I know that my Redeemer lives: and that at the last he will stand upon the earth. 

We’re coming to that time of year when the readings come with a musical soundtrack. ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ is one of the best known and most poignant arias from Handel’s beloved oratorio Messiah, with a confidence in the music which matches the words. I don’t just believe: I know. Handel underlines that message by setting these words right at the start of the third and final part of Messiah, immediately after the joyful positivity of the Hallelujah Chorus, as we move away from telling the story of Christ’s life, ministry and death towards its meaning for us. 

Today, as we begin the countdown to Advent and Christmas but also remember the horrors of war, and the countless lives lost to conflicts big and small, that message holds a yet deeper significance. Death, in war or otherwise, is not the end. Because I know that my Redeemer lives. I know that I too will die one day: that, in the words of our reading, my skin will be destroyed- or, in the translation Handel used, worms will destroy my body. Not much joyful positivity there, you might think- but then it comes: in my flesh I shall see God. Not in some airy fairy nothingness that I can’t really imagine or put words to. In my flesh I shall see God. 

Body and soul, soul and body. Today’s readings make us think about the fact that we have, that we are, both. And they do more, too. This otherwise very complex and confusing Gospel passage tells us that we are not limited to this life, but that God’s perspective is eternal and therefore so should ours be. The poor mythical woman who is passed around from brother to brother is dreamed up as a legal trap for Jesus, but he escapes the trap by showing that the Sadducees have missed the point of their own story. To be children of the resurrection, to live as people who know that our Redeemer lives, is to have faith in God’s eternal perspective, to exist without the limits of time or space. So we don’t have to fear death, the destruction of our bodies, because it is in that same flesh that we will see God: ‘and to God all of them are alive’ as the Gospel tells us.

That’s an important message for us today as we give thanks for those who gave their lives for us in war, as Christ gave his life for all of us in a different kind of sacrifice. I don’t say that to romanticise or glorify war in any way. War is nasty, it is brutal, and most of those who get caught up in it didn’t chose their death, or understand what they were doing as in any way noble or sacrificial. But at the same time, if we are to make any sense of what Jesus is talking about, we have to confront the reality of war and death and suffering- and to know that God is there in it. Not somewhere else, safe and protected and untouched. In my flesh I shall see God. Not only in spirit, in imagination, but in the very midst of pain and death. That is where we most need to know that our Redeemer lives- and it is where he waits for us to recognise him.

Earlier this week I spent time at the bedside of a member of the Cathedral community during the last hours of her life in Thorpe Hall. It is always an incredible privilege to be there at such a time; the dying person may not be aware you’re there, but their friends and family are, and they are probably the ones most in need of that reassurance: I know that my Redeemer lives, right here, in this frail flesh which is about to become an empty shell, something very special is happening. In war, of course, there mostly isn’t time for that kind of peaceful bedside reflection. There the flesh is tested in very different ways, and some of them are horrible. But the value and dignity of each life remains the same, up to and beyond the moment of its ending, no matter the circumstances.

So today we grieve for the cruelty and waste of war: for those who didn’t need to die, as well as for those who went into it with open eyes because they believed in what they were doing. We grieve for those who have carried the wounds of bereavement and trauma down the generations, and for those who still do. We remember those whom we have lost, and those whose absence touches us personally. But we are also invited to look beyond our loss, to see as God sees, with an eternal perspective. 

‘I know that my Redeemer lives: then in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.’ 

He is God not of the dead, but of the living: for to him, all of them- and all of us– are alive. 

Amen.

Service: Canon Rowan Williams 9th November 2025. (St John’s Church Peterborough)

Reference: Job 19: 23-27a, Luke 20: 27-38