If I were to ask you what is special about tomorrow, August 6, you might know that it is the feast day of the Transfiguration of Our Lord. The story is told that Jesus took Peter, James and John with him up a mountain, and there his appearance was transformed so that he shone ‘as bright as a flash of lightning.’ A cloud covered them, and the voice of God spoke from the cloud, saying, ‘This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.’ But August 6 has another resonance which is less splendid. You may also remember that it is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The irony – though that seems too weak a word – has often been remarked upon. On the day when Christians, including those in Hiroshima, were celebrating a revelation of Divine light and power to an uncomprehending sample of humanity on a Galilean hilltop, a light and a power wholly un-divine fell upon the human race represented in the uncomprehending citizens of one Japanese city. There seems to be a kind of photographic negative of the Transfiguration to be seen in the August 6 atomic bombing. The one who is truly human, Jesus the Christ, reveals in cloud and in light to James, John and Peter, and thus to us all, the potency and the glory of the Godhead that is in him, and so in us all. An object derived from a material virtually non-existent in nature (plutonium-239) descends from a clouded sky and with a light brighter than a thousand suns reveals the destructive potential of human beings.
But it is not just that August 6 provides us with a hideous contrast between the Transfiguration of Jesus and the disfiguration wrought by the atom bomb. We are not confronted simply and unambiguously with an image of human beauty and Divine majesty on the one hand and of human ugliness and diabolical force on the other. The contrast is real, of course, and unmistakable, but to stop there in the horror of it is to make no real spiritual progress towards recognising the roots both of that ugliness and force and also of that beauty and majesty in ourselves, and so beginning to transfigure the one into the other. We could, in a parody of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, simply bleat like sheep, ‘Jesus good, atom bomb bad.’ True enough, but that still leaves us outside the reality.
The finest scientific minds of the mid 20th century contributed to the development of the atomic bomb. Viewed in one light, it was an almost heroic achievement. It was created not by evil monsters but by dignified and decent men following the logic of their vocations and in response to the crisis of their times. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project that produced the bomb, said that the mathematics involved were beautiful, but it was not that they did not know what they were doing or had their heads buried in pure physics. Oppenheimer was there from conviction and had earlier opposed fascism by participating in communist organisations He was from a liberal Jewish background and was a man widely read in literature and in eastern philosophy. He knew that the world would change because of what he and his colleagues were doing. He also said this: ‘In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.’
None of us can lose that knowledge. It is a matter of fact that if we pay taxes in this country, we are contributors to the continuation of the nuclear threat. We may protest, ‘Not in my name’, but we do not so easily escape from contamination. The atom bomb has transfigured our consciousness, so that we cannot be unaware of humanity’s potential, our potential, to obliterate itself, ourselves. In the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are shown an image not of what one group of people did sixty-odd years ago to another group, but of who we potentially are.
When this is recognised and accepted, we move towards some kind of truth, bitter and painful though it may be, and thus towards the one who is truth, who is found (as we should have guessed), not removed from this experience of death but in it. God was speaking from the mushroom cloud, as he spoke from the cloud and fire to Moses and as he spoke from the cloud when brightness enveloped Jesus on the mountain that day? I would not ever have dared to express such an idea if I had not heard the words of someone close to that cloud in August 1945. Joseph Iida is the former Bishop of Kyushu, the diocese in south-western Japan that includes the city of Nagasaki, and he was thus my bishop until he retired a few years ago. He is one of a small group of people who have some direct experience of both atom bombings. As a teenaged cadet, he was in a naval academy on an island ten miles south of Hiroshima on August 6, and he both saw and felt the blast. He watched the mushroom cloud for two days until it dispersed. He tells how, at the sight of it, the words ‘the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire’ (Exodus 13:21) came unbidden into his mind. Some days later he and his classmates were evacuated in a train of coal trucks and they saw the effect of the bomb. ‘Under the moonlight we saw the total devastation of the city. Nothing was left but piles of burnt bricks and junk on the flat delta of the Ota River. There stood several burnt trees like human hands crying for help against the black silhouette of the Chugoku mountain range…The air was filled with the sickening stink of burnt dead bodies.’ He then went to his home town of Sasebo, thirty miles north of Nagasaki, and a month after the end of the war was sent by his father, a priest, to find out what had happened to the priest in Nagasaki. As he climbed up one of the steep hills which overlook the city, he was surrounded by the lush greenery of late summer. At the crest of the hill, he stepped over into a world of ash and destruction. Japanese hills and mountains, unlike our rounded English hills, have sharp crests and summits, and at Nagasaki the division between the areas completely shielded from the blast of the bomb on one side and the devastated zone on the other could be crossed in a couple of footsteps. Joseph Iida said, ‘These words struck me: ‘I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.’ (Deuteronomy 30:19)
The young Joseph Iida saw scenes that seem to defy hope; he saw how over large areas the atomic bombs had wiped out all people and all they had laboured to create. The readings we heard this morning from the Old Testament (Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14, 2:18-23) and the Gospel (Luke 12: 13-21) remind us that all human life and every human endeavour, viewed as an end in themselves apart from God, are doomed to vanish, not instantly but one by one, and so can not be a source of ultimate hope. We will all face death, although we pray not in so terrible a fashion as those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is not cheerful stuff. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,’ says the writer of Ecclesiastes, and it is quite strange to hear, ‘this is the word of the Lord’ said after that. But it is a simple fact that our lives come to an end, and that nothing at all, no matter how strong or worthwhile, lasts absolutely for ever. If our hope is not in something beyond what is transient, we are in fact hopeless. Facing up to this reality is the beginning of a way towards genuine faith. The Gospel story tells of a rich man who piled up his wealth and decided to enjoy himself, only to find that his life ended before he had a chance to make use of his riches. He was not actively sinning against his neighbour, not being oppressive or violent. He had simply forgotten who he truly was, a creature dependent upon God for the meaning of his existence.
In the years after the war Joseph Iida found himself struggling for the meaning of his own existence and of what he had witnessed. I mentioned that when he saw the mushroom cloud hanging over Hiroshima, he was reminded of the pillar of cloud and of fire that guided the people of Israel through the wilderness. This association troubled him greatly. The cloud and the fire in the book of Exodus were signs of the glory and the protection of God during the journey of His people towards liberation. How could the atomic bomb possibly be a sign of anything except human evil and folly? After many years wrestling with this painful question and with his own faith, he came to a conclusion that leaves me quite literally speechless: He says: ‘Although I am not suggesting by any means that those who were killed were particularly guilty…[and] I am not justifying the use of any indiscriminately destructive weapons…the atom bomb was God’s judgement on the whole Japanese nation for its racial prejudice and arrogance… But on the other hand it was God’s act of mercy on our nation, because we were delivered from racism, nationalism, totalitarianism and militarism…His grace came with his judgement at the same time. In order to repent, we had to sacrifice the precious lives of half a million innocent people.’
Only someone with Bishop Iida’s particular set of experiences could write those words. None of us, I feel, has the right to come to the same conclusion. I find it very difficult even to read aloud what he wrote. It is quite beyond me to pass any comment on it. But however his words strike us, the important thing, I think, is that they show how it is possible to begin to see God in the midst of utter horror, and not in a futile attempt to escape from it What those words reveal is a very costly transfiguration. A way has been found to see God’s face, not in a sublime mountaintop experience, but on the plain where multitudes seem lost. For us, who have lost our innocence, our not knowing, in the light of our own participation in the forces of death, our own knowledge of the depths to which our humanity can fall as well as the heights to which it can be raised, this may be the best and truest hope. God is here, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in all the agonies of our age, for you and for me and for all.