“Looking back or looking forward?” (Isaiah 65:17-25).

We’re all familiar with the scenario. There’s been a hospital failure in which patients have died or a social services fiasco which allowed a child to be horrifically abused; there’s been a computer glitch which left people unable to access their bank accounts or a public event which has got out of control and left folk killed or injured; the Press have mistakenly incriminated an innocent person or the national football team has yet again been knocked out at an early stage of an important competition – after any of these incidents, in due time and following a long investigation, a slightly flustered and defensive spokesperson appears on the television news and assures us that “Lessons have been learned; nothing like this will ever happen again”.

Well, sometimes it is true. Back in the 1880s a terrible railway accident occurred in Northern Ireland and a large number of children were killed. As a result fundamental changes were made to railway operation across Britain. Equally, following the “Titanic” disaster, no-one ever again made the mistake of thinking that a ship was unsinkable and didn’t need to have enough lifeboats for everyone on board. Just this week we saw Yorkshire County Cricket Club taking drastic action to root out racism; it’s still early days but we wish Lord Patel and his fellow board members success in their efforts. (I’m far less optimistic about the attempts being made to eliminate “sleaze” from Westminster).

But we’re often cynical when we hear someone parroting that mantra of “lessons having been learned”. For, although we know that time and effort will have been spent in producing a report, we suspect that it will just end up in the archives, gathering dust. For the Government will introduce legislation that will rapidly prove to be unworkable; local Councils and hospitals will propose improvements that will be far too costly to implement; working practices will be devised which bear no relation to the job in the real world. The issues will fade from peoples’ consciousness and, almost inevitably, a few years later history will repeat itself and the cycle will start again.

It’s been said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, and I think that there is some truth in that statement. For instance, leaders in the long-established churches despair when newer Christian movements – claiming to be “led by the Spirit” – refuse their wise counsel and advice; it’s almost certain that these will fall into the same heresies and make the same mistakes that have come up with monotonous regularity throughout Church history. Equally, people and nations who have sadly suffered persecution and oppression in one generation all-too-easily become persecutors and oppressors themselves once they gain power; they quickly forget that power can corrupt and “absolute power can corrupt absolutely”.

However, there are times when mistakes of a different kind are made. For instance military history is studded with instances of strategies and plans that were based upon the experience of earlier conflicts but quickly proved themselves outmoded; this is sometimes known as “fighting the last war”. Perhaps the best-known example of this took place when France built the Maginot Line along its border with Germany in the 1930s, only to find the Nazi army simply going round the end and invading from the north, via Belgium. The French had indeed learned lessons from WW1 – but aircraft and motor transport had revolutionised tactics during the following years and they’d failed to realise that the next war would be very different.

The final chapters of Isaiah present us with a glorious picture of a renewed and peaceful earth. In it all children will survive into adulthood and no-one will die before living to a ripe old age – no small promise in a world where medicine was primitive and premature death a normal occurrence. No householder will ever be forced from their home to become a refugee and no farmer will ever tend crops only to have them harvested by foreign invaders. No-one will work hard only to find the products of their labour destroyed by warfare; no child will ever be born into a nation that is traumatised by conflict. Finally comes the most famous part of the entire prophecy: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent – its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt nor destroy on my holy mountain”. This is a vision of an entire world in perfect balance and harmony, a return to Eden’s paradise.

Set within those glorious promises is one phrase that seems to strike a jarring note: “the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind”. Now I think we can see what Isaiah is trying to say: this new creation will be so amazingly wonderful that it will blot out or surpass all memories of the past. But I wonder how practical or realistic this is? After all, refugees (such as my own parents) who make a new life in another country cannot simply forget the place from where they have come. Yes, their new life may be successful and prosperous and, yes, the memories of persecution and hardship may be so vivid that they’d prefer to push them to the backs of their minds. But however much they try, they can’t obliterate them entirely. Equally, there are military personnel (and indeed civilians) who have returned to this country after witnessing horrific sights in war, whether that be WW2, Korea, the Falklands or Afghanistan; they may never speak of those things and outwardly they often live happy and balanced lives. But those nightmares can all too easily thrust themselves back into their consciousness at moments of stress; the memories are still lurking in a seldom-accessed and closely-guarded part of their brains.

In any case, isn’t it – as I have suggested already – a good thing to remember the past, as so many of are doing today? Doesn’t doing so help us to avoid repeating the mistakes that others have made? Doesn’t contrasting former tribulations with present happiness help us to appreciate our blessings all the more? And, knowing that we are all shaped by the past, both our own personal yesterdays and the history of our nation, isn’t it a bit silly to ignore it or pretend that it never happened? We need to know about it because, if we don’t, we are left confused and disoriented, with no connection to our roots.

Yet Isaiah does say, “the former things shall not be remembered or brought to mind”. Now this promise comes within the context of Israel’s recent history: the terror of the Babylonian invasion, the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple, the forcible exile of young leaders such as Daniel. But it goes back much further and recognises every part of Israel’s life and its identity, including its enslavement in Egypt, its constant skirmishes with neighbours such as the Philistines, and its uncertain life in the shadow of the powerful Assyrian and Babylonian empires. Israel had always been threatened with extinction; but in this new future that threat will be completely removed.

It does seem to me that this phrase betrays a certain inconsistency within the Bible. For seems to contradict Moses’ repeated plea that his people, on their journey to the Promised Land, should “remember the way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness …  (and) keep the commandments of the Lord your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him”. The prophets said much the same when they were exhorting the people to turn back to God in penitence; so did the Psalmists at times of stress and doubt. And we can easily see how actively remembering God’s mighty acts could be a stimulus to faith and obedience. But Isaiah is reflecting another, parallel, strand which we must not ignore; one which perhaps reaches its climax in the great words of his near-contemporary Jeremiah: “No longer shall they … say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more”. Here it is God himself deliberately forgetting sin or wiping the slate clean.

We can find similar verses elsewhere: Isaiah himself reports God as saying, “It is I who blots out your transgressions … and remembers your sins no more” while Micah declares that God “will hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea” – a verse to which the Dutch evangelist Corrie Ten Boom once added the comment, “And he puts up a sign saying ‘No fishing’!” This theme of course reaches its climax in the New Testament where we told quite unequivocally that Jesus has dealt with our past history of sin once and for all, “nailing it”, as St. Paul says, “to the cross” of Christ. When God forgives sins, they are not merely relegated to some recycling bin on his heavenly computer’s desktop from where they can be instantly restored to our here and now; God deletes not only sin but every trace of its memory.

Now I don’t think that this is just an interesting theological point. In fact I believe it’s a thought which should have a huge impact on our Remembrance commemorations – and I’m not just thinking of personal reconciliation between combatants from both sides, such as the well-known story of one of Corrie Ten Boom’s concentration camp guards coming up to her at a Christian meeting after the war and holding out his hand for her to shake, or of representatives from the city of Coventry standing in solidarity with their German counterparts from Dresden in the Community of the Cross of Nails. No; I think that this deliberate act of forgetting is absolutely vital if we are to see any lasting resolution to the world’s long-standing disputes and conflicts.

For instance, many of the atrocities we saw in the Balkans back in the 90s (do you even remember them?) were fuelled by memories of the Battle of Kosovo between Serbia and the Ottoman army which invaded back in 1389. Equally, Muslim extremists’ distrust of the West and their call to jihad are to an extent informed by the Crusades which left a terrible stain on Christian history. I’m sure we could think of other examples. In a sense it is quite remarkable that countries such as France and Germany have managed to co-operate so well since WW2, but this may be because they have managed to separate in their thinking the memories of Nazism from the idea of “being German”. Here in Britain we haven’t been so successful: memories of “the War” surface whenever England and Germany play each other at football, the media still repeatedly offer us programmes with wartime footage (I’m sure we’ve seen it all by now!), and jingoistic politicians talk about “the Blitz spirit”, Churchill and “Britain’s finest hour”. (The advertising for this Covid hand sanitiser says that “its unique retro branding harks back to the 1940’s when Briton’s displayed stoicism and determination in the face of adversity”).

Of course, none of us here is fighting today! But I’m sure that this passage still has a message for us. For many of us have bad memories about family feuds or long-standing disputes with our neighbours; we remember hurts and slights, or the times when people we thought were reliable let us down, or occasions when it seemed that others were unfairly preferred to ourselves; we may even recall painful disputes and differences within the church (and I must say that churches are notorious for having long memories). These have all left their mark on us, and some of them may have never been tidied up but remain unresolved. So what are we going to do with them?

Well, we all know one approach: it’s revealed when we say things like, “I’ll never forgive him until he comes grovelling to me on his hands and knees” or “I’m the one who’s in the right here, it’s up to her to make the first move” or “I’ll never forget the way he got his claws into grandma’s money when she’d promised it to me” or “I’m going to get my own back on them even if it’s the last thing I ever do”. How often have you heard people saying things like that – even Christians who profess belief in love and forgiveness? It’s clearly true that warring nations or ethnic groups need to be brought together in reconciliation; but so does everyone who is involved in the most trivial dispute. However much we have been hurt, however deep the wound, however painful the memory, by God’s grace we must take it by the scruff of the neck, declare that Christ has firmly placed it in the past and destroyed its power to hold us down, and make the conscious decision that it has been forgotten, never to return or be dragged out in conversation.

So here we are, remembering – or, perhaps, trying hard to forget. Of course we do not, we cannot, forget what has happened to us; that’s just not possible. Here we may need to hear the words of Desmond Tutu, so much involved in bringing reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa: “Forgiving is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering and not using your right to hit back. It’s a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important; especially if you don’t want to repeat what happened”. And the point I want to make is that we Christians need to constantly affirm that something painful and ugly and wrong came to a dead stop at the Cross; and that fresh life leaped out beyond it. We should be pressing forward in faith rather than harking back to the ills of history; we should refuse to allow the past to hold us down or pull us back but instead transform it into a springboard which propels us into the future.

Isaiah wrote, “the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind”. All of us are the products of our history, both personal and national; some of us have good reason to be bitter or angry. But Christ has drawn the teeth of that history which means that we no longer need to be its slaves. So let us live as the truly free people we are, by the grace of God. And let us see our mission as one of enabling others to see things in the same way. For true peace is only possible when the memories of hate and anger cease to haunt us.