The efficiency with which our culture translates any holiday into a marketing tool amazes me. 

Sometimes the translation comes easy – Mother’s Day and flowers, Valentine’s Day and greeting cards, Independence Day and fireworks. 

But sometimes the translation judders and jars. Like today. 

Memorial Day… and “markdowns”? 

Making the leap from remembering and honoring the deaths of thousands of Americans in the cause of freedom to seeking a better bargain on a big-screen television is a very tricky thing. 

Think about it too hard, and you tumble into the chasm between the profound nobility of the sacrifice being recalled and the profound triviality of the product being hawked. 

One might even start to ponder the weirdness of the way that holidays = shopping days in the first place. 

For most of this country’s short history, a holiday specifically connoted a day when commerce ceased so that either reverence or leisure could be prioritized. 

And leisure – in the not-so-distant past – meant time spent doing pleasurable things other than shopping (because commerce ceased on holidays).

But the cultural ironies of Memorial Day observation in America circa 2023 distract us from the myriad ways that this particular holiday points us to Christ. 

Set the wackiness aside, and the day becomes a conduit of specifically Christian truth.

Consider, first:

“Remembering” reverberates throughout scripture as command and as disciple-template. 

“Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm…”

(Deuteronomy 5:15) 

“Remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like me, declaring the outcome from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done…”

(Isaiah 46:9 – 10) 

“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

(Matthew 28:20)

A day dedicated to “remembering” cannot help but prompt the Christian to remember these (and many other) scriptural precepts of remembrance and to consider how remembering, in itself, is a holy obligation. 

We can only live as Christians if we remember who we are and Whose we are – an act of the will in a fallen world which constantly coaxes us to believe alternative things about ourselves. 

Memorial Day can push remembering to the forefront of our consciousness, thereby restoring us to the truth of our own identities as God’s own. 

Consider, second:

Memorial Day honors those who have “made the ultimate sacrifice” for others. 

One has only to listen to the grief of the families, friends, and comrades of the fallen to catch a glimpse of the overwhelming costliness of those sacrificed lives. 

Each one of the dead was someone’s child, someone’s sibling, someone’s beloved. 

The souls offered up in the cause of freedom were not anonymous, unknowable generalities – they were people. Like you and me. And their absence caused / causes pain. Pain exactly like the pain we ourselves feel, when we miss people we love.

These costly sacrifices at the heart of Memorial Day point us to Jesus. 

Jesus “made the ultimate sacrifice” in a way that is both the same and also infinitely more than the noble dead of our military. 

Like a volunteer soldier or sailor, Jesus chose to put Himself in harm’s way and chose to defend His beloved against an Enemy who was intent on killing Him in order to get at those beloved. 

The physical agonies of crucifixion parallel the physical agonies of slower deaths in battle… gangrene, burns, poison gas, asphyxiation while nailed to a tree, are similarly excruciating. 

But Jesus’s identity as God limits the comparison of His death with anyone else’s – his suffering went so far beyond the physical torments He endured that we literally lack the capacity to imagine its extent. 

To be separated from His Father, to take on the entirety of human sin in all its horrific depravity and gruesomeness of evil, to leave His beloved followers and friends thinking that darkness had won – these pains are beyond not only our ability to bear but also our ability to comprehend. 

Jesus experienced them. 

For us.

The opposite angle of approach to Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice is this: where any of us (and in wartime, all of us) may be called on to fight for our nation, ONLY Jesus could effectively fight for mankind.

Where any of us (in our best moments) might volunteer for dangerous service in the interests of protecting people and principles we love, ONLY Jesus could volunteer to protect the people He created and the Truth He embodied. 

ONLY Jesus could defeat the Enemy whose weapons were (and remain) deception and death.

We rightly honor the fallen who have died to protect us from earthly suffering and tyranny of foreign powers; we honor them as grateful fellows – as indebted equals.

But we worship Jesus, the Lord Who died to save us from eternal suffering and the tyranny of slavery to sin; we bow to Him as reverent subjects – as adoring children.

In that worshiping, the zenith of Jesus’s impact on Memorial Day (and every other day) becomes clear: Where those who mourn their military dead must live daily with the grief of their absence, we who celebrate the resurrection of Jesus get to live daily in the sustaining delight of His presence. And His ongoing Presence keeps us mindful that we anticipate reunion with loved ones we miss in the moment. Even when we grieve, we grieve as those who have hope – Jesus IS our hope.

Finally, consider, third:

Memorial Day is an American holiday. 

Those whom we remember gave their all, in order to preserve American freedom. 

In the history of the world, there is no freedom on record more comprehensive and egalitarian than American freedom.

For any serious scholar, it is indisputable that Christian freedom provides the model for America’s founding documents and legal codes. 

For any serious American Christian, it is equally obvious that Christian freedom provides the most comprehensive picture of America’s freedom-aspiration at its best. 

But American freedom is not synonymous with Christian freedom, and we dishonor both our military dead and our Lord when we confuse the two.

How so?

Because not all of America’s fallen heroes are Christians, but their sacrifices are no less complete.

And because Jesus’s sacrifice was not for America – but for humanity.

Scripture states clearly that nations “rise and fall” and that Christians are “citizens of heaven.” 

Memorial Day should therefore prompt American Christians to be accountable to God for the way we steward the circumstances of our earthly citizenship. 

We live as American Christians; we die and live forever as Christians, period. 

So, in the meantime, how do we use our “American-ness” to serve King Jesus? 

And how do we witness to Jesus’s Kingship in the way we frame our American-ness?

Friends, I encourage you to savor the pleasures of this holiday. Enjoy time “off” – feast and fellowship with your family – laugh and play! 

But please also pause to pray. 

Pray gratitude for those whose deaths are the reason for the holiday. 

Pray comfort for those for whom those deaths are a source of deep personal pain. 

And pray for the soul of this nation for which those deaths were freely offered – that America might be worthy of their sacrifice, and that American Christians might be empowered by the Holy Spirit to work tirelessly toward that end.