BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman? SATURDAY. The disciples were sitting behind locked doors, paralyzed by fear. The women were walking toward a dead body carrying spices. Joseph and Nicodemus stepped into the open for the first time. Christ descended into hell. Saturday is not a day of rest. It is the quietest and darkest day in the history of Redemption. We are still in it…

Saturday began with silence. Not the kind of silence that is inner peace. But the kind that remains after something has ended completely, and you still do not know whether this is really the end, or whether there is something on the other side of this quiet after the death and burial of a body. Like the silence after every Russian peaceful terrorist massive shelling, when we are counting the destruction, killed, and injured…

The disciples were sitting behind locked doors. The Gospel of John says it plainly: behind locked doors, out of fear. The same people who for 3,5 years had walked alongside the One who kept saying: “Do not be afraid.” They were afraid. They were hiding. They did not know what to do with what they had witnessed.

Meanwhile, two other people did the opposite, as they stepped out of the shadows… Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Both were secret disciples of Christ. Both had been careful in public throughout all this time, keeping their connection to Christ’s teaching hidden because they were members of the Sanhedrin and feared the consequences. Nicodemus had come to Jesus at night so that nobody would see him. Joseph also believed but kept silent, and it is not even clear from the text whether he ever met Christ directly, or whether Nicodemus passed on His teaching to him. And now, when Christ is dead, when the danger from Jewish religious leaders and Roman occupiers has not become any smaller, it is precisely these two who stepped forward publicly. Joseph went to Pilate and asked for the body. Nicodemus brought myrrh and aloe, about a hundred liters, a royal amount for a burial. They did publicly what none of the twelve had done…

Was it too late? Yes. They had not been present during Christ’s public ministry. They were not at the Last Supper. They were not with Him in Gethsemane. They did not carry His cross. They came only when everything was already over, from the perspective of the spiritual leaders, the Roman occupiers, and the disciples of Christ alike…

But the Gospel records their names. It remembers them the same way it remembers Simon of Cyrene. Too late is better than never. But Saturday reminds us of something important: time matters. There are things that can only be done when the right moment arrives, for me or for someone else. There are choices to be made while there is still a choice to be made. It applies to evangelical churches and leaders who kept silent for years during the Russian terror, and are now looking for something to say. It applies to partners who “woke up” only after Bucha and then did more than simply express concern. God accepted the ministry of Joseph and Nicodemus… late, imperfect, but real and public.

And then there were the women… They came early, before dawn, with spices to anoint the Body. They did not know about the resurrection, even though they had heard Christ speak of it. They were not walking toward the tomb expecting a result. They were going to a dead Body because they loved Him. They knew that the anointing would not change anything. Love as service to a Body that could no longer, it seemed, be helped by anything except one last act of honor.

I think about those who are still carrying out exhumations in the de-occupied territories today. Those who identify the fallen: by DNA, by fragments of bodies, by what is left, by personal belongings. Those who bring bodies back to families “on a shield,” so that there is something to bury. Those who prepare graves so that there is a place for us to come and weep. It is our theology of the dignity and honor of the dead, something the evangelical church in Ukraine still needs to learn. These are not people who went to kill people. These are people who stood up to defend their country and its people. The Sunday services and fervent prayer in relatively peaceful circumstances are possible precisely because of the defenders, because the Lord protects us from murderers and rapists through people.

This ministry of honor and memory does not produce results in the conventional sense. But God sees it and remembers it. In our church, “Skelya,” every Sunday we have a minute of silence and read aloud by name the full list of all church members, relatives, and friends who are serving at the front; we pray for the missing and for those in Russian captivity. By name. More than a hundred names. And then we pray one of four chaplain prayers, closing this weekly service of honor and memory with the Lord’s Prayer. Someone might say that this takes 15 to 20 minutes of the service, and we could fit in another sermon. Friends… our defenders are giving years of their lives for our protection, and we are troubled by the question of 15 to 20 minutes once a week during Sunday worship?

The women came with spices, and it was to them that the Risen Christ appeared first. God sees those who remember by name with love… and He appears with love to those who come to honor His death and Body…

The body of Jesus lay in a borrowed tomb… His own (like His own home), He never had, even in death. The tomb belonged to Joseph. This is a detail that is easy to miss, but it matters. He was born into this world in a borrowed manger. He lived as a refugee in Egypt in a borrowed home. He served in borrowed spaces. He entered Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey. He held the Last Supper with His disciples in a borrowed room, washing their feet from a borrowed basin. He died among criminals. He was buried in someone else’s borrowed tomb. From the beginning to the end… borrowed space. That is why, today, I keep thinking about the ministry and the theology of borrowed space.

The disciples did not know the word “resurrection” from their own experience. They had seen Him raise Lazarus, who had already been in the tomb for four days. They had seen Him raise the daughter of Jairus, a child who had just died. They had seen Him raise the widow’s son in Nain. But who would raise Him now? He had raised others, but He himself lay dead. The entire theological framework that had been built over 3,5 years on the words and deeds of a living Christ had stopped. They knew only one thing: He was dead. And they did not understand what comes next…

It is the culmination of Holy Week in Ukraine under ongoing full-scale Russian aggression. For the defenders. For those of us who rejected the mantra of “this is not our war.” For the volunteers. For our partners. We too are living on this Saturday. Between the death of what was – that life, those people, those cities, those relationships, that faith that knew how to answer simple questions before 2014, before 2022 – and the resurrection of what is not yet here and what we cannot yet name, because it has not yet been revealed. Andriy’s body lies in the ground. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians killed by the Russians lie in the ground. Not all of them are known, in which tomb they lie, borrowed, nameless, or simply never found. Millions of Ukrainians live in this Saturday darkness between the faith that existed before 2014 or before 2022, and the reality in which we now find ourselves, a reality that has not yet given us the right words to describe exactly what is happening…

Saturday is not the absence of God. It is the hardest place for my faith, because in it, there is no confirmation. Only silence. Only the absence of those we love. Only locked doors. Only a borrowed tomb. Only waiting for what’s next…

The Apostle Peter writes that Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison… Saturday is not a pause in the biblical and theological story of the Redemption. It is its deepest moment. Christ’s voluntary descent into hell is not a metaphor for humiliation. It is the theological fact of His active presence: He descended to where no human ministry can reach, no volunteer effort, no prayer, no outstretched hand, no form of help. To a point where nobody can help anymore. And it was precisely there that He went first…

Where was God on the day Andriy was killed? Not above the battlefield near Krynky in Kherson oblast, watching from a safe distance. God was in death itself, from within. His descent into hell means: there is no depth to which He did not descend first, even if that depth is hell itself. There is no grief He did not enter before us. There is no captivity, no exhumation, no nameless grave, no basement where His presence was not there before us. I cannot and do not want to explain this theologically; these are things I accept by faith without explanation, as a crippled evangelical…

And for me, it means one more thing, something that is rarely said in the context of loss. The same Christ, who is present with us now and comforts us by His Spirit in our grief for those we have lost, is present right here and right now with those we have lost. With Andriy. With the other five relatives killed by Russians. With those whose bodies have not yet been found. With those in Russian captivity, in the unknown. Saturday is the place where the living and the “dead” church are joined in Christ into a single “cloud of witnesses,” not through our efforts and not through our prosperity evangelical theological system, but through the One who descended into death itself and remains there with them, while we wait here… either for their resurrection, or for our own death, when we will join that cloud of witnesses, that eternal Community of the Hope of the Kingdom of God…

Our unity with those we have lost is not sentimental and not abstract, not for me. It rests on trust in Christ, Who is simultaneously present both here and there. The living and the dead are joined in Him, in this very Saturday, right now, in this very darkness, as the curtain between us is torn…

Saturday is not over yet… There is still one more night of fear and unknowing ahead… But somewhere in the darkness of a borrowed tomb, something is happening that we cannot see and cannot yet name. Not because God is absent. But because He is precisely there, in the death and in the hell… quietly doing what only He can do. Even though we cannot see it. We are simply waiting… Keep your children away from war.. Our Mission has not changed.. Taras D., Ukraine