Sermon preached at Bradford Cathedral

To the left of the door you came in at the back of the Cathedral, there's a memorial window for the Yorkshire Regiment; it's the most detailed and finest services window I've seen anywhere. Have a look when you go out: it details their campaigns, as well as weaponry and living conditions. It's a window we use a lot with schoolchildren to help them understand what the world wars were like.

At the centre of the window is a picture of a dying soldier, lying at the foot of a cross. One of the children who came to see the window asked our education officer, 'what have they done to that man in the picture' – pointing not to the dying soldier, but to the man hanging above him on a cross: either side of whom are written the words: greater love has no man than this: to lay down his life for his friends.

We've heard testimony paid to Martin Bell as a hero, a truly professional soldier, a great friend, a loving and loved family member.

The presence here of civic as well as military dignitaries recognises the importance of his life and his death, as a man who chose to serve his country with distinction and courage, and who acted with selfless loyalty to help a colleague in great distress, counting the needs of others as greater than his own safety.

By his courage and generosity of heart, he has left an inspiring example of what love can mean.

Love can be such a misunderstood word in our culture. It gets used as a euphemism for sex, or for being sentimental, a bit pink and fluffy, often contrasted with hard-headed power and real action. You won't find a section on love in the Army manuals on how to do soldiering.

But all of us know that without love, real, generous, self-giving sacrificial love, the world is a cold and lonely and ultimately pointless place.

And without love the Army wouldn't work properly either, as Martin's life and death remind us. It's love that makes the world go round.

Not the shallow romantic love that's chronicled in the pages of celebrity magazines. But the love that has the courage to work at relationships even when it's hard going.

The love that parents offer unconditionally to their children: the love which cares and suffers and lets go of the children we love so that they may find love for themselves.

All of us who have children or wider family or friends who are or have been in active service, and currently in Afghanistan, know the cost of loving and letting go: how we have to live one day at a time, dreading a phone call or a knock on the door; and our hearts go out to Martin's family, who like many others are bearing the ultimate cost of the love that holds tightly and yet lets go.

Love which Martin held onto, and which he acted on, and which cost him his life. Love which has lost you the person you know and love, whose future we will not now see; the cost of the love which you will bear for the rest of your lives with sorrow and sacrifice, and with pride in Martin's example and achievements.

But today isn't only about remembering, celebrating or thanksgiving. This is a funeral service: and in a funeral we do two particular things.

We lay Martin's body to rest: we go with him on his last journey; it's the last physical thing we can do for him.

And we also commend Martin, the person we know and love, into the hands of God: the God whose love makes the world go round, the God who teaches us what true love really means.

That World War 1 memorial window at the back of the Cathedral has the same words which have been used of Martin, blazed not across the dying soldier in the window, but across the figure of Jesus on the cross. Words which were first spoken by Jesus when speaking with his friends on the night before he died on behalf, not just of them, but of all of us. Words spoken about love, not in the heat of battle, but over Jesus' last meal before he was arrested and framed and nailed to a cross.

The Christian faith is that God is living and dying in Jesus: it's God who loves us and who counts us as friends worth dying for; and the love of God in Jesus is greater even than death.

Today we commend Martin into that love of God – the love which touched his heart and life. We pray that Martin may rest in the love of God, the God who would be Martin's friend, and ours, the God whose love took Jesus to hell and back for us; so that we with Martin might be held by the love of God through life and death, and learn to love our God and those around us as much as God loves each one of us.

Jesus said: If you love me, keep my commandments: and this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, to lay down his life for his friends.