On 25 April 1915, 3,000 Kiwi soldiers hit the Gallipoli beaches to face a brutal trial by fire. Two thousand years ago in Jerusalem, a beaten and bloodied man was condemned to a humiliating death. These two events have more in common than you might think.
We’re in between Easter and Anzac Day, holidays that usually fall within the same few weeks but otherwise aren’t treated together. Hot cross buns give way to poppies with little thought for what unites them.
To see the connections, start with the word holiday, which originally meant “holy day”. Our festivals reveal what our society holds sacred. And if that sounds strange in a secular state, the reality is that we all, individually and collectively, hold some things sacred. The only question is what those things are and whether they deserve our veneration.
Sacred things are set apart. They’re above us and beyond us, attitudes and beliefs that give our lives meaning and purpose. This was true at Jerusalem and at Anzac Cove, and it’s true now. But the things we treat as sacred—they can change over time.
In contemporary New Zealand, we talk a lot about freedom. That’s mostly a good thing. Freedom is essential for a well-lived life; we need it to make meaningful choices, to be fully human. But we can also make freedom into an idol.
In fact, we too often act as though life is about projecting our personal sense of who we are onto the world. Look inside you to discover who you are, and live your truth: “you be you”. Attempting to make this possible, we turn freedom of choice into something like a sacred right; we say we need maximal choice to fully express our sense of self.
Among other things, this means we avoid commitments that would limit our self-expression, or we choose only those that confirm it. Think of the “fur baby” phenomenon. This goes beyond simply treating pets with affection. In its extreme form, it means treating pets more like people than like animals, even opting for pets over children. True, pets create obligations of their own, but they’re property not persons. This makes them subject to their owners’ choices and control in ways that other humans are not.
It’s a deformed idea of freedom, which grows out of a worldview we can call narcissistic individualism. This is a view that treats rights, choice, and empowerment as sacred, and makes them into fig leaves for selfish and self-regarding beliefs.
These aren’t the beliefs that make it possible for men to leave their landing craft and advance into enemy territory, or to carry a cross onto a hill to die.
That takes a character forged over time to do something good even when it’s hard or apparently self-defeating, even when there’s a choice not to do it.
That kind of character has to be oriented to something we used to call virtue, an old-fashioned word for something that truly deserves to be treated as sacred. Virtues like courage and love are objective goods—they’re good because they’re good, regardless of whether we personally perceive this.
That makes virtues different to the values we’re more comfortable talking about. Values are subjective—they’re things we think are good, even things that become good simply because we chose them. The issues should be obvious. We’re not always very good at identifying what’s good when left to our own devices, and something wrong doesn’t become right just because we chose it.
Let’s return to Easter and the Anzacs. These are both stories of courage or, in classical terms, of the virtue of fortitude. CS Lewis called courage “the form of every virtue at its testing point.”
In both cases, what was being tested was love. More than an emotion, love grows from attachment—to people and to places. It’s a commitment to do what’s best for others, even when that comes at your own expense.
We might even say that love is the motive power of sacrifice. Eugene Sledge, a US Marine who fought in the Pacific in World War Two, describes the simple attitude of the troops he served with: “If the country is good enough to live in, it’s good enough to fight for.”
Or as Jesus of Nazareth said, “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
The intermediate space between the holidays of Easter and Anzac Day is a good time to reflect on virtue, and to let that challenge our culture’s all-too-common sense of the sacred.
Courage, love, and sacrifice—these are the kind of transcendent virtues that our freedom is meant to be used for, and for which others freely gave all they had.
Our task, as their descendants, is to be grateful for their example and to imitate it in our own day.
This article was originally published by The Post, The Press, and The Waikato Times on 15 April 2026 under the heading “Courage, love, sacrifice, but not fur babies: The things that freedom really exists for”.
