#BeingHuman. Thursday 2026. “This is My body which is broken for you” (1 Corinthians 11:24, NKJV). I used to read those words once a month. Now I see them every day.
Jesus gathered His disciples for their last supper together in a borrowed room. Not His own home, since He did not have one, but a space someone else gave Him. That is more than a detail in the Gospel story. It opens into what I have come to think of as a theology of borrowed space.
We in Ukraine know that feeling physically rather than abstractly. Most acutely in the frontline cities of the south and the east, on the left bank of the Dnipro: Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, and in Kyiv and Vinnytsia and Lviv and hundreds of villages. There people, our ministry partners among them, live in a permanent state of between. Between the whistle of a missile or the sound of a Shahed and the explosion. Between the silence after the blast and the first cry of the wounded. Between the end of the siren and the moment you can bring your children home from the shelter. Between the notification of a death and the body brought back on a shield, as my brother Andrii was. Between the words missing in action and confirmed dead, or still not found, or in captivity. Between the last phone call from the front and the long silence after it, which no longer promises anything good.
Between who you were before the war and who you have become, with an abyss between those two people. Between the faith you once had and the faith you carry now, which makes no sense to anyone who has not lived what you have lived. Between the prayer you can still say and the one you can no longer pray, because you have no words for it or no strength left to look for them. Between the desire to keep living and the guilt of that desire, with so much death around you. Between the fifth year of this war and the first year after it ends, which may come someday and cannot be seen yet.
This space of between is the borrowed space where Jesus invites us to His table, to have our feet washed and to break bread with Him. You borrow other people’s walls to shelter behind during mass attacks, and you look for borrowed space in the souls of partners outside Ukraine as well. Their prayer, their willingness to stay close, their readiness to walk not a second but a third and a fourth mile with you, all of that is borrowed space too. Real, often given as a gift, and temporary. And there as well He invites us to His table. Nearly four million internally displaced people in Ukraine have lost their homes. Nearly six million Ukrainians abroad live permanently in borrowed space. Another six million live in frontline territories where any night can move you from having a home to looking for someone else’s walls.
So this Thursday I remind myself that we are standing at the very heart of Christ’s own tradition, which begins in a borrowed room. We are not an exception to the norm. We are at its center.
He took a towel and began to wash feet. Dirty, tired feet belonging to people who would soon run away. He washed them knowing how the night would end: a body that serves in full knowledge of the consequences, out of choice rather than naivety.
I think of volunteers who have carried other people’s grief on their shoulders for five years without permission to stop, as in the People of the Bridge network, though many now say they are exhausted, fading, becoming invisible. Of pastors who conduct funerals for people younger than their own children, again and again. Of military and civilian doctors whose hands no longer shake, though their eyes still do, and whose bodies know what their minds have not yet had time to process. Jesus washed exactly those kinds of feet, the ones that would carry their owners away from Gethsemane later that same night.
Then He took the bread and said that this is His body, broken for you. In Ukraine before Easter 2026, those words are not a liturgical formula. They describe a reality that is hard to look at without turning away.
The bodies of defenders killed at the front. The bodies of the missing, nowhere to be found and present everywhere, in every thought of their families. Bodies in captivity, where the breaking is deliberate and systematic and carried out with satisfaction. Bodies of the wounded who come back without limbs, without sight, without who they used to be. Bodies of elderly parents killed by waiting rather than by a bullet, by the heart attacks and strokes that come from knowing your child is out there, or will not come back. Bodies of civilians wounded and killed every night in apartments, in hospitals, on streets, in cars. And the bodies of families, broken by waiting, by absence, by a funeral without a body, or by a body brought back on a shield that you recognize and do not recognize at the same time.
On 22 July 2024 I stood over Andrii’s body, brought from Odesa on a shield, in a refrigeration chamber, by my friend from Dnipro. The broken body of my brother. I will not find words for it and I will not try, since some things can only be described by silence. But I know one thing: in that moment, “this is My body which is broken for you” stopped being theology for me and became my brother’s body.
Jesus made a choice of brokenness. The disciples did not understand it then, and we struggle to understand it now, because nobody likes a broken body. People are horrified by it. They look away. It is uncomfortable, since it destroys the illusion of control, ours and God’s alike. Andrii did not choose to be killed. He chose to defend our country and our people, and in that choice there is something I cannot name except as eucharistic. There is a difference between being broken by violence and being broken by choice. The first is a deliberate criminal act. The second is a free decision. And I think the Church has not yet learned to honor that difference properly among the living, and not only among the dead who are celebrated as heroes.
In most of our evangelical churches we break bread once a month. Perhaps now, in the fifth year of this war, we should do it every day. Not as a ritual, but as memory: memory of Christ’s broken body, and of the broken bodies around us. They are not an illustration. They are realities waiting for a full and thoughtful human gaze, direct rather than averted.
At that same table sat Judas. Jesus knew it, and still reached out and gave him bread, in full knowledge of what was about to happen, and said quietly: what you are going to do, do quickly.
After 2014 we kept sitting at the table with russian pastors and lecturers and seminary rectors, partners in theological education and mission. We ate together, prayed together, sang together, worked together. We hoped. We did not want to believe that most of them, and yes, I remember those who paid the price of faithfulness, would do what they eventually did. Not all at once, but gradually: through the silence of betrayal, through justifying aggression, through the mantra that it is a complicated topic and not so simple, through supporting not Putin personally but the regime that kills our children in the name of traditional Christian and family values, in the name of a messianic role for the russian people against a diabolical West and a not-quite-Ukraine.
We heard familiar arguments. It is frightening, they might fine us. It is frightening, they might ban us from meeting at home to pray or read the Bible. It is frightening to go against the system. This often sounded like an equation in which the fear of being persecuted for the truth was set equal to the suffering of the cross itself, as though the cost of a silent betrayal were only a matter of reputation in Putin’s eyes and in russian society, and served mainly to prove that we too are a traditional russian religion.
Yes, you are being killed and tortured, but please understand us, they might ban us from meeting in homes to pray. That is from recent news out of russia. Our parents in Soviet times did not ask the authorities for permission to meet at home. They met. And they paid for it with their freedom, with persecution, often with their lives, for the truth. My own family among them. And they did more than meet, since they printed Bibles and Christian literature underground. They were broken too. And they do not compare today’s fear of a fine with torture and rape in the basements of Bucha and Kherson, because they know the price of freedom and the price of faithfulness.
But I cannot speak about betrayal only from the outside, because I know what it is to betray. Not like Judas, with conscious calculation and thirty pieces of silver from people who promised to protect traditional values. More often like Peter. Out of fear. Out of despair. Out of an exhaustion that makes you smaller than you want to be.
Peter did not plan to deny Him. He simply ran from Gethsemane along with the others and found himself standing by someone else’s fire, warming himself beside people who also claimed to know who they were. And something in him took fright before he had time to think, at a simple question from a servant girl: you were with him, were you not? And then a rooster crowed.
Betrayal in wartime is not an abstract sin. It is the specific moment when you can no longer pray, and you do not. When you stop going to the place where the truth hurts. When you choose the warmth of someone else’s fire over the cold of the place where He is suffering. When you keep putting off the conversation with God, because you do not know what to say to Him after everything you have seen. When survivor’s guilt becomes a wall between you and Him. When the fifth year of terror wears your soul down to the point where you can no longer tell whether He has gone silent or you have stopped being able to hear. That is the flight. Not toward any particular place, but away from yourself, from who you are at the moment the rooster crows, and toward a solitary place where you can weep without meeting anyone’s eyes, including His.
The difference between Judas and Peter is not in what they did, since both betrayed and both ran. The difference is in where each of them went with his shame. Judas went to the temple, returned the money, heard “what is that to us?” and went off alone, where the shame destroyed him physically. Peter went to weep bitterly over himself, over who he is without Christ, though Christ had not abandoned him and it was he who had abandoned Christ. And he did not weep into emptiness, since he wept with himself, allowing himself to see his own face. His bitter weeping is not weakness, and I am sure of this: when he later told the other disciples about it, nobody laughed. They had all been in Gethsemane. They had all run. They all knew the sound of their own rooster.
To borrow a temporary space for weeping, where your own self meets the self of Christ, is often the beginning of the road back to Him. But that road begins only when you stop running from who you are in that moment and look into the mirror of your own experience without turning away, until you meet His eyes.
And then Gethsemane. The dark garden after the supper. The disciples asleep, even here, even now, even right beside Him while He prays: not My will, but Yours.
A prayer that did not change the circumstances. It did not prevent the arrest, the torture, the night of interrogation. It did not stop the flight of those with whom He had just broken bread. The cup did not pass, despite the force of the prayer, despite sweat falling like drops of blood. Things grew harder, more frightening, more lonely. And the prayer sustained the One who prayed, by changing His relationship to reality rather than reality itself. This is the hardest form of freedom in the face of suffering: to choose your direction knowing it will bring pain, even greater pain, unimaginable pain, and to pray not because everything has become clear but because there is One you trust more than your own fear of the unknown, after you have already heard the sound of your own rooster.
We pray in the fifth year of this war, often without words, often through tears, often without the answer we want about our killed, our missing, those in captivity, our displaced, and above all those at the front, inside the hell of this terror. But we pray. Even knowing that things may not get better, and may get worse. This is not despair and not the absence of hope. It is our confession that we trust the Father more than our own fear, and more than a tomorrow we cannot yet imagine.
Thursday is not over. The night is only beginning. It will get worse. There will be more suffering. And we keep praying: Father, let Your will be done. Praying, and still learning to make the right choice, here and now, as the pain increases.
Our Mission has not changed. Keep your children away from war. Taras D., Ukraine
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