11 Nov 2024
Truth is powerful. No one can change any truth. One can only seek the truth, find it, recognise it, conform one’s life to it.
The Jewish German physicist Max Born, a PhD advisor to Robert Oppenheimer, in a letter to Einstein, dismissed any difference between the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan and the NAZI death camps, writing that “the former case is one of warfare, the latter of cold-blooded slaughter. But the plain truth is that the people involved are in both instances nonparticipants – defenceless old people, women and children, whose annihilation is supposed to achieve some political or military objective. I am certain that the human race is doomed unless its instinctive detestation of atrocities gains the upper hand over the artificially constructed judgement of reason. A moment for yourselves: I can assume your horror of the holocaust, but do you feel similarly of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
It was in a letter to Born that Einstein famously remarked that God does not play dice. And incidentally, Born’s daughter married Welshman Bryn Newton-John, who gave him the granddaughter Olivia Newton-John. I think Max would have liked his granddaughter starring in a film about a machine that was automatic, systematic, hydromatic. But not involved in the deaths of tens of thousands.
I’ve encountered the most vitriolic anti-Japanese feeling here and abroad, founded on the particular brutal forms of torture they employed. But I think the most significant element in our ambivalence to deploying the most destructive weapons the world has known, is mostly because it was us that used them. There are the ‘artificially constructed judgements of reason’ about the number of deaths of American soldiers, the need to end the war, but the immediate deaths of over 200,000 civilians can’t really be justified. The principles of jus in bello – just war – which is one of the oldest forms of ethical exercise, ask of any military action – Is it discriminate? Is it proportional? Is it necessary? You would need quite a legal team to support that cause.
The second mission itself went very wrong. Nagasaki was not the original target, nor was Urakami the intended target in that city. It was particularly unfortunate that the epicentre of the second atomic bomb was a Catholic cathedral instantly killing 8500 Christians – That at the nearby Catholic Girls High School 214 girls and staff died. The pilot who manned the plane that dropped that bomb was a 25 year-old Catholic who had sought reassurance from a priest the night before. The bomb, ‘Fat Man’, was blessed by a Catholic priest and a Lutheran minister.
The reading we heard earlier from Jonah is I believe a joke. A serious joke but a joke none-the-less. We caught the bit where Jonah walks across Nineveh demanding repentance. But the weird thing is they repent, even the animals fast and put on sack-cloth. That almost never happens in the Bible. But everything is reversed in Jonah. Jonah is called by God but runs away – which is how he gets swallowed by a whale and spat out at Nineveh. The people repent and God has mercy. Jonah, the prophet then sulks because he wanted a bit of fire and brimstone. The book of Jonah is a warning to prophets and ofprophets – to ask yourself – whose side are you really on?
Today’s Gospel begins with the almost throw-away words ‘After John was arrested’. There’s no Christmas story in Mark’s Gospel, no lineage and ancestors, Mark jumps straight in with John the Baptist as the context for Jesus. By verse fourteen he’s arrested and we later hear how he was executed on a dancing girl’s whim; because he told the truth about Herod and his new wife. The context for the Gospel is the arbitrary, murderous use of power. Jesus has a similar misadventure. We heard today of his gathering disciples, but as the story goes on more and more people abandon him, walk away from him. But he just keeps on telling the truth. Reading it, we have to ask ourselves – would I have stuck with him? It would have been easier to stick with things how they were. To not question ‘am I on the right side?’ To not pursue too carefully the truth.
A Russian priest Fr Dimitrii worked in Paris during the occupation, providing French Jews with passports. He was captured and interrogated and didn’t lie about what he had done. They offered to let him go on condition that he stopped helping Jews. Fr Dimitrii lifted his pectoral cross, showed the figure on it and asked: ‘but do you know this Jew?’ He was answered with a blow to the face.
The Second World War martyr, Maximilian Kolbe, who set up a monastery on the outskirts of Nagasaki, before later dying at Auschwitz, wrote that: “truth is powerful. No one can change any truth. One can only seek the truth, find it, recognise it, conform one’s life to it.’ Where it matters, truth is not the same as correctness. It’s not just about facts. It’s about our ability to question our assumptions; To question what we have been told; To see ourselves and this world from the position of people very different to us. And that’s much harder than it seems. There are Christians in America, Christians in Russia, Christians in the Middle East who are saying surprising things right now. Just as that young America catholic dropped an apocalyptic weapon on to a Catholic cathedral, 79 years ago.
All of which should return us to the Gospel, asking – whose side am I really on? The Gospel is a story of God being found among outsiders, and of a world turned upside down. It doesn’t end how we expect. God is not where and with the people we’d expect. We are only finally reading the Gospel properly when we identify with the tax collector in the Temple, or the tarnished woman anointing Jesus’ feet, or the prodigal son in need of coming home. Otherwise, we are also with the high priest, discussing in the places of power, the expedience of one man dying for the people; or one city, or one race dying for the world.
It seems to me it’s more important today than ever to shake off our assumptions, our comfortable worldview and seek the truth, find it, recognise it, conform one’s life to it. For eighty years we have not forgotten the horror of the death camps; We have not repeated the deployment of nuclear weapons; We have been faithful in remembrance of two apocalyptic wars; but in a world in which the truth is very much at risk we can expect a return to the expedient killing of those with whom God stands. Let us pray for truth and pursue it. Amen.
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