With honour they served...

photo credit: screenshot

With honour they served…

This is a phrase that has been said maybe hundreds of times in the last week or so, as people remember the two Queensland Police officers that were brutally gunned down in the course of duty near Tara.

As the ABC covered the memorial service at the massive Boondall Enterntainment Centre on the 21st December 2022 and the 1.5km guard of honour of thousands of Police officers after the service, the term 'a huge display of honour' was used. 

It was an horrific crime and a fitting tribute. 

But it's the 'honour' element I want to highlight.

I can't help thinking that this is the biggest 'honouring' event I have seen in the Australian context in my lifetime.  Ok I've only live just over half a century which isn't that long in the grand scheme of things, but I began to wonder why there seemed to be this deep need in the psyche of so many to do such an huge 'honouring' and for so many members of the public to feel they needed to be there.

Other Police officers have been killed before, hundreds of our military have been killed across the world, yet this seemed to evoke an excessively strong response.  

Maybe it was because it was such an intentional slaughter of innocent lives and happened in a close-knit and normally 'quiet' rural setting.  But it provoked me to ponder this all a bit more.

So what might be going on here…..

Although we talk about 'honour-shame' oriented cultures being primarily Asia and Africa, we must not overlook that deep in the heart of us all is the hunger for honour…and as we see in this incident we are not only hungry for our own honour, but I think we are also desperate to find someone/something great and noble which to give our honour. And as the West more and more rejects, ignores or forgets about God for who He really is, the West will also more and more go looking for everything related to honour, but on an earthly level, thinking that is all there is. Honour on the level of God and eternity are no longer factors that are embraced.

In a world that has rejected God, there is no God to honour, there is no Jesus to honour. There is no-one in our lives on a daily basis to salute, to bow to, to humbly honour for their greatness, their goodness, their sacrifice for others.  We were made to 'look up' to a greater glory than our own. 

Like I talked about with the Queen's passing, and all the tributes and people feeling 'honoured' to just be in the room where her body Lay in State, people would have felt a sense of humble honour to attend and pay tribute to these two courageous, sacrificial officers.

Maybe it is also that unlike the Queen, these two officers represented in people's minds a situation of 'good people' who intentionally and knowingly deny themselves and give their lives every day knowing under what risks they serve, and they paid the price of social 'badness' with their lives - they sacrifically suffered something they should never have suffered. Is it that this reveals just a hint of the deep unconscious reality that our hearts want to honour such a person, and such a person deserves honour….and yet we miss honouring the One - the Lord Jesus Christ - who was perfectly good and suffered the greatest and most henious murder this earth has witnessed. 

Maybe this is another situation that you can use in conversation with others to draw them to think about matters of the heart…..ask them why they think we humans feel a need to give honour at all?…or why we say the police 'serve with honour'?…and what honour has to do with giving of oneself for others?….what else can you think of that might lead a person to think more deeply even if just for a moment, about why we act the way we do and what this might teach us about why we were made and Who made us….and Who deserves our highest honour and also wants to 're-make' us anew….

….The 'Who' of Christmas!…Jesus Christ the Lord!