, one man stepped forward. The officer beat the man to death. Then, at the next tool check, the shovels were recounted. There had been a miscount at the first checkpoint. None of the instruments had been missing. The prisoners were stunned. An innocent man was willing to die to save everyone else.[3]

In Lent, and at this Table, we reflect upon Christ’s suffering for us. We do so in full recognition of that gracious act of selfless dying. Ernest Gordon’s fellow P.O.W.’s were profoundly changed that day. He and others felt a greater association with the suffering Christ, and he noticed a profound shift in the way in which the men treated one another. There was more care, more kindness.

When the men were finally liberated, the skeletal captives chose not to attack their captors. Instead, what they said to them was this: “No more hatred. No more killing. Now what we need is forgiveness.” [4]

As I draw to a close this morning, I wish to leave you with a brief reading from 1 Peter, chapter 2, where we find these words:“To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe, ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of thecorner’… But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy,but now you have received mercy.”

Friends, this is the message of grace upon grace. May it be so and all thanks be to God. Amen.

[1]

[2] Gail R. O’Day, John, The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary Volume IX, ed. Leander Keck (Abingdon Press, 1996), 548.

[3]Ibid.

[4]Ibid.