The Holocaust: what is our Christian vision 80 years on?
The Holocaust: what is our Christian vision 80 years on?
Third Sunday of Epiphany 2025
A sermon preached by Rev Maggie Guillebaud
Nehemiah 8: 1-3,5-6, 8-10. Luke 4: 14-21
On 27th January 1945 the group of concentration and extermination camps in Poland known as Auschwitz Birkenau were liberated by the Soviet Red Army. Holocaust Memorial Day marks that day of liberation 80 years ago.
The Red Army were on the Vistula-Oder offensive, and hearing their guns the camp guards had begun a forced death march of some 60 thousand inmates going West. So there were only 7 thousand people left in the 40 camps which made up the complex when the Red Army arrived, the camp guards having fled as the Russians advanced.
The unimaginable horror which unfolded before the Red Army’s eyes is well-documented, as are the stories of the survivors. It led one of them, the famous Italian Jewish writer to write: ‘There is Auschwitz, and so there is no God.’ Justice for some was to come at the Nuremberg trials.
At Nuremberg difficult questions as to what is, and what is not, acceptable in war began to be hammered out at an international level, going far beyond the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of those captured in conflict. The original convention was expanded to include non-combatant civilians and introduced the concept of ‘Crimes against Peace’ and ‘Crimes against Humanity’, concepts flouted continually in subsequent wars. But a baseline was established against which perpetrators of war crimes could be measured, nowadays at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
As a species we are incredibly good at organisation, if the mood takes us. The ruthless killing machine contained within the Auschwitz complex was a model of organisation. Over 1.1 million people died in just this one camp, including the wife and young son of a devout Polish Roman Catholic doctor who arrived in the UK as a refugee after the war, and whom I knew well when I was a young woman. He never got over the horror of his loss.
Dictatorships usually end badly. In Germany the infernal vision of one man and his wildly inflated ego and half-baked theories on race was able to captivate an entire nation . How? There was clever propaganda of course. But that would not have been enough to turn an entire nation, apart from the brave few who resisted, into compliant Nazis. Ordinary people – doctors, nurses, secretaries, famers, academics, factory workers, and indeed the army – how were they manipulated into serving this efficient and murderous regime?
The answers to that question is for the historians. But fear and intimidation had a lot to do with it.
And for me it was most certainly what nowadays we call the ‘vision thing’, which Hitler had in spades.
As we know, the political sands world-wide are shifting beneath our feet, and the liberal values, exemplified for example in the re-vamped Geneva Convention, are not as secure as we once thought. Whose vision are we to follow? What is our vision for a healthy society?
The theme of society-building runs throughout both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. As Moses led the tribes of Israel out of Egypt to wander through the desert on their way to the Promised Land, he faced the enormous task of holding together a disparate people. Under his leadership they had to forge a new a rule-based order of society under God. This period produced the Ten Commandments and the Torah, the Law, under which all Jews were to live, laws later challenged by Jesus. These were, if you like, God’s vision thing for these early wanderers.
This theme is picked up in our reading from Nehemiah. Nehemiah was one of many Jews carried into exile in Babylon, and as a cup bearer to the Persian King Artaxes unexpectedly got permission to return to Jerusalem, now in ruins, and re-build the city walls. Which he did. But it was the re-building of the community of God’s people which was far more challenging.
The rag-bag of returning exiles from Babylon in the fifth century BC had all but lost their sense of what it meant to be a practising Jew. They had to learn again about their God, and learn to live together as a society obedient to God. This was both practical and theological. So in the scene so vividly described I our reading, while Ezrah read the scriptures the ‘ears of the people were attentive to the Law’. They were to worship God and live under the Law. They were not being asked to follow a blue-print of a perfect society, but to live together humbly in community under God, and to obey his laws as laid out in their scriptures.
Some 2500 years later a young rabbi in a small synagogue in an unremarkable town called Nazareth astounded his hearers. On being asked to read from the scroll of Isaiah he read the passage we heard earlier. On finishing his reading we are told he handed the scroll to the attendant and sat down, and began to teach.
What he taught both bewildered and horrified his hearers. He declared in their hearing that he was the anointed one, or Messiah, that Isaiah had foretold would come. It was astonishing claim.
But for us today, in this place, it is the mast to which he nailed his colours that should concern us.
His vision, his vision thing if you like, is straightforward: he has come to bring good news to the poor, to release captives, to heal the sick, to end oppression, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. In other words, he does not have a blueprint or carefully organized plan of how a society should be. Rather he comes to build a community based on justice and love, particularly for the poor. No diagrams, no spreadsheets, no half-baked racial theories. Not a society based on resentment, grievance or hatred, but one which would be reveal the long-awaited Messiah who as God’s son signified God with us, now and for eternity.
Nehemiah guided the people of Israel to live under the Law. Jesus invited them to believe in him, and follow another, more radical, path.
As memories of the Second World War fade, and younger generations sometimes have only the haziest knowledge of what happened then, we must not let this terrible period of history be forgotten. Which is why Holocaust Memorial Day is so important. We must remember collectively what human beings are capable of at their very worst, so that the poisonous vision of a society run along genocidal lines and unimaginable cruelty may never happen again. As Christians we must protect our democracies and remember under whose divine light and promise we flourish.
Or as one of my favourite blessings exhorts us:
Go forth into the world in peace.
Be of good courage.
Hold fast to that which is good.
Render to no one evil for evil.
Support the weak.
Help the afflicted.
Show love to everyone.
Love and serve the Lord,
Rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.
If we hold to this as our vision, we shall have made a very good start.
Amen