A few weeks ago there was re-run of a very disturbing film on BBC2. It contained no images of violence. The language was reasonably restrained, with just occasional swearing. It was almost entirely set in one or two rooms, with just the occasional outside shot - one of a snowball fight. It wasn’t on particularly late. It just started at 9.00 O’clock, at the watershed. It was disturbing because of it was so cold and rational.

The film was called ‘Conspiracy’ and it aimed to re-create a summit held in 1942 at a place called Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin. At this summit the Third Reich plotted to wipe out the Jewish people in a plan they called the Final Solution. Shooting them was euphemistically called ‘evacuation’ and then concepts of efficiency and economy were perverted with industrial scale plans for their mass murder.

The method of using gas chambers had already been tried out on the mentally ill and with that we were reminded in passing that others who did not measure up to a perverted view of perfection were also killed with the Jews. These included homosexual people and psychiatric patients.

The characters in the film did not discuss whether or not these people should be ‘evacuated’. It was assumed that Germany and Europe needed ‘cleansing’ from people who were regarded as an infection and vermin polluting the purity. It sent a shiver down my spine as the various senior generals and lawyers coldly discussed mass murder and genocide.

Ethnic cleansing and attempts to be ride of everyone who does not meet our standard is all too familiar. We have seen it since the 1940s in Rwanda, in Bosnia, under the Taliban in a varied form. There are echoes of it in any social group that will not live with difference. We see echoes of it in racism and the prejudices that divide our own nation.

The film Conspiracy included a brief story about a man whose father was very cruel to him, so much so that he hated him with a passion that ran to the very core of his being. He was close to his mother and when she died, he found that as much as he felt he would like to cry, he couldn’t. Some years later, when he was about 50 his father died and he wept uncontrollably. He had spent his life hating so much that when the object of that hatred was removed he had nothing left; he found that his life was empty.

Hatreds can be reactionary. They can be based on bitter experience. They can also be a cover for other, deeper fears. It is one of the oldest tricks to attack as a form of defence; to distract attention by finding someone, something, some group, to rally behind hating. But there is always an emptiness about them, always an avoidance of facing something that needs filling or healing. Anger has an important function in giving us a drive to change things, to stop abuse, to wake us up to the evil we sometimes do. But it can become infected, like any wound, and then it starts to attack us from inside and make us go sour. Then it is not an expression of passion because things matter, but a destructive force that will consume us and destroy us.

There was an interview recently on Radio 4 with someone who had lost his daughter in a bomb attack in the United States. He used to be in favour of the death penalty and at first wanted his daughter’s killer exterminated, ‘evacuated’ if you like. But after the execution he found that it didn’t change anything. He didn’t feel any better and now he campaigns against the death penalty. When hatred consumes us, it leaves nothing behind.

There is an element of the empty vessels needing to be filled in our gospel reading (John 2:1-11). Jesus takes stone jars used for rites of purification and asks for them to be filled. From those jugs are taken more wine than any party could hope for and of a quality that most of us just could not afford. The quantity is enormous, it adds up to between 120 and 180 gallons. In case you can’t picture that, it is between 730 and 1095 bottles! Imagine taking those to the bottle bank the next morning!

The allegory reminds us that even our religious rituals and treasured practices can become empty if they are not open to and filled by the Spirit of God. It reminds us of the importance of ensuring that our lives are filled with much more than just being reactionary; to be for something not just against something else. In the Baptism Service the parents and godparents, and the candidate themselves if they are old enough, are asked if they reject evil and rebellion against God, if they renounce the deceit and corruption of evil. They are also asked if they repent of the sins that separate us from God and neighbour. With all that rejecting and renouncing and being against, they are then asked what they put in its place. What is offered is Christ as Saviour, Christ as Lord and Christ as the way, the truth and the life. These are metaphors of profound importance. They stand for being so filled with God’s Spirit and grace that we place following Jesus at the centre of everything we try to do and become.

We will still find ourselves becoming angry. There is plenty of injustice and humbug to make us angry. Some are very angry our troops are being sent to Iraq without proper explanation or an adequate case being made. Some burn with passion when elderly people are burgled and die from their injuries. Seeking to be filled with the Spirit of God does not stop us being angry at times, but it does mean that there is more to us than anger and bitterness.

Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day and it is important to remember with a shudder what was done; the attempt at genocide. It is important to look at the hatred which can so consume and become infected. It is important to watch out that we do not use hatred as a way to disguise our own emptiness. Christ fills that emptiness in a way that goes far beyond anything we could expect or imagine; far more than we can use or need. God sends his love with an abundance and if we are open to it, it will fill our lives to overflowing. This in turn will show itself in generosity, justice and righteous living; the very things which combat whatever lies at the root of atrocities like the Holocaust.

© Ian Black 2003

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