ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Before we come to how they are linked, let me turn to two other acts of remembrance which have taken place recently:

Our age thinks it right and salutary to remember; to remember especially the victims of cruelty and injustice; to remember those who died in the tragedy of human conflict. To forget the victims is to do them a further injustice, to condemn them to a second death, to consign them to the ranks of the forgotten. To remember them is to honour them, to do them some justice. To remember them publicly is to bring some possibility of healing; to individuals, to families, to society, to nation, to world.

To remember the consequences of human inhumanity is to have some possibility of preventing it happening again - although we cannot claim to have been very successful on that score.

But remembrance is a complicated and ambiguous business. It will not suffice to remember if all that means is to nurse resentment of wrongs suffered. Memory can be poisonous; it can serve to justify the unjustifiable, it can turn the victim into the victimiser.

Today, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we have remembered the end of the cruellest and most destructive war the world had known - but it was not to be the most evil and violent it would know. Yet greater horrors were in store, and their seeds lay in the memory of that "War to end all Wars."

Yesterday was the anniversary of "Kristallnacht" - "The Night of Broken Glass" - the anti-Jewish pogrom orchestrated by the Nazis in 1938 which left the synagogues of Germany in ruins. It was to be the foreshadowing of an unimaginably greater horror.

This orgy of destructive hatred sprang from the remembrance of Germany's defeat in war, and the desire nursed in poisoned imaginations for revenge, for scapegoats.

How then is remembrance to heal, to reconcile, and to enable people to move on? How is it to enable us to forget in the right sense; that is of not allowing past hurts to dictate and distort the future of our lives?

Here, as Christians, we must turn to the remembrance of the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord.

In the Passion we see:

But in our remembrance of the Passion in the Eucharist, we are also reminded that Christ died for all. He died as a substitute, in the place of the offenders, for those who cause suffering, for the enemies of God. He died not just for those who inflicted death on him directly, but for all.

If our remembering of the Passion is to be true to the Gospel, then it must speak not just of solidarity with victims and judgement of perpetrators, but of forgiveness and reconciliation. The passion of Christ demands of Christians that we recognise that the grace of God extends to every human being. Since the perpetrators are part of the "all" for whom Christ died, they also obtain mercy; that divine emancipation which frees them from the guilt of their evil deeds and the power of their evil desires. In the memory of the Passion, evil doers are remembered as forgiven and freed from the hold of evil on their lives.

In the memory of the Passion, we honour victims even while extending grace to evil-doers. In taking upon himself the wrong-doing done to sufferers, God identifies it truthfully and condemns it justly for what it is. As a substitute, Christ removes from wrongdoers the guilt of their sin, but he does not distort or disregard the sin itself. He does not pretend that it did not happen or that it does not matter.

More than that, however, Christ offers to victims and victimisers alike his own saving presence. He is the risen Christ, not some tragic past victim, wistfully remembered. In that strange incident in today's gospel, that rabbinic argument over a text in the Law, Jesus is asking the Sadducees, those theological conservatives, to see the possibility that God can do something new; that the resurrection means that what happens in this world is not the measure of what is possible in the love of God. We are enabled to love in a way which transcends the limits of earthly power. He asks us to believe that we who find it difficult enough to be reconciled with family or friends we have quarrelled with, let alone those who might have destroyed our family, to believe that in sharing his risen life we find the power to overcome enmity.

The resurrection of Jesus, his victory over sin and death, which we celebrate in the Eucharist, is God's pledge to all victims that wrongdoing cannot destroy the core of their being nor determine their future possibilities. Sin and death to not have the last word: God, who had the first word in creating us, does!

The Christ who forgave his murderers as they crucified him, is present with us through his Spirit. He gives us power to emulate him by both struggling against wrongdoing and forgiving wrongdoers. The memory of his Passion gives back to the wronged their true identity as the beloved children of God who are empowered to love as God loves. The memory of the Passion can do the same for the wrongdoer who acknowledges their wrong so that they might receive mercy. They must choose. They must remember their deeds truthfully.

So, when, like Job in today's first reading, we come to see God face to face, we will have the possibility not simply of remembrance but of reconciliation with our enemies. We will have the possibility of forgetting rightly, not in the sense of pretending that something did not happen, but in not allowing it to determine our life. For wrongdoers there is the possibility of forgiveness; for victims there is the possibility of forgiving.

The possibility will be there but we must choose it - whether we are victim or perpetrator, or both. But it is not just something for the future, for the end. In the power of the risen Christ, it is a real possibility here and now, and we must choose.

The Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops has not been known of late as an occasion of reconciliation. However, at the last one, there was a particularly moving occasion when it was. One day the worship was led by the bishops of the Church of Japan. It included an act of repentance for the cruelties inflicted by Japan during the war in the Far East. The act of worship was introduced by a priest from Britain, the Revd. Susan Cole-King. Her father was Bishop Leonard Wilson of Singapore. He had been imprisoned and tortured by the Japanese. After the war he was able not only to forgive his persecutors, but to baptise his principal tormentor into the Christian faith.