One of the interesting, recurring themes in the Bible is the way in which rituals and physical objects are used to encourage people to remember what God has done. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it gives you an idea of the repeating pattern.
The passover meal was instituted as a reminder of God freeing his people from slavery in Egypt. Exodus 12
After the people of Israel had crossed the Jordan, Joshua placed 12 stones in the river as a reminder of God stopping the flow, so they could cross. Joshua 4:9
Samuel raised a stone monument (Ebenezer) to commemorate God’s help in defeating the Philistines. 1 Samuel 7:12
Perhaps the most important and profound call to remember is Jesus institution of Holy Communion which we celebrate in remembrance of him.
I find these passages fascinating because they seem somewhat paradoxical. I mean, why would anyone ever forget any of these things? They are all massive moments that should surely live in memory without any prompting, but yet God insisted on the people having a reminder. The ongoing narrative of Scripture and the history of the church shows that God was absolutely right in his prediction of his people’s ability to forget his miraculous interventions.
One of my favourite illustrations of this is the story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17. I won’t retell the whole story as it is a very familiar one, but let me pick out a couple of points. When Goliath came out to challenge Israel to produce a champion to fight him, king Saul and his army were terrified. This is despite the fact that in chapter 14 of the same book, God had helped Saul to route the Philistines and in the following chapter they had made short work of the Amelekites. God had proved that he could help Israel win against overwhelming odds, but Saul (and his army) seem to have forgotten that completely when faced by Goliath. David, on the other hand, had never fought a battle, but he did remember that God had helped him to protect his sheep from lions and bears. He reasoned that if God could help him see off large predators intent on eating the flock, then he could also equip him to deal with an oversized Philistine.
The only real difference between David and Saul was that David remembered what God had done, but Saul didn’t. This is why ritual and remembrance are important in the Christian life.
However, the importance of remembering goes well beyond the religious sphere. We see it in national life; when countries or societies don’t remember their past, they tend to create a rose tinted legend for themselves which has limited resemblance to anything that actually happened. Perhaps the most egregious example of this tendency is Vladimir Putin’s rewriting of history to justify his war against Ukraine.
Somewhat linked to this is the fact that we have a generation of politicians in the West who have very little if any experience of a country at war. The politicians of my youth had, for the most part, fought in either WW2 or Korea. One government minister that I greatly admired was Dennis Healey, who served as beach master for the British brigade during the landings at Anzio in 1944. This generation of politicians remembered a global conflict and it shaped their attitude to international relations. They knew that it was important to reconcile with former enemies and to create alliances, rather than build walls. Of course they weren’t perfect, but in as much as they remembered the impact of wars and did their best to avoid them, they did a good job.
Someone I remember from childhood was aunty Doreen Galilee. She wasn’t actually a family member, but one of a large group of adults - friends of my parents or grandparents - that were called aunties and uncles. Doreen was in a wheelchair having suffered from polio as a child. She had to be lifted in and out of bed and needed help even to go to the toilet. Of course, polio isn’t a problem today because we have cheap and readily available vaccinations. Smallpox was a pandemic disease that killed large numbers of people, especially children, and leaving others badly scarred for life. The introduction of a vaccination (originally from cows infected with a related disease - hence the word vaccination derived from the Latin “vacca” or cow) led to the eventual eradication of the disease world wide, in what is probably the greatest triumph of public health in history. While we haven’t eliminated other diseases such as measles, mumps, whooping cough and so on, vaccination has both reduced their prevalence and attenuated their impact. As a result, we live in a world where dangerous infectious diseases are more or less under control and have been for generations. And so we start to forget. We have very little memory of a world in which childhood diseases killed a significant number of children and left others with lifelong scarring of one sort or another. This memory vacuum provides fertile ground for those who for one reason or another want to reject modern medicine and so we are seeing a resurgence of maladies that we thought were under control.
Perhaps this sort of forgetting is an inevitable part of the human condition. As the poet Steve Turner said “History repeats itself, has to, no-one listens”.
However, it is our responsibility to buck this trend; we need to know our history, biblical, social and economic and we need to learn its lessons.