Holocaust Memorial Day Sermon 2024

Fragility of Freedom, Methodist Recorder 25 January 2024

The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is ‘Fragility of Freedom.’ Freedom is a central concept for both Christians and Jews. Christians believe that freedom is possible by knowing the truth (John 8.31) and that simply by being in, or with, the Spirit of God, freedom is present (2 Cor. 3.17).

In the West many have come to think of freedom as a given. We overlook its fragility at our peril. If it is Truth that sets us free (John 8.31-32) and truth is in short supply then freedom is surely at risk. Jews understand this well. I know a number of Jews whose grandparents have kept their bags packed and their passports at hand ready to leave at any given moment; such is their deep seated fear of how fragile freedom is.

For Jews the notion of freedom is a socio-political experience: freedom from slavery (Exodus), oppression (Isaiah 58), and exile (Psalm 137). In Judaism this understanding of freedom deepened and developed over millennia, not least as a consequence of religions, rulers, and regimes imposing restrictions upon Jewish beliefs and practise culminating in the Holocaust (or Shoah – catastrophe).

We still have much to learn from the Holocaust, including that freedom became increasingly limited over time. It was Tony Blair, then Prime Minister, on the 60^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz who said that the Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers but broken windows. Beginning in small ways, boycotts, political cartoons, and restrictions imposed on membership of organisations, fear increased. Almost without noticing and without much care on the part of those outside the Jewish community, freedom became limited and disaster ensued. The ranting of a madman was initially scoffed at by the intelligentsia, and indeed by many in the middle ground of German society in the 1920s. However, the capturing of minds lacking in historical understanding or willing to overlook the lessons of the past in favour of their own prejudices, led to ground being laid for catastrophe. These unrestrained developments steered one of the most cultured nations on earth to implement genocide on an industrial scale. 9 out of 10 Jewish children in Europe were killed. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has calculated that 2.7 million Jews were slaughtered in killing centres, 2 million murdered in mass shootings, 800,000 to 1 million in ghettos, labour and concentration camps, at least 250,000 outside camps and ghettos. Additionally the Holocaust claimed the lives of many non-Jews, 250 – 500 thousand Romani, 250-300 thousand disabled people, 1,700 Jehovah’s Witnesses, hundreds possibly thousands accused of homosexuality, and hundreds perhaps thousands of Black people in Germany.

Tony Blair was correct in stating that incremental changes brought about the Holocaust. Given more time we could go further and consider the centuries of Christian contempt toward Jews that helped create the environment in which the Holocaust could occur. The spin that people were fed meant the oldest hatred was always a light sleeper. Given the right conditions such hatred awakens and stalks the earth, as it did during plague and pandemic, as it did during periods of political upheaval, as it did in times of economic recession, and as it is doing today. Jews are once again fearful of where the limiting of their freedom will lead. With a ten-fold increase in anti-Semitic attacks in the UK since the 7^th October pogrom by the Islamist terrorist group Hamas and Israel’s response in Gaza, many Jews here have had to remove their mezuzot from their doorposts, many are unable to wear a Magen David in public spaces, and many are afraid of what colleagues might say if their heritage is discovered. It has been heart-breaking to receive phone calls from Methodists with Jewish heritage, some to whom I had not spoken before, expressing anxiety over what has been said in their hearing.

So much of what is being said and done by members of the Christian Church in response to the Israel/Hamas war is out of a deep desire for peace and justice, and to free Palestinians from the restrictions imposed upon them. However, depending on the form of action we take, and those whom we choose to partner, there is a danger that like those before us we intensify the fears and limit the freedom of our near neighbours.

There is a real possibility that any desire to do good may actually bring harm. This is not new of course, far from it. All sorts of wrongs have been justified from religious belief over the centuries, I do not need to list them. Horrifying though it may seem but in the 1930s many Christians believed that the Nazis had the answer to their problems, and Nazi apologists were not limited to central Europe.

Methodist minister and Holocaust academic in the post war world Franklin Littell stated that the Church could never fulfil its mission until it repents of its historical contempt toward Jews (The Crucifixion of the Jews). It is incumbent upon us as Christians then to ensure that when we engage in socio-political discourse, not just in our dialogue with the Jewish community, we do so from a position of sound historical knowledge as well as theological maturity. A text that continually assaults my mind in opinion formation or ethical decision making is from the Gospel according to Luke ‘consider whether the light in you is not darkness’ (11.35). It is often said that all it takes for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing. I have an additional view: all it takes for evil to succeed is for good people to make the wrong choices. The wrong choices of many in the 1930s have much to teach us today.