Faith: Connecting sacrifice with present-day freedom – Kamloops This Week

This past October I toured with the Rocky Mountain Rangers through Belgium and France.

We visited a variety of battlefields, cemeteries, and monuments to honour our fallen members and own our regimental history.

As I stood on the soil that witnessed terrible carnage and incredible heroism, I was overcome with gratitude for those men and women who answered the call to serve their nation.

While these battles happened over 100 years ago, I felt a connection between their sacrifices and my own present-day freedoms.

Connecting sacrifice with freedom is at the heart of the Christian faith, in particular, the Christian understanding of Jesus death.

While some people understand Jesus death as simply the unfortunate consequence of challenging the powerful, most Christians see Jesus death as more purposeful. Jesus death is sometimes spoken of as Gods victory over sin, death, and the devil. Elsewhere it is understood as the righteous taking the place of the unrighteous, the innocent taking the place of the guilty. We commonly speak of Jesus dying for you and me.

Understanding Jesus to be taking our place involves a few important assumptions. It assumes humanity has done wrong, it assumes God demands justice and it assumes someone could make restitution and right all this wrong.

It is not hard to see that humanity has committed many wrongs. In the past few decades, weve witnessed all sorts of crimes against humanity around the globe. In our own country, the Canadian government has acknowledged injustices on our soil, including the internment of Japanese Canadians and the creation of residential schools.

It is not hard to see where humanity has done wrong. We are particularly adept at noting the sins of our neighbours. We hear a story about a distracted driver flattening a pedestrian and we are furious.

Seeing our errors and mistakes is perhaps a little more difficult. We continue to text while we are driving until we are called out by our kids or pulled over by the police. Then, we are forced to reckon with the fact we are not so innocent, but maybe just fortunate we havent caused an accident.

That mistakes and deliberate wrongdoing demands punishment or restitution can be seen in our criminal-justice system and those government apologies already mentioned.

We want justice, not a slap on the wrist, for the person who plowed into the pedestrian. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission demanded more than an apology; it issued 94 distinct

calls to action.

But if we demand accountability from each other, we can begin to understand the Christian contention that we are also responsible to our creator.

Our responsibility to God would seem to stand ahead of any other responsibilities. If God created all things, any recklessness toward ourselves or the rest of creation would demand justice and restitution to the one to whom all life owes its very origin.

So, how can justice be served and restitution be made to God?

What Christianity asserts is that Jesus stands in our place. The first epistle of Peter argues: He [Jesus] himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. (1 Peter 2:2).

But for Jesus to stand in our place and bear the sins of the world he would need to be more than human. What Christians believe is that God lived and died among us in Jesus, so that all things could be made right.

This is sometimes hard to grasp.

And yet maybe, just maybe in this season where we have observed Remembrance Day, there is a way to begin to understand this. Just as we comprehend a connection between the sacrifice of long-past soldiers and our present-day freedoms, we might begin to imagine how Jesus death can reconcile us to God.

I did plenty of research before I embarked on my battlefield tour with the Rocky Mountain Rangers. Probably the most heartbreaking story I ran across was the Newfoundland Regiments tragic advance at Beaumont Hamel on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

After a battle lasting only 30 minutes, less than 10 per cent of the regiment was able to answer roll call. The dead included 14 sets of brothers, including four lieutenants from one family.

My battlefield tour didnt take me to Newfoundland Memorial Park. But Ive read that, at the entrance of the park, there is a memorial stone with this inscription:

Tread softly here! Go reverently and slow!

Yea, let your soul go down upon its knees,

And with bowed head and heart abased strive hard

To grasp the future gain in this sore loss!

For not one foot of this dank sod but drank

Its surfeit of the blood of gallant men.

Who, for their faith, their hope for Life and Liberty,

Here made the sacrifice here gave their lives.

And gave right willingly for you and me.

We are separated from these soldiers by time and geography.

In 1916, Newfoundland was not even part of Canada. Yet most of us can understand their deaths are connected to our freedoms.

As the inscription states, they gave their lives for you and me.

Two-thousand years ago, the Son of God was nailed to a cross in Palestine. Jesus stood in our place, dying for you and me so that we could live free from the guilt of all our mistakes and all our willful wrongdoings.

Rev. Steve Filyk is minister at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in South Kamloops (Sagebrush) and is also chaplain for the Rocky Mountain Rangers, a primary reserve infantry regiment of the Canadian Army headquartered in the JR Vicars Armoury in Kamloops.

KTW welcomes submissions to its Faith page. Columns should be between 600 and 800 words in length and can be emailed to editor@kamloopsthisweek.com. Please include a very short bio and a photo.

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Faith: Connecting sacrifice with present-day freedom - Kamloops This Week