#BeingHuman. Friday.
Simon of Cyrene was walking past. Nobody asked him. Nobody explained. They put someone else’s cross on his shoulders and said, carry it. Five years later I know exactly what that feels like, and so do millions of Ukrainians.
They took Jesus to His execution in the morning. Jerusalem was living an ordinary morning: someone opening a shop, someone trading at the market, someone hurrying about his business, someone sitting in a tavern, someone praying in the temple. Just as today, when people in peaceful countries were going about their lives while russians attacked Ukraine through the whole night and most of the day, without stopping, along a road of death that has now stretched more than four years. One thousand five hundred days.
An ordinary morning in Jerusalem for most people. And in the middle of that ordinary morning, Roman soldiers pulled a man out of the crowd, and nobody asked him whether he had the time or the strength for what they were about to demand.
Simon of Cyrene had not planned this. It was not his calling. It appeared in none of his plans or responsibilities, in no job description and no contract. He was not one of the twelve. He was simply walking his own road, and they stopped him and gave him no choice and no time to prepare.
I think about the people this war has stopped in exactly the same way, in the middle of their own road and their own calling, without warning and without any chance to prepare. Volunteers who never planned to become volunteers, and who woke up one morning in February 2022 and understood that the previous life was over and there was no road back: either you leave, or you stay, or you come home from abroad. In our People of the Bridge network none of us signed up for what we have been carrying now into the fifth year. Pastors and seminary lecturers who preached about resurrection and suddenly found themselves standing over the coffin of a twenty-year-old, burying someone for the first time in their ministry, and then again, and again, new bodies, until it became a terrible norm you still never get used to. Partners outside Ukraine, whom this war also stopped in the middle of their own path and laid on their shoulders a burden written into none of their strategic plans, since the war reached them too, without asking permission and without explaining why them.
To carry a cross when it is not your direct calling and fits into none of your plans or job descriptions or budgets is also a calling. Simon did not choose. And he did not recoil at the sight of Christ after a night of torture. He did not run and did not argue with the Romans, at least the Gospel says nothing of it. He lifted the cross and carried it down the street to the place of execution. And the Gospel has remembered his name for two thousand years, while the names of most of the voluntary bystanders of that morning nobody remembers at all.
Jesus was dying between two people who were not righteous. Not martyrs for the faith. Not disciples who at the last moment decided to share His suffering. He was crucified between men convicted of real crimes, on both sides.
Why did God choose, for the most important moment in the history of redemption, an environment that was neither pure nor theologically correct? Why did He choose an unjust and brutal reality and die inside it, between people society had written off long ago, while so many decent believing people stood and watched, tired that it was all dragging on so long and wishing it would end faster, and reasoned that since they are crucifying Him it is probably not so simple, and perhaps one ought to consider both sides, Herod’s as well as Pilate’s?
One of those crucified beside Him shouted along with the crowd: if you are the Messiah, save yourself and us. Familiar. We shout the same thing sometimes, only politely and decorously: God, where is Your power, where is the rescue, where is even one sign that You see and hear us? The other one, in the last moment of his last day, with no possibility of correcting anything or proving anything to anyone, simply asked not to be forgotten. Without merit. Without a rightly lived life. Without anything at all. One last request in the agony of dying. And it was to him that Jesus said: today you will be with Me in paradise.
Not to the decent bystanders who were tired of how long this was taking and had to hurry off to the tavern or to prepare for Passover. Not to those who had believed correctly and lived correctly and knew it and were proud of it. Jesus promised to remember the man who could no longer fix anything in his life and never would, and who simply asked not to be forgotten. For those whose suffering seems to them not clean enough or not heroic enough to carry any eternal meaning, this scene is the answer. Not because suffering automatically cleanses and justifies everyone, even in a war, since the suffering of the one turned him toward Christ while the other went on cursing Him. But because Jesus was crucified between two men who could no longer change anything in their lives, and He stayed among them to His last breath, not above them and not apart from them, but between them.
And then darkness came at noon. Not as a metaphor and not as a literary device, since the evangelists record it as a physical fact: from the sixth hour to the ninth, three hours of darkness in the middle of the day. The sun went out. Creation refused to watch what was happening on the hill outside the city, as though nature itself felt the unbearable weight of it and answered in the only way it could, with silence and darkness, so as not to see this cruelty.
In Ukraine we know what darkness in the middle of the day means, as material experience rather than as symbol. A strike on the power grid, and the city goes dark, or half the country. In the middle of the day or the night, in the middle of a school lesson, in the middle of an operation, in the middle of a church service, in the middle of a seminary lecture. Darkness. And every blackout is more than an inconvenience you can manage with a candle or a power station. Each time it is one more reminder that you are deeply vulnerable, and that your world hangs by a thread russians can cut whenever they choose. Because they can. Because they do it deliberately and systematically, with cold calculation, and not because they need that particular power plant, but because darkness is a weapon that plants fear and breaks the fabric of ordinary life.
But the darkness at noon on Good Friday is also solidarity. Creation refused to watch the suffering of Jesus in silence and answered with the only thing it had. In the same way, every blackout we live through is more than the absence of light. The darkness russian terror brings with it becomes our honest witness, from inside it, to what is happening here, a witness that requires presence rather than words.
And in that darkness, the cry: my God, my God, why have You forsaken Me. Jesus cries out Psalm 22, the psalm that begins in complete abandonment and, somewhere far off, through many verses of pain and divine silence, ends in hope. But between its beginning and its end lies an abyss that cannot be jumped over or avoided, only lived through.
Where was God on 6 July 2024, when Andrii was fatally wounded? Where was He when russians killed the other five members of our family? Where is He while missiles and drones fly over Ukrainian cities through the night before last and last night and tonight and most of today, carrying destruction and death? Where is He while prisoners are tortured in the basements of occupied cities, deliberately and with pleasure? While mothers wait for the bodies of their sons, wives for the bodies of their husbands, children for the bodies of their fathers, bodies not yet found and perhaps never to be found? Where is He in this darkness?
I have no answer that would take this question away, and I am not going to pretend I have one so that people will see me as a decent and highly spiritual evangelical. But I know one thing, as a crippled evangelical: Jesus did not give us a theological answer to that cry. He gave us something else. He cried out Himself. He did not silence the question from the height of eternity. He did not take a position above the conflict, as so many newly emerged evangelical peacemakers advise. He did not explain His cry from a safe distance. That darkness surrounded Him too, and He entered it from the inside rather than the outside, and cried out along with everyone who has ever cried into the dark: where are You?
A cry born of feeling abandoned by God is neither unbelief nor weakness, whatever some decent Christians outside Ukraine may think of us, and whatever those inside Ukraine whom the war has not touched may think. It is an honest form of prayer offered to us by God Himself, and not by the priests and Levites of the temple, but by the One who passed through the darkness and the cry Himself. God did not turn away from that darkness, since He cried out inside it, physically and existentially. If you want to cry out to God, cry out. Psalm 22 was written for exactly that, and the One you are crying to knows the sound from the inside, because He made it Himself, and He will make it with you every time.
At the ninth hour He said, it is finished. And died. And the curtain in the temple tore from top to bottom. The curtain no mortal believer could pass, which required a mediator, a sacrifice, the right condition and the right lineage. It tore. Forever. Access to God no longer requires a mediator. But who stops to think what that cost?
The torn curtain is not a free gift, even when it looks like one and is offered as one. Behind it stand unanswered prayers, torture, suffering and a cross. The fact that I have the right to come to God directly, to cry out directly, to weep directly, was not paid for by me. And this should change how I approach prayer: not as a right I hold by virtue of being born into the correct conservative evangelical tradition, but as a space someone opened for me at the cost of His broken body and His own sense of abandonment.
And one more thing, which good evangelicals rarely say directly, because it is more comfortable to pray for peace in the world than for victory over an evil that others are paying for with broken and dead bodies. Those who live in relative peace today have that peace partly because Ukrainian defenders have stood for five years with their own bodies between them and what comes in from russia. This peace is not free. Behind it stand crosses on the graves of the people we loved, portraits of the fallen on walls, the heart attacks and strokes of our parents, the weeping of orphans and widows. And bodies, and bodies, and bodies. Even if you find these bodies distasteful, and the defenders increasingly look to you like a new social problem, because they cannot simply reintegrate into your way of life, because they are not normal, and you are afraid of how we normal people will manage to live alongside them. Behind that peace stand the Simons, whom nobody asked whether they had the time or the strength to carry someone else’s cross. God loves through people, and He also protects through people, as Ivan Rusyn often reminds us, and He often does it through those who carry on their shoulders what they never planned to carry, going where they never planned to go.
Friday is ending. The body of Christ has died, and His pain is over. Now only the living are left to suffer, to weep and cry out to the Father, only those who loved Him and cannot accept His death as reality or His absence as normal. The body was taken down and placed in a borrowed tomb, because He never had one of His own, as He never had a home of His own, not even in death. The living suffer and weep, and Jesus descends from the cross into Hades.
And tomorrow, Saturday. The day when nobody yet knew there would be a Sunday, when the body of Jesus lay dead in that cave, and all who loved Him were simply trying to survive the silence, the trauma, the uncertainty.
We do not know what Saturday will bring either. What will be destroyed. Who will be killed. We are inside this Friday evening silence too, with the cry of where are You, on the 1500th day of this war. And our Mission has not changed, even as we move from Friday into Saturday.
Taras D., Ukraine
Kyiv, Vorzel
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