Fit for heroes?

On Sunday, at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month, I'll buff up my old brass bugle and play the soldiers' lament at the cenotaph; five-score mournful notes left hanging on the breeze with the names, lives, loves and losses of the fallen.

It echoes across the world, from suburban TV sets to the battlefields of Afghanistan to a place just beyond the Hindenburg Line where Australian Diggers carved their name in the annals of valour. The loneliest of the AIF memorials in France and Belgium is dedicated to the Fourth Division, cut off by a motorway running through the old German lines, and it is the most desolate: men died here when the war was already won.

The Remembrance Day ceremony is a commemoration of the end of the "war to end all wars", 1914-18; and the sad mockery of that phrase in the years since extends the sentiment to the fallen of all wars.

Last Post, originally a signal that the last sentry had taken his post for the night, has become an act of devotion to address what we now struggle to acknowledge: the giving of self to something greater than self.

Once upon a time it was common place; and while people were challenged to describe that self-giving, there were traditions at hand to help. The "supreme sacrifice", a "lesser Calvary": the phrases harnessed to the cause back then had a resonance that is lost with the gradual retreat of faith from public life.

So we retreat to a song without words, a song that resonates in unforeseen places.

In churches around the world, we read this Sunday of a widow who gives her last two brass razoos to a Temple whose officials, we are are told, "devour the homes of widows and orphans and for the sake of appearances say long prayers."

The widow has no name and speaks no words. Nor do we know why she gives away "the whole of her life" – a sum worth a handful of flour, which might have kept her from starvation.

Widows and orphans are important in the Bible. The second book of Jewish law, Deuteronomy, says that God "executes justice for the orphan and the widow".

To emphasise the point, we also read from the Old Testament book of Ruth, a young widow who chooses loyalty to her widowed mother-in-law over returning to her own people across the border. As a widow, Ruth is allowed to glean grain from the edge of a harvest field to earn her handful of flour. When she's done, her mother-in-law Naomi urges her to seduce the landowner Boaz while he sleeps on the "threshing floor" – this is the Old Testament, remember – and he then marries Ruth. The couple raise a child who becomes an ancestor to King David, and ultimately Jesus.

Lesson? Widows matter, as generations of war veterans have acknowledged. Perhaps the most humanising aspect of our cult of Remembrance is the attention paid from its earliest days to widows and orphans. A society can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members, and a widow or orphan without means is on the edge of existence.

Many women lose husbands and sons in war. At the point where Jesus observes the widow in the Temple, his mother is most likely a widow who is about to lose her son. So the poignant moment is two-edged. The widow who has nothing left to lose gives her all.

This moment is the last act in Jesus' public ministry. In the next chapter he foresees the ruin of Jerusalem and the Temple in a passage we have dubbed the "mini Apocalypse". Thereafter he is betrayed, tried and executed.

What the widow teaches is not a recipe for giving: there is no "go and do thou likewise" in conclusion. But her plight offers a reason for the cataclysm to come.

Her fate should be mediated by the religious laws which the authorities are supposed to honour, yet the Temple to which she gives her all is complicit in the oppressive government of the day. It served, among other things, to store records of debt – debts which might serve to impoverish a widow and devour her house. Josephus, the historian of the era, records rebels burning the chief priest's house and the debt records – clear signs of trouble in that part of paradise.

The people to blame are the scribes, who "like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the market places, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honour at banquets".

It is not the commitment of the people that is found wanting in this scene – they give their all – but the actions of those in power.

We can find parallels with this scene throughout history, but perhaps today most directly in the caricatures of World War I generals – and chaplains – secure behind the front lines while the common soldier gave his all in battle.

It's a scene of uniforms, salutes, fine seats and dining just a few kilometres away from the Digger, Tommy, Poilu or Fritz freezing, fighting and dying in the mud. Our memory of that disconnect colours our memory of their sacrifice.

The sheer scale of the losses forced a rethink of our Western world, yet the Gospel reminds us that each individual matters. As Jesus observes in Matthew's account: "Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me".

Soldiers who returned to a "land fit for heroes" found that the battle for justice had to be constantly renewed – and they were the supposed victors. To their credit, they focused on the widows and orphans, as their successors continue to do. More than a decade of recent armed conflict has given us a new wave of war heroes, damaged veterans and grieving relatives who will need care for years to come, in both material and spiritual ways.

But the lesson doesn't end there. Who are "the least of these" in modern society? The list is potentially endless and open for renewal every day.

Our modern Temple is conflicted by issues of abuse in the past; abuse which in many cases remains unaddressed, though the fact that we hear the cries of pain is progress.

But we also face a conflicted future, where people marginalised by traditional attitudes find Christians of a certain tendency only too keen to cite Scripture in condemnation.

In the Church of England, an unholy alliance of conservatives is fighting a rear-guard action against the consecration of women bishops: a battle that thankfully has been won in my home State of Western Australia.

But this scene has a counterpart here in a similar rump of resistance to dialogue with same-sex couples. The recent Synod in Perth approved a motion to recognise diversity. Two hours of passionate yet polite debate ended in a vote of both Houses – clergy and laity – that was clearly carried in both.

Yet legalistic arguments have prevailed and the resolution has been set aside. Now we must wait a year before readdressing the matter, which next time around will require a two-thirds majority in each House.

On the basis of this year's vote, the laity would meet that test, but the clergy most likely would not.

So the challenge is there: who claims the long robes, the greetings and the best seats?

A widow's weeds may denote grief, but the Gospel teaches that the outcome will be worse for those who grab the robes and do nothing to help.