war

Ukraine’s Holy Week Like No Other

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APRIL 14, 2022BY ARCHBISHOP BORYS GUDZIAK

As Ukraine is being crucified by the enemy, millions of its people go through the same experience of darkness and a sense of the absence of God as Jesus did on the cross. Let us not doubt that God is with the suffering and that his truth, peace, and love will prevail.

Christians of different traditions begin Lent on different dates. For Ukrainians of all denominations, their spiritual pilgrimage this spring started on February 24 at 4 AM. War and Lent have been deeply intertwined this year.

Lent is a time to discern evil, especially in one’s own life. Understanding violent and destructive passions is difficult amid the modern world’s comfortable, soft circumstances. For centuries, the Church’s tradition has helped us detach from worldly comforts during the Lenten journey through fasting, prayer, and works of charity. The war in Ukraine has given Lent a deeper resonance. Violence and suffering, sin and evil, compassion and sacrifice, virtue and heroism reveal themselves. War was something known to the monks of Constantinople and Jerusalem who wrote the prayers and hymns for our Lenten journey. And it was known to generations of our ancestors. But now we experience war in Lent first-hand.

His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, also reflected on Ukraine’s violence-hewn Lent in his address on April 5, 2022, the 41st day of the war.

The Christian faith teaches us not to turn our eyes away from God who became human, from God whom humans dishonored, crucified, and killed in the most shameful way. The Christian faith teaches us to honor the wounds of Christ, to kiss them, because we know that by His wounds we are healed [cf. Isaiah 53:5], as the Prophet Isaiah writes.

These days Ukraine is experiencing her Golgotha, her crucifixion. Today I ask all of us—all Christians of the whole world, all people of goodwill—not to turn your eyes away from the humiliation and suffering, the death and wounds of Ukraine. . . . Just a few tens of kilometers from the center of Kyiv we see today hundreds of dead who were shot in the back of the head. We see the wounds of the Ukrainian people.

This Lent has made reality clearer to me than ever. The work of evil, the wicked will of the Enemy of humankind, and the frailty of our human nature are on display. We witness Adam’s grab. Adam had all the trees and their fruit in the garden of Eden. God the Giver gave Adam everything he needed. And yet, he decided not to live with God and be like God the Giver. Despite being forewarned, he decided to grab that which would lead to his death.

Grace amid Horror

Today we witness the leader of a contemporary empire that extends across eleven time zones grab for more. Unprovoked, he decides to invade a sovereign, independent country. In the account of Christ’s Passion, we see that Judas, blinded by greed, stretches out his arm to snatch silver in exchange for the Savior. These are different episodes of the same story of human sin. All of them lead to death.

Yet Easter gives us hope for salvation and new life. God repeats and renews His gift. Amid the brutality and horrors, there are many signs of grace. In this world, which is characterized by compulsive self-reference and the dictatorship of relativism, we see people giving their lives for others and for the truths of dignity, freedom, and justice. Ukrainians are demonstrating that greatest love defined by our Lord in John 15:13: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” As we recall and celebrate the salvific sacrifice completed on the Cross, we see the sacrifice of our contemporaries—brothers and sisters in Ukraine, military and civilians—who are willing to give their lives to protect the innocent. Through their sacrifice, we get a glimpse into the sacrifice of the Son of God once more.

Holy Week’s rich liturgical traditions help us understand reality. As Father Alexander Schmemann noted, in our liturgical celebrations, we do not merely remember past events. The power of liturgy is that it “transforms remembrance into reality.” Lazarus Saturday, celebrated by Byzantine-rite Christians on the day before Palm Sunday, places before us the reality of death. “It stinketh,” Jesus is told as he approaches Lazarus in the tomb. Schmemann writes that at the grave of Lazarus, God encounters Death, “the reality of anti-life, of destruction and despair.” Jesus weeps “because He contemplates the triumph of death and destruction in the world created by God.”

At the beginning of April, the world was shocked by the dreadful images of bodies and violence discovered in Bucha, Borodianka, Irpin, and other towns near Kyiv; these were people Russian soldiers slaughtered during the weeks of occupation. We see death’s ugly face. And we weep as Jesus did. In the recent words of Bishop Erik Varden, “His tears show him aggrieved, indignant at the scandal of death’s reign in beings made for immortality, who long for paradise lost and lost friendship. Having wept, he goes up to Calvary to work our redemption.” The deaths Ukraine is experiencing bring the reality of Christian liturgy into full view.

After Jesus’s glorious entry into Jerusalem, we begin Holy Week by remembering the Lord’s last days on the earth before his salvific Passion and death. But the death on Great Friday will not be the closing of our week. Holy Week will be crowned by the feast of the Resurrection. The Resurrection provides all-important perspective on the suffering that Jesus, the Innocent One, endured.

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Stephen McAlpine: Planting Flowers in Wartime

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People are planting flowers in Kyiv. Spring is coming.

In the midst of all the chaos, horror and death that the Russian invasion has inflicted on Kyiv, there is something beautiful about people planting flowers in wartorn Kyiv.

As The Times reports, in the light of the Russian withdrawal from the city, the city’s mayor, former world heavyweight boxing champion, Vitaly Klitschko declared:

The municipal services have started spring cleaning. Parks, green areas are being arranged and trees and flowers are being planted.

The war isn’t finished of course. Far from it. Half of the city’s population is still missing, some dead, many in other countries. The devastation and pain will continue for some time yet.

But the normal process of planting seedlings in the flowerbeds, much the same as in my suburb on a seasonal basis, has recommenced. Spring in the air. Easter Resurrection in the air.

Planting flowers in wartime? It could be construed as denial. It could be misdiagnosed as futility or nihilism. Or it could be seen for what it is: Hope sprouting from the ground again.

And it’s a lesson too. A lesson for so many things, but a lesson, I think, for the church. I’ve written much about the straitened times that the church of God finds itself in in the West, either due to its own folly, or because of the turn against the Gospel in the hard secular age. There is much to be sober about. And let’s not get too shy about calling the Christian life a battle, or the spiritual work of the Church a warfare, for the sake of not offending, or for fear of being labelled seditious. If we were to jettison that language we’d have to cut large swathes out of the New Testament documents.

But in the midst of that, let’s remember the better story, the truer narrative of human flourishing, the light to the world, salt of the earth, shining like stars in the dark, sorta stuff that the New Testament speaks of as well. Let’s not forget the new citizens of a heavenly kingdom, the people who have a hope beyond the hope of this age.

In other words, the church gets to plant flowers in wartime. We have a hope that what springs from the ground in our midst, and as we do good to the world and in the world, will not be wasted. Our Resurrection Day is coming. Not Easter Sunday, that was the proto-type, the first-fruits springing from the ground, of which our resurrection will be the full planter bed, blossoming into eternity.

And that should encourage us as we approach what I believe could well be darker and harsher times ahead, both geo-politically and for the church.

The always brilliant Anglican rector and UK journalist Giles Fraser, pointed out recently in UnHerd, that in response to the Ukraine war, the Christian hope leaves the humanist hope quite literally for dead. Humanists have no way of explaining evil away, other than it being a good opportunity for humanity to glint through the darkest body count.

And while I think that humanists could look at the flower-planting in Kyiv and say “See? There’s humanity in all its glory!”, they are unable to counter that glory with any sense of the true horror of humanity that makes such a photograph as the one I posted above, truly memorable.

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The End of History

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Ukraine War Spells The End Of The Golden Arches Peace Theory

Just a week ago there was a theory that no two countries that both had McDonalds outlets had gone to war against each other. Not any more.

John Roskam writes:

ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW

For the past quarter of a century, we’ve wanted to believe Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman were right. And we’ve acted as if they were right.

Fukuyama’s book The End of History  and the Last Man, published in 1992 at the end of the Cold War claimed ‘history had ended’ because every country would become a liberal democracy.

No more perpetual globalisation: A McDonald’s restaurant in Moscow. Bloomberg
No more perpetual globalisation: A McDonald’s restaurant in Moscow. Bloomberg

Friedman’s book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, published in 1999, at a time when the intertwining of national economies seemed inexorable, made popular “the Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention” – “no two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a way against each other since each got its McDonald’s”.

There are at least 700 McDonald’s outlets in Russia and more than 100 in Ukraine.

The idea of a new world order of peace isn’t new.

In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant envisaged a “perpetual peace” because, ashumanity embraced “reason”, communities would no longer tolerate “all the miseries of war”.

The day after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, George Will wrote that “the nation’s decade-long holiday from history [has come] to a shattering end”.

Although he was referring to America and its political debates, which appeared to him to have reached “a nadir of frivolousness”, what Will said could easily have applied to the West as a whole.

Read the rest of the article at the IPA web-site

Scot McKnight: You Can’t Be a Christian and Support Torture

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Christians and Torture

Dec 12, 2014 @ 0:06 by  1 Comment

Brian Zahnd, in a recent post, opens with some strong, attention-grabbing and profound claims:

You cannot be a Christian and support torture. I want to be utterly explicit on this point. There is no possibility of compromise. The support of torture is off the table for a Christian. I suppose you can be some version of a “patriot” and support the use of torture, but you cannot be any version of a Christian and support torture. So choose one: A torture-endorsing patriot or a Jesus-following Christian. But don’t lie to yourself that you can be both. You cannot.

(Clearly you do not have to be a Christian to reject the barbarism of torture, you simply need to be a humane person. But to be a Christian absolutely requires you to reject the use of torture.)

I remember when Pew Research released their findings in 2009 revealing that six out of ten white evangelicals supported the use of torture on suspected terrorists. (Patton Dodd talks about thathere.) The survey stunned me. I spoke about it from the pulpit in 2009 and have continued to do so. I said it then and I’m saying it again today: You cannot support the use of torture and claim to be a follower of Jesus.

Any thoughtful person, no matter their religion or non-religion, knows that you cannot support torturing people and still claim to be a follower of the one who commanded his disciples to love their enemies. The only way around this is to invent a false Jesus who supports the use of torture. (The Biblical term for this invented false Jesus is “antichrist.”)

Those who argue for the use of torture do so because they are convinced it is pragmatic for national security. But Christians are not called to be pragmatists or even safe. Christians are called by Jesus to imitate a God who is kind and merciful to the wicked.

“Love your enemies! Do good to them.…and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to those who are unthankful and wicked. Be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.” –Jesus (Luke 6:35, 36)

I don’t know of a greater indictment against American evangelicalism than the fact that a majority of its adherents actually admit they support the use of illegal torture on suspected terrorists!

Brian brings up the commandment to love, which some no doubt will turn around to say “to love my family or nation I must protect by use of torture,” but I would go as well to the cross. It was an expression of the hideousness of Rome’s violent powerful rulers to use force and torture in the use of crucifixion as a deterrent, as a punishment, and — what’s more — an extravagant display of its arrogant power.

Torture is the arrogance of the mighty.

What Christians can do in responding to American torture is a theme I develop briefly in Kingdom Conspiracy — show to the world its worldliness for naming it as torture and by showing that the way to respond to enemies is love, grace, and forgiveness. A cycle of violence met by a cycle of love create a culture of grace and justice and peace.

The cross of Christ reveals what God thinks of torture: it is not the way of God. God turned torture into new life by resurrection and overcoming torture.