The Eleventh

November 11th. Remembrance Day. Armistice Day. Veterans Day. Whatever we call it, it was on this day at 5:45 in the morning the Allied Forces and Germany signed an armistice agreement bringing World War I to an end. Fighting officially ceased later that morning at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. 

Something in my wiring really loves that tidy “11th” kind of agreement. How precise and clean and controlled. The stuff of storybooks. Strange that it should be the way war came to a close. Feels almost a complete paradox.  As if we can ever gloss over something so grueling, so gruesome, and then quickly give it a nice name and a pretty package. 

But that’s exactly what we do. All the time.

When we make up. When we fix up. When we tidy up. In our relationships and in our real life.

I wonder about those people living through the first world war years only to be hit so soon with the second world war. Just a couple of decades later. Did they not want to stand up and shout out and shake a fist — “Wait just a minute here! We all agreed to get along.” Didn’t they remember that eleventh hour on that eleventh day in that eleventh month? That agreement?

How quickly we forget. 

We are war forgetters.

We, even more so, are peace forgetters. 

There is little remembrance in fighting or in trying not to fight. Not when the lines have been crossed and the crosses lined up. We forget.

We move on after our troubles and our trials and our tiffs. We claim willingness to work hard and harder and harder still.  We sign armistice agreements all the day long with our children and our spouses and our colleagues and our neighbors … and then back to war we go. We are warring people. In our countries and in our cul-de-sacs. In our nation and in our nature. 

Like we cannot help ourselves.

We claim to be progressive and improved, more enlightened and less entitled, and yet war on we do. Conflict and chaos bedmates to our broken world. We’d like to think we have a measure of control with our policies and positions, but like that tidy 11th-ish package on that November day in 1918, we can call it anything we want, it won’t change the challenges of our humanity.

We are like dogs who return to their vomit. Even more instinctual than our tidying up, is our throwing up. Throwing it down. Down. Down. Down.

And there is little remembrance at that moment of rage and rift. 

When Jesus gathered his disciples in the upper room for the last supper and the first communion, he offered bread and wine saying “do this in remembrance of me.” 

And when he had given thanks, He broke it and said, “Take, eat; this is my body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of me. In the same manner he also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 1 Corinthians 11:24-25

His body broken. His blood shed. For us. For you. For me. 

Knowing the brutal hours ahead of Him. Knowing the spiritual and physical war surrounding Him. Surrounding us. And yet he offered a most perfect agreement. A New Covenant. A chance for all those who believe to truly have peace. True peace. Lasting peace. Eternal peace. 

He took our place on the cross. 

He died the death we deserve. 

He surrendered His body for the sins we commit. 

Because He knew there’d be no way for us to keep an armistice agreement or any agreement on our own. No matter how tidy. No matter how hard we try. 

We are way past the eleventh hour of everything and if nothing else shows us our need for a Savior this day of remembrance surely does.  

So today we give abundant thanks for those who served and sacrificed. But let this day lead us to remembering the ultimate sacrifice of the One "who did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." Mark 10:45