TRAPPED IN THE PRESENT

 A SERMON FOR PASSION SUNDAY

In the spring of 1917, the First World War was raging at full force in Europe.  Soldiers from both sides were pouring into France, filled at first with patriotic fervor and ready to lay down their lives for their country.   Their wildest imaginations could never have prepared them for the horrors of modern warfare, with the constant screech of artillery shells whistling overhead and falling around them, the terrifying seconds as they scrambled to put on their gas masks, the sudden calls to scramble over the relative safety of their trenches and into a no-man’s land filled with the sound of machine gun fire and the smell of blood and rotting corpses.  But in the midst of this truly horrible scene, there was one event in particular that no man could ever have predicted, and that no man should ever have to live through.

It happened on May 4, 1917, near the town of Craonne in northern France during the Second Battle of the Aisne. The Germans had built a supply tunnel under the Winterberg, about 300 yards long, and the French had found out about it.  For once, the accuracy of their artillery was perfect, and with two shots they blew up the entrances at both ends of the tunnel, triggering the further explosion of munitions within the tunnel, and sealing the 270 men of the German 111^th Reserve Infantry Division inside.  It was wartime, it was the middle of a battlefield, and neither side could spare the time or the manpower to dig them out.  Three survivors were eventually rescued and described the gruesome picture from inside the tunnel as the air gradually ran out.  It took six days for their comrades to die from suffocation.  Their cries for water were punctuated with the occasional gunshot.  One of the survivors remembered how a soldier, with rasping breath, begged for someone to load his pistol.

Just this past week, it was announced to the world that the Winterberg Tunnel, its entrances covered for over a hundred years by the foliage that returned after the end of the war, had been rediscovered.  It took the devoted efforts of a couple of amateur historians to find the mass grave of these poor soldiers.  I hope the French authorities will do what is now necessary to help give them a more fitting final resting place.

Today is Passion Sunday.  The word Passion comes from the Latin passio, which means suffering.  So far this Lent, our attention has been focused on ourselves.  The liturgy has been concerned with preparing us for what is to come.  We have been reminded of how we are dust, that unto dust we must return.  We have been encouraged to fast and do penance in reparation for our many sins.  Our efforts have been aimed at making ourselves more holy and pleasing to God, so that we may be judged with mercy, and more worthily partake in the glories of Easter and the Resurrection.  But first, before we may deserve mercy ourselves, we must turn our attention from ourselves to the sufferings of others.  Passiontide is a time to think not of our own miniscule trials and tribulations, but the terrible sufferings that many other people in this world have had to endure, and are enduring still.  We help wherever we can, and above all, we pray for them, we pray for their courage to persevere in their faith, not to despair, not to give up the cross that has been placed on their unwilling shoulders.  May we all suffocate in agony rather than pull the trigger.  And let’s pray especially for those who do yield to the temptation of hopelessness in the face of such torments, that God may forgive their weakness and inspire them with repentance even as they give in to defeat.

Above all, our attention in Passiontide is drawn to the sufferings of one Man in particular.  It is far easier to imagine the sufferings of a single man trapped in a tunnel, knowing he has been buried alive, than for our minds to comprehend the sufferings of our Lord.  For he took upon himself the sins and sufferings of us all.  Add up all the suffering of those 270 men in the Winterberg Tunnel, and multiply it by the number of human beings who lived before them and after them—all those sins, rising to an almost infinite number for which only an infinite divine being could sufficiently make reparation.  Our minds cannot wrap themselves around the depth of suffering such reparation would require.  Only God himself will ever know how much he suffered.  All for us.  What can we do, O Lord, to make up to thee for what thou hast suffered for us?

The fact is, like the Germans in the tunnel, we too are trapped.  Trapped in a tunnel from which there is no escape, no way in and no way out.  The tunnel’s name is Time, and we are trapped very firmly in The Present.  We cannot move forward into the future, except at the speed that the Present allows.  And the only way we can revisit the past is in our fading memories.  The soldiers no doubt remembered their past and all the happy times they had as children, with their mothers and fathers, sweethearts and wives.  What would they give to be back in those days, breathing the fresh cool air of Christmases long past?  But the past is inaccessible, and we can never return to it.  Likewise the future.  Sure, we can prepare for the future, we can hope for the future, but we can never travel into the future.  Those soldiers surely hoped for a light at the end of their tunnel, a sign that the rescuers were coming to help them out of their prison.  But hoping it would happen did not make it so.  They were trapped for the rest of their mercifully brief lives.  And so are we.

The soldiers must have eventually realized they were doomed.  Back in those days, many of them would have had the Faith, and it is to be hoped that at least these good men realized what the real light at the end of their tunnel was.  Only death would be their escape.  And so with us.  For us to escape our Present time, it can only be by death, a death that will be the great portal allowing us to slip the coils of this our prison and ascend from this dark tunnel of Time to the light of eternity.

Our Lord showed us the way.  Now we have prepared ourselves, hopefully, by a good Lent, we must force ourselves to commemorate his death.  We must watch as he endures these most terrible sufferings of his Passion, and come to grips with the fact that it is only by death that we will be able to follow him further and beyond.  We have come this far in Lent, by trying to avoid sin, by making reparation for our sins, by resolving to sin no more.  But before we can be led out of our present tunnel to the Light of Glory, we must first follow our Lord up the hill of Calvary.  This is our destiny, this is the path on which we must continually advance.  For it is the path of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by following him, we will not be lost, we will not be abandoned forever in our tomb.