I suppose that the astonishment we feel at the Russian invasion of Ukraine is matched most closely by the progressive collapse of the Iron Curtain during the autumn of 1989, writes Rev Sydney Maitland. Every month another East European country shrugged off the communist straightjacket and emerged blinking into a new era of choice and of responsibility. A time of opportunity and to be part of the future.
And yet here we are with a war in Europe, initiated on the back of an exaggerated sense of grudge and of having been wronged. True, in the 1990s the western powers could have been more sensitive in their treatment of Russia, whose ideals had just been comprehensively rejected. But this does not really explain the self-consuming resentment that was being nurtured by today’s Russian leaders. In this I am profoundly at one with those thoughtful Russians who wonder, dangerously, whether this war is justified, both in its aims and in the way it is being prosecuted. And indeed there is a confessing church which does not follow the endorsement of the war by some of their senior colleagues.
Yet it is also easy for us to project our own inadequacies onto the Russians – as if in our own country and church there were not those who were also trading on their own sense of resentment and demand for restitution. Part of the issue is in identifying ourselves with our own sense of victimhood, whether justified or not. The effect is a morbid fascination in looking inwards. To rehearse in detail every instance of insult, rejection or disadvantage. And of course this is always somebody else’s fault. The idea that this is part of life and dealing with the uncongenial is never taken into account.
And it is quite different from an honest self-examination. There are those memories which we do not have to entertain, those attitudes that only undermine us, those priorities that might meet our own sense of being but which may be at the expense of somebody else. And then there is the question of where God stands in all this. Front and centre? Maybe a little to the side, where there is less interference with the business of getting on in life? Possibly as an incidental element, which may nudge us in some sort of moral direction but is otherwise kept under strict control? Just where have we placed the voice and being of Jesus in all this?
Part of the answer is in recognising what Jesus taught about taking up the cross and following Him. It is an act of self-denial rather than self-affirmation. It is a reckoning that yes, there were things hoped for but not realised. There are situations that have to be endured and managed but which do not yield to manipulation and from which there is no apparent form of escape. Maybe there are things within us that we have to bear and which we would wish to lay down but are not in a position to do so.
Part of the answer is to bring these matters to Jesus in our prayers – maybe praying for the people who have caused us most anguish. Maybe there is a growing under the burden of the cross and finding new ways of giving comfort to others, also under similar burdens. Part of it is also in seeing the burden as part of God’s pruning of our lives – in order to make what is already fruitful, more fruitful yet. (see John 15). Part of it is also in learning to look away from ourselves and towards Jesus – who will also lead us to seeing others as He sees them.
We may ask why God has allowed the mayhem in Ukraine to happen at all. Yet these are the freely adopted actions of the perpetrators, and without that free will then humanity itself is undermined. More than this, these events were part of the burden that Jesus bore on the cross, where He was becoming sin, who knew no sin. Jesus was taking full and personal responsibility for those actions so that those causing them could come to Him seeking His forgiveness.
In this we would be well to remember that salvation is for sinners – the wholly just and sinless have no need for it: the problem is that there are none such who walk upon this earth. It is something of a cliché that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
If there were any easy answers we would have found them by now. Instead what we have is a man – the Son of God, hanging from a cross and knowing the sins of the world intimately as He does so.
Every blessing this Lent and Eastertide.
Sydney Maitland
