Â鶹Éç

Good morning. One of the most terrible sights of the war in Ukraine has been the devastated buildings. Apartment blocks have been smashed to pieces, sometimes with an armchair left hanging perilously in the air. Children’s toys lie in the dust. Busy, bustling cities, replaced by a desolate landscape.

This reminds me of what the early church father and theologian, Augustine, said about evil. He saw evil as the absence of good, calling it by the Latin word privatio, meaning a kind of emptiness. You can see this emptiness in the cities of Ukraine. Where once there was family life, the fellowship of neighbours and the laughter of children, the invaders have attempted to wipe it out, contravening international law, which says military force must not target civilians.

Today, the day after the Christian feast of Good Friday, which commemorates Christ’s crucifixion, and the day before Easter Sunday and his resurrection from the dead, is a moment that marks another absence of good. Jesus is dead, lying in the tomb. Without him, his disciples inhabit a lifeless, featureless emptiness. There’s nothing to hope for. Their lives are like a war-torn landscape, smashed to pieces.
What they don’t know is that they’re in an inbetween time. Soon, where there is seemingly no life, there will be a stirring. In the tomb, limbs will stretch again, and move, and Jesus will emerge.
In Ukraine, after seven weeks of war, here and there are also stirrings of life amid the desolation. Reporters have described how people emerge from basements and metro stations where they’ve hidden underground, away from the tanks and bombs. Then there is the aid offered by people across Europe and elsewhere: signs that good is not entirely absent.

As Christians mark Easter this weekend and Christ’s resurrection, there will no doubt be many prayers said for the people of Ukraine, that good will return and thrive again. After the weeks of war, though, nobody will be able to press the rewind button. Life can’t return exactly to what it was before. Too much has happened.

When Jesus walked among his disciples after his resurrection, they were thrilled to see him. This was the man they knew, and yet he was different. This resurrection of Jesus was not a re-birth. There were no cries of labour. Nor was the resurrection a resuscitation: there were no panic-stricken medics, no machines getting his heart going again. So Easter signifies not so much restoration, but transformation and a new beginning.

Postwar, the Ukrainians cannot return to the past, but they will hope for a new start too.

Show less