August 9, 2015

Dr Nicola Hoggard-Creegan

Ordinary Sunday 19

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It isn’t possible to speak today without reflecting on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seventy years ago today the plutonium bomb Fat Boy destroyed Nagasaki, and many of its inhabitants. The American bomber was running out of fuel and Nagasaki was a standby target. Thursday was the 70th anniversary of the dropping of Little Boy on Hiroshima. The beautiful powerful mushroom clouds and the sustained flash of light associated with them will always scar the twentieth century memory. 2001 pales into insignificance when compared to the hundreds of thousands of civilians who lost their lives at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

They were the explosions that released the startling energy and light of an atom, and indirectly the energy of the sun on earth. After these explosions we were less innocent. We know that nature is not just mild and biddable, it is power and energy of unbelievable proportions. We now know we control something too big for us. At the time the US government and scientists risked everything to try them out. And they had dozens more bombings of Japanese cities planned. Politics since that time has been very largely aimed at managing and containing risk in a world with 15000 nuclear weapons, 450 on hair trigger alert in the United States alone.

Oppenheimer the author of the bomb famously said: I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.

I have had two personal acquaintances with Hiroshima. The acerbic English professor across the hallway when I was teaching in a liberal arts college in North Carolina turned out to be the son of the Hiroshima bombardier, Thomas Ferebee. On the other side, and more recently a Japanese student who was studying why the atonement makes no sense to Japanese told me one day that she had been born in Hiroshima. Her great-grandfather had a premonition on August 5th 1945 that he should walk away from the city. He took his grandson, her father, with him and survived. They saw the bomb explode from the distance and walked back. Life continued amongst the ashes. By some extraordinary sequence of events she embraced Christian faith. These encounters made me realize how these historic tragedies had tentacles that spread very far from the epicentre.

The people who dropped those bombs, most of them anyway, probably didn’t know the full extent of what they were doing. They were after all, partly experiments. But it is odd that the reaction to these tragedies is still muted. Unlike the other atrocities of the twentieth century Hiroshima is regretted, in the way one might regret a natural tragedy, but it is not condemned outright. We do not speak of it as a war crime. Although our attention is largely taken up elsewhere the Doomsday clock is now set at three minutes to midnight, almost the closest it has even been.

How can we live with the memory of all of this, and with the threat for the future it entails? Our response, the response of the Church is that we can still live and hope because in Jesus we have the antidote to death: the bread of life. But that is complicated. And because in the world of the Bible nothing is as it first appears. There is always a deeper reality. It is ironic that August 6th has long had another meaning: it is the feast-day of the transfiguration, that time when Jesus went up a mountain with his disciples and his face shone with light. When Moses and Elijah appeared and Peter wanted to erect some tents. Jesus was revealing that things are not as they appear. That life and light and matter are all connected. They were connected long before the atomic bomb and modern physics showed us these things. Transfiguration though is probably more than ironic. It is also an example of synchronicity. Two events paired together. Synchronous events do not cause each other, but they seem to share a meaning, in this case one is darkness and the other life. They represent death and life. Both show the secret of the way in which energy and light and matter are all connected. One was powerful and deadly. The other was obscure and private, and although also linked to death, it was a death that brought us life. Transfiguration is like the last word to the scandalous deaths of August 6 and 9 1945. The light of Christ can banish even the scorching heat of the fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It shows through the eyes of faith that meaning is present in the universe if only we look.

Today’s gospel speaks of another conversion of the sun’s energy for human purposes: This time it is through the peaceful and natural process of photosynthesis and the cultural practices of bread making. Bread has been given a bad press recently but it is a miracle food and nutrient rich. Bread is in part responsible for the meteoric rise of human kind in the last 13000 years. It is marked by the invisible signs of culture. A baguette is not a naan. But they are made of the same stuff. The symbol of bread resonates through the Scriptures. The unleavened bread of exodus and Passover, the mana in the desert, the bread that gave Elijah sustenance for 40 days, the bread Jesus did not make of stones, the bread he shared with 5000 just before today’s gospel, the bread of his body, the daily bread we pray for in the Lord’s prayer, the bread and wine of the Last Supper, and the bread he broke at Emmaus. All these breads resonate with the ongoing bread of communion for the last two thousand years.

If we think about it bread is a sign of God’s accommodation to human culture. Jesus claims to be the bread of life. Bread, which is the positive result of human effort and cooperation is marked forever as linked to Jesus. It is a sign of God’s love, it bears in it the presence of Jesus amongst us still and it symbolizes all our hopes. For this bread will not perish we are told. And this bread is the exorbitant promise of life coming out of death. I am the bread of life resonates back and counters the hopelessness of Oppenheimer’s words, I am become death.

And we are here in part to keep those words of life alive and to share them. Although we are few, the world is hungry for signs of spiritual meaning and the exorbitant hope they come with. It is only if we do acknowledge the hope that we can also acknowledge the death. Perhaps that is why we have not yet really come to terms with what happened in Japan 70 years ago. Although we are few, especially here in New Zealand we keep alive the faith that Jesus holds out to us, the bread of eternal life. In a world that is obsessed with death this inwardness, this spirituality, this affirmation of life matters more than anything else.

The spiritual hunger around us is revealed in the symbols of redemption in so many stories, movies and television. I have just watched the gripping Flemish TV series Cordon. The storyline involves a deadly flu that breaks out in the centre of Antwerp which is then cordoned off and cut off from the rest of Belgium. I don’t think I am giving anything away when I say that it has a new baby born in unlikely circumstances to a young girl, and a boy who was going to save people from the plague. We are greedy for signs and symbols of hope and new life. The world wants to see the face of God. In Jesus we have the source of all these symbols and signs and reality here in the bread and wine of the communion. And although world leaders, and powers and principalities continue to court death and to play with the weapons of war, we can also testify that there is a child and young man who are with us still and hold the deeper secret of life.