BEING HUMAN

Day 16, 16 December 2024, the 1027th day of the full-scale war.

As Ukraine’s skies fill with missiles on this 1027th day, russian soldiers claim divine sanction for their violence, the way other armies have before them. They say they defend their god and traditional Christian values, a strangely vulnerable deity who apparently requires protection through destruction on this scale. Where, then, is the true Emmanuel while cruise missiles and kamikaze drones and artillery shells pierce our lives and our sky? How do we recognize an authentic divine presence when false claims that God is with us are used to justify atrocity?

“Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel, which is translated, ‘God with us’” (Matthew 1:23, NKJV).

This Advent reveals a stunning paradox: the God who fills infinite space chose finite limitation in a manger. That was a radical advance rather than a divine retreat, God compressing a cosmic presence into human vulnerability. The manger foreshadowed the cross, and both reveal that Emmanuel manifests most powerfully exactly where human and religious systems expect Him least.

Now, as this aggression compresses our world into spaces of bare survival, we discover Emmanuel expanding out of that ancient manger into our own reality. Like my brother Andrii, killed in July, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian defenders and civilians have departed into eternity, leaving families to navigate between divine presence and human absence. And Emmanuel bridges that gap, present equally in front-line trenches where soldiers pray, in grieving homes where families gather around an empty chair, and in that unseen realm where the fallen dwell in unfiltered light.

This presence transcends both religious pretense and human perception. Many priests and pastors and bishops in russia go on blessing missiles while claiming to protect traditional Christian values against a demonic West by killing Ukrainians. Their god is aligned with an empire, a language, a culture, a church. He is not Emmanuel.

The true Emmanuel appears in the least expected places: hospitals where doctors operate by flashlight, ruined apartments where families huddle behind two walls, hastily dug graves where bodies rest. God remains present in those places especially, and not merely despite them.

Emmanuel creates an unbreakable connection between the living and the dead, between me and Andrii, between the temporal and the eternal, forming a community of hope in Christ that transcends physical separation and death itself. This is about constant presence even in apparent absence rather than about occasional divine appearances. The same God who lay in that manger fills our darkest spaces, uniting those still fighting with those who, like my brother, have crossed into the immediate presence of glory. The same God who holds our fallen in eternity walks beside our grieving families here, proving that not even death separates us from this Emmanuel. And as we approach another Christmas at war, we remember that His deepest mystery is not about God coming near but about recognizing a presence that never left.

That presence carries a threefold promise: incarnation in the past, God with us in Jesus; presence now, through the Spirit in the darkness of a war; and future hope, in Christ’s return as the ultimate Emmanuel. Until then His Church, our community of hope, becomes the hands and feet of Emmanuel, made visible through defenders protecting our people and our country, volunteers evacuating civilians, chaplains comforting the frightened and the wounded, believers sheltering the displaced, each of them making tangible the God who is with us. True Emmanuel manifests most clearly in faithful presence amid suffering rather than in imperial religious claims of divine support. May our eyes open to the presence that never departed.

Prince of Peace, God with us in darkness and in light, in joy and in grief, make Your presence known in our places of apparent absence. Unite us with those who have crossed into Your more immediate presence. Turn our places of loss into places of encounter. Help us recognize Your face in unlikely people, Your voice in unexpected moments, Your presence in improbable places. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, who has been here all along. Amen.