BEING HUMAN

Day 21, 21 December 2024, the 1032nd day of the full-scale war.

The story of Zechariah silenced in the temple mirrors the spiritual upheaval Ukraine faces in this war. As violence shatters theological certainties and fractures the language of faith, we find kinship with him, the professional explainer of God struck wordless for nine months by a divine encounter.

And that speechlessness differs fundamentally from the moral muteness of some Christians today, whether those in russia who bless the war or those global church structures that issue careful statements of concern while sidestepping moral clarity. Zechariah’s silence gave birth to prophecy. Theirs breeds complicity.

“Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard; and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John… But behold, you will be mute and not able to speak until the day these things take place, because you did not believe my words which will be fulfilled in their own time” (Luke 1:13, 20, NKJV).

Through that enforced muteness, Zechariah watched his wife’s barrenness transform into a divine purpose. While some religious voices recycle comfortable phrases about a conflict or a situation, avoiding words like war and invasion, this kind of holy observation is desperately needed. Elizabeth, carrying the shame of childlessness and unbound by temple terminology, recognized a divine presence that the religious experts missed, and her prophetic insight spoke a truth her silenced priest-husband could only confirm later by gestures.

Their story illuminates a profound truth: God’s purposes often work through life’s deepest disappointments. Elizabeth’s barren years and Zechariah’s mute months were not a punishment but a mysterious preparation for speaking new truth in a fresh language. Their long season of childlessness, a source of social shame and private pain, became the crucible for bearing the prophetic voice their generation needed to hear.

Silence transformed Zechariah from a religious authority into a humble witness, and nine months of observing Elizabeth’s quiet faith taught him more than decades of priestly service. Through her courage he learned how divine timing turns waiting into wisdom and years of shame into preparation. When speech finally returned at John’s birth, what poured out was not institutional rhetoric but a revolutionary song of witness, and his Benedictus carried authority not from the temple offices that would later hand Emmanuel over to death, but from the wordless witnessing of Elizabeth’s dignity, Mary’s presence, and John’s prophetic stirring in the womb.

This pattern illuminates the path of life and ministry in a war. Shattered theological certainties, stripped-away religious comforts, and encounters with an evil that defies easy explanation are stripping away a superficial theology. And these trials prepare the church to birth what a broken world needs most: an authentic testimony forged in the furnace of suffering rather than only in theological theory, spoken by people who lost and then found their prophetic voice through pain. A witness to the crucified and risen Emmanuel, God among us.

Here we are learning a similar wisdom: how the language of prayer changes when words fail, how faith speaks through self-sacrificial action when explanations fall short, and how suffering communities often discern divine realities more clearly than distant theologians and religious experts. May this long night become, like Zechariah’s imposed speechlessness, a womb for birthing fresh prophecy to a generation hungry for truth in a new tongue, the language of costly witness and Spirit-empowered testimony, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

In this unveiling, where violence strips away facades and suffering reveals what is most real and unshakeable, we learn to speak of God with the moral weight that comes from passing through the silence of Saturday between the cross and the empty tomb, rather than with the neutral institutional rhetoric of a peacetime theology keeping both perspectives in balance. That speechlessness of Holy Week, heavy with desolation and pregnant with promise, is the crucible of resurrection witness.

Prince of Peace, in this chaos teach us to wait and discern like Zechariah and Elizabeth. Transform our shattered certainties and our muted faith into vessels for Your Word. Tune our hearts to Your hidden rhythms, and let lament and longing and praise take root. Teach us to sing Your song in a strange land. Birth in us and through us the language of incarnate love, a prophetic witness to a broken world. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, Lord of the childless and the speechless. Amen.