The Ultimate D-Day

Yes, D-Day, 80 years ago this month, was important, but far more important in world history was the battle fought between Christ and Satan, culminating in the Cross and Resurrection.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STL, STD

For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, the example of D-Day should remind us of another and very different battle, one which was fought a long time ago and on a far greater scale.

It was exactly eighty years ago this month that General Dwight Eisenhower sent a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers and sailors and airmen across the sea to win the war against Hitler and his Third Reich. It was the largest armada ever launched in human history. Nearly all those young men dispatched from England to France in June of 1944 would land on the beaches of Normandy, there to begin the final and decisive assault upon Nazi Germany. Call it the initial, dramatic phase of a campaign for the reconquest of Europe, for the return of freedom to millions who had long languished without it. 

Not all would return, of course; and for those who did, the ordeal of battle would change them forever. Thousands were fated to die along the way. More men fell on the beaches and in the hills during those first weeks of hard fighting than would die during the quarter century we’ve spent fighting the War on Terror. But for all that was lost, and the losses were both real and terrible, the battle begun on those beaches would mark unmistakably the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler. Owing to the sacrifices of those brave young men, neither Hitler, nor the insane ideology that drove him and an entire German nation into the madness of war, would survive in the end. Their defeat was certain, total.

Which is why we call D-Day the midpoint of the struggle to wrest control of a continent. It was not the end, not the supreme moment of victory, but it put the end squarely in sight, establishing the essential beachhead pursuant to that final, long-awaited victory in Europe eleven months later on 5 May 1945.

For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, the example of D-Day should remind us of another and very different battle, one which was fought a long time ago and on a far greater scale. It was a battle whose midpoint we also commemorate; not as Americans following the flag, but as Christians following Christ. It is the event of His coming among us to suffer and to die, thereupon to rise again in Easter triumph. Those three days Christ spent in mortal combat represent the greatest and most far-reaching drama of all, one in which God Himself became the central figure, the chief protagonist in the struggle to wrest control of an entire world held hostage to the prince of darkness. 

“It is,” Dorothy Sayers reminds us, 

the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke and killed him. This is the dogma we find so dull—the terrifying drama of which God is both the victim and the hero.   

From the first moment it all began, reaching back to that miraculous day in March when a young Jewish girl agreed to become the Mother of God, humankind would undergo a complete seismic change, leaving one world in ruins, another radiant with the promise of future unending glory. A vast panorama had suddenly opened up, infinite in its scope and sweep, and nothing since has managed to put out or diminish the light and the life that Christ brought into the world.

This new world begun by Christ, fashioned from a couple planks of wood on which He would stretch out His arms to encompass everything—the perfect “sign of expansion,” says the Didache—is today the very life of the Church. She is the sheltering womb, the matrix of a new order of being in which all of humankind awaits a new and eternal birth. “Mundus reconciliatus Ecclesia,” says St. Augustine: “The Church is the world reconciled.”  

“The foundation of the Church,” writes St. Gregory of Nyssa, “is the creation of a new universe. In her, according to the words of Isaiah, new heavens and a new earth are created; in her is formed another man, in the image of Him who created him.” The deepest possible identity is thus struck between the work of redemption wrought by Christ in time, in human history, the highpoint of which is the cross, and the building up of the Church, which continues unabated, stretching on into a future filled with the promise of Parousia.   

A new epoch in the history of the world has thus come to pass. We needn’t worry or be anxious about the future, therefore, for it holds no fear for us. Set free by Christ, the exact midpoint of whose life was His death on the cross, victory is ours. “That which has already happened,” says Oscar Cullmann in Christ and Time, a book written in the immediate afterglow of victory in Europe, “offers the solid guarantee for that which will take place. The hope of the final victory is so much the more vivid because of the unshakable firm conviction that the battle that decides the victory has already taken place.” 

And, to be sure, has already been won, thanks to Christ’s definitive conquest of sin and death and the devil. “It is already the time of the end,” explains Cullmann, “and yet it is not the end.” That will come on the far side of history with the Lord’s final blast of the trumpet. In the meantime, of course, for us who cleave to Christ, the upward movement of history is unmistakable; and not unlike the Allied surge toward victory in Europe, it will not suffer final defeat. The tension between already and not yet remains, giving us real and lasting hope.  

Here, then, is the great theme of tension overshadowing the entire life of the Church. It is an ongoing and creative tension, and both her faith and theology are shaped by it. It is the fact that we are privileged to live, to have been inserted, precisely between these two great waves of the sea, that of the decisive battle already won by Christ and that final victory not yet announced on the other side.  

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with Ah! bright wings.
(from “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins)