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13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down ones life for
ones friends.
Ernest Gordon was a Scottish POW in Word War II. He wrote a book
entitled Miracle on the River Kwai which detailed his experience
along with other soldiers at the hands of their Japanese captors as
they were forced to build a jungle railroad.
As conditions steadily worsened, as starvation, exhaustion and
disease took an ever-growing toll, the atmosphere in which we lived
was increasingly poisoned by selfishness, hatred, and fear. We were
slipping rapidly down the scale of degradation.
We lived by the rule of the jungle, red in tooth and claw the
evolutionary law of the survival of the fittest. It was a case of I look
out for myself and to hell with everyone else. The weak were
trampled underfoot, the sick ignored or resented, the dead
forgotten. When a man lay dying we had no word of mercy. When
he cried for our help, we averted our heads.
We had long since resigned ourselves to being derelicts. We were
the forsaken men forsaken by our families, by our friends, by our
government. Now even God had left us.
Hate, for some, was the only motivation for living. We hated the
Japanese. We would willingly have torn them limb from limb, flesh
from flesh, had they fallen into our hands. In time even hate died,
giving way to numb, black despair.
Then Gordon becomes sick and is nursed back to health by two
other men. This act of sacrifice along with others began to create a
change in Gordon as well as the other men in the camp. One
anecdote from his book that is pretty well known goes as follows:
One day a shovel is missing. The officer in charge becomes angry
and demands that the missing shovel be produced or he will kill
them all. No one budges until finally, one man steps forward. The
officer beats the man to death. At the next tool check, there is no
shovel missing and the men realize that there had been a miscount
at the first check point. The prisoners are stunned. An innocent man
was willing to die to save everyone else. In the midst of abject
suffering love was stretching out, straining to cover a midst of sins,
stretching out in sacrifice.
Let us pray.