The destruction of towns and cities across Ukraine reminds us of our capacity as human beings to do terrible things to each other. It is heartbreaking for families in that war-torn country to see places they once called home reduced to wastelands. Sadly, history is a litany of war and destruction, always brutal and indiscriminate.
Some say that the letter to the Hebrews from which we read tomorrow is a sermon by an anonymous Christian to a largely Jewish audience who knew something about war. They suggest that after the first Jewish Roman war (circa 66 AD) their towns were flattened, lands seized and the temple in Jerusalem destroyed. Nonetheless, the author urges them to follow the example of their spiritual forbears like Abraham who always trusted God and was perceived to have been vindicated.
Comforting words certainly but challenging for anyone exposed to suffering with few signs of hope or deliverance. That was the experience of Elie Wiesel, a Jewish teenager, who lost his faith when he witnessed the execution of a child by the Nazis in Auschwitz during the second World War. “Never shall I forget that night,” he wrote, “the first night in the camp which has turned my life into one long night ... Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I’m condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.”
Another victim of those times, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, saw things differently: “I believe that God can and will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil ... I believe that God will give us all the strength we need to resist in all times of distress. But he never gives it in advance, lest we rely on ourselves and not on him alone.”
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Faith is more than fingers crossed, hope for the best. According to tomorrow’s reading: “Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” So, just as our physical eyesight is the sense that gives us evidence of the material world, faith is the “sense” that gives us evidence of the invisible, spiritual world. Dean Swift linked faith and vision by describing vision as the art of seeing things invisible.
That is what a young architect turned soldier was doing while serving in the second World War. In the summer of 1944, having landed on D-Day, he was appalled at the destruction he saw everywhere as his unit advanced through France. Standing among some ruins he was asked by a fellow soldier what he would do after the war. “I intend to build a cathedral,” he said. Beyond the desolation he could see a future, a promised land.
In the new building suffering and hope are met together in a stained-glass window
In November 1947 my father took me to England where his sister lived. We visited Coventry, still badly damaged from wartime bombing and I have a special memory of standing in the shell of the 14th-century cathedral which had been destroyed in a raid in November 1940. Fifteen years later, 1962, I watched the consecration service of the new Coventry Cathedral on TV, a resurrection in stone recognised worldwide today as a centre for the promotion of peace and reconciliation. The architect was the D-Day veteran, the young soldier with a vision. His name was Basil Spence.
The ruins of the old building still stand, an acknowledgment of the reality of suffering and loss which any of us can experience, but in the new building suffering and hope are met together in a stained-glass window. The periphery of the window is dark, the central figure, Jesus, is portrayed in clear, dazzling stained glass while the darkness around the edges remains. It insists that even in the darkest of places and hardest of times faith is justified, the light of Christ cannot be dimmed.
“Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”