But sometimes memorials can serve less honorable purposes. Not only do memorials call attention to the best in the past; they also can be used to cover up the worst. An impressive monument can bestow dignity upon a dubious endeavor or questionable person of days gone by. Such memorials do no service to the truth for they hide unflattering facts. At times a memorial itself can be greater than the person it is supposed to honor. For instance, Michelangelo's sculpture for the tomb of Pope Julius II is a magnificent creation, but the Pope it was to pay tribute to was pretty much a scoundrel. But we don't want memorials to highlight the dark side of the past, the atrocities and treacheries. We prefer our memorials to comfort and reassure us, rather than warn us or disturb our complacency.

Sometimes dwelling on the past is a means of escaping the problems of the present and the disturbing prospects of the future. Sometimes we are tempted to glorify days gone by. I suppose we all know people who seem to continually talk about how great things used to be. Life was simpler, friendships were closer, motives were more pure, morals were higher and so on. This is the Golden Age syndrome. For some people the Golden Age was the 1920s; for others it was the 1960s. No matter what our favorite period may be, the problem with looking back to a Golden Age is that we distort the past and we come to believe that the best days of life have already gone by. Everything else that follows is anticlimactic. Consequently some people, who are disappointed with the present and distressed over the future, tend to live in the past. Their memories are highly important to them but they do not have hopeful memories.

You see, hopeful memory does not drag us into the past and lock us there. Hopeful memory does not tell us that the best of life has already come and gone. Rather it thrusts us into the future. When the prophets of old called upon God's people and told them to remember the works that the Lord had done in the past, this was to prepare them for the future. They were not called upon to remember the past for its own sake. The practice was not a self-indulgent diversion. Rather they were to remember the wonders of the past so that their lives would be open to the even greater wonders God would do for them in the future.

The Lord's Supper is a hopeful memorial. It does not falsely glorify the past. When we partake of the bread and cup we remember the broken body and blood of the Lord. Images of deceit, betrayal and cruelty impose themselves upon us. The memorial feast confronts us with the disquieting fact that we humans are all too capable of striking out against true holiness and supreme goodness and treating it as demonic if it does not work out to our advantage. That is not the kind of memory we hold dear. But the Lord's Supper does more. It reminds us of the sacrificial love of God. It speaks to us of a love that will not let us go but which reaches out to us, despite our evil.