BEING HUMAN

Address at the conference of Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, “Wounded Leadership: Challenges and Paths of Restoration.” 22–23 May 2026, Pushcha-Vodytsia, Ukraine.

Let me begin not with a thesis, but with a question that, I suspect, has long lived in each of us. When the risen Christ passed through the locked doors to His disciples in the room and said, “Peace to you,” why – and to what end – did He show them His hands and His side? Why, and to what purpose, did a body that had conquered death keep upon itself the marks of torture and crucifixion? (These are two different questions.) For He could have stood before His disciples whole, with no trace of the nails and no pierced side, with no reminder at all of what had been done to Him on Friday. God, who creates the universe out of nothing, could surely have remade His body without a single scar. Yet He did not do so.

And here we stand – pastors, chaplains, ministers, volunteers, teachers; people from whom local churches and others have grown used to expecting strength, answers, steadiness, and unbreakability – we stand before this body and with this question. I invite you to give this question some time, without rushing to close it. For the answer to it, it seems to me, determines how we lead people in the fifth (and in truth, the twelfth) year of Russian aggression, and what we mean by vulnerability and restoration when we speak of ourselves and of those entrusted to our care.

I will not give that answer now. I want to come to it together with you, through four stops. The first three are about what is happening to us: first the wound, then the lament, then the scar. And at the end, on the fourth, about why: about the witness.

I. The Wound. Leadership that does not hide its vulnerability

There is an image of the leader that we all carry within us, even if we have never spoken it aloud. It is the person who always holds. Who never stumbles when others fall. Who always has a word where others are silent. War only deepens this image, for the local churches look at us and ask, with their eyes or aloud: are you holding up? And we have learned to answer, “Yes, of course.” Even when it is not quite true.

Holy Scripture describes for us another kind of leader. One of them is Jacob at the ford of Jabbok. He wrestles all night, and toward dawn receives not only a new name but also a severe injury: a dislocated hip. “Just as he crossed over Penuel the sun rose on him, and he limped on his hip” (Gen. 32:31). Notice how these two things stand side by side: the rising of the sun and the limp. The dawn, the new day, the hope that came through God’s blessing did not cancel the limp. The one who from now on will be called Israel is the one who limps. The blessing came not after the dislocation, but through the injury and beyond it. Jacob did not leave his limp at the ford in order to enter the promise unharmed. He carried it within himself as the leader of his small people, as part of his name.

The Apostle Paul, one would think, had the least reason to speak of his own weakness, for it was so often used against him. And yet he writes what the Lord said to him: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). Paul does not say that God’s power compensates for our sinfulness, or makes up for our lack of time or skill, or patches the hole in our weakness. He says that God’s power within us reaches its goal and its fullness (τελεῖται) precisely in the state of weakness, and not in spite of it. The weak, vulnerable place turns out to be not an obstacle to God’s power, but the very space where that power at last accomplishes what it was given to do. This is why Paul adds that he will boast all the more gladly of his weaknesses – because it is over this vulnerable place that the power of Christ, as he goes on to say, “pitches its tent” and takes up residence, as the glory of God once dwelt over the tabernacle. That which we are used to hiding as shame – our vulnerability – turns out to be the place of God’s dwelling.

And when Paul looks for an image of this, he says: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us” (2 Cor. 4:7); ὀστράκινα σκεύη – vessels of plain fired clay, the cheapest container of that time, the kind it is no loss to break. From the same root comes the word ὄστρακον – a potsherd, a fragment of a broken pot, and in the ancient world also the cheapest writing material there was: papyrus and parchment were expensive, but a broken pot lay underfoot in nearly every yard. On such sherds a poor person could write out a few lines of Scripture for himself and carry them about; and to this day some two dozen such ostraca survive bearing Gospel text, mostly from Egypt, of the sixth and seventh centuries.

Already in Paul’s own words – “earthen vessels” – a paradox is hidden: the divine content is entrusted to the most fragile and most vulnerable shell. And notice: the clay vessel was made not for the display cabinet, but for service – to carry water, bread, oil, grain. For the work of leadership God chooses not the golden cup that people admire, but the everyday clay that goes into use among people and wears out, often very quickly. Such a vessel is vulnerable from the very start: it serves, knowing it may wear thin or break. And when at last it breaks, God does not cast it away; He chooses these very sherds to write His word of hope upon them. The vessel served while it was whole; the fragment serves on, having become the bearer of a divine message.

So too the wounded leader: he serves in his vulnerability, not feigning unbreakability, even to the point of possible breaking; and even broken he does not drop out of service (unless we discard him as refuse), for upon his fragments God goes on writing hope for others. This is why Paul says it in the plural – vessels: not one heroic bearer of light, but a community of vulnerable servants who do not hide their fragility and do not pretend to be unharmed; and it is precisely through such people that not their own strength but God’s shines out.

So the first stop leaves me with an uncomfortable question. Which do I fear more: to show my vulnerability (this is not about sin – where sin is concerned, the matter is confession) or to hide it? For the present-day notions of leadership, the ones that worked so well before 2022, often shatter against the walls of today’s reality. A leader sealed in the armor of unbreakability, who never flinches and never admits his vulnerability, is not the biblical ideal. More often it is our fear, dressed up in pharisaic piety.

II. The Lament. What comes before restoration

Between the wound and its healing there is a place we too often pass by. It is the place of lament. And I want to linger here longer, because it is precisely here that our pastoral practice most often fails people – and that, out of the best of intentions.

The psalmist is not ashamed of lament. Psalm 13 opens with a fourfold “How long, O Lord?” Psalm 22 begins with the cry, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” – which Christ Himself later spoke from the cross. Psalm 88 ends, in fact, in darkness, with no resolution and no bright finale – a kind of “existential gloom.” In the Bible there is room for lament. There is a whole genre of lament for the leader who stands between the wound and its healing, who has not yet reached hope and has no strength to feign it in order to appear invulnerable and unbreakable.

Jeremiah complains to God that he was mocked for His word (Jer. 20:7), and God does not rebuke him for the lament. The prophet has a right to this cry within his calling, and not only before it or after. And this concerns not only those we accompany, but ourselves as well. The leader, too, has a right to his own psalm of lament, and not only to the sermon of hope. The one who leads others – pastor, chaplain, volunteer, teacher – has the same right not to reach hope and not to feign it as does the widow he accompanies. If we deny this to ourselves, sooner or later we will deny it to others as well.

This is why I am wary of a pastoral care that hurries to heal and to impose hope; that sees a person in grief and at once tries quickly to explain, to comfort, to turn the lament into gratitude toward heaven; that tells the widow on the “ninth or fortieth” day that it is time already to forgive and move on. That reads a deep wound as a lack of faith.

Here a distinction must be drawn, without which, in my view, we cannot honestly offer pastoral support today. It is the difference between pacification and reconciliation. Pacification is the cessation of visible conflict at the price of unnamed truth. It is a peace that the (supposedly) spiritually stronger imposes on the wounded, so that he will stop visibly bleeding and stop spoiling the picture of blessed Christianity or of a festive service. Reconciliation is something altogether different. It presupposes truth; it presupposes the repentance of the one who did the wrong; it presupposes justice and right judgment, and the freedom of the wounded to name the wrong by its true name. Paul called the Church to a ministry of reconciliation, not of pacification (2 Cor. 5:18–20). And we have no right to substitute one for the other.

To this belongs as well an honest conversation about hatred, which we often avoid, because we mistake the avoidance for spirituality and unbreakability. Yet hatred as an emotion is that living, burning feeling that rises in the soul of someone who has lost a child under shelling, or a family member killed by the Russians. The psalms of imprecation are filled with the emotions of hatred. This emotion is not a sin (which may not please many of you); it is human, created by God as well, and God endures it when it is brought to Him – and He speaks of hatred toward both the sin and the wicked and the lawless one. But hatred as a value, as a motivation that defines our deeds and our very being – that is another thing, and that is already poison. Our task is not to forbid a person the first – the emotion – but to let it be brought out, expressed, and at the same time to help the person not get stuck in hatred as a value and a motivation. Between these two there is no straight road down which a person can be led in a single pastoral session or a single theology course.

And one last thing about this stop. Silence here is not a neutral position. In a context of violence, silence – whether it wishes to or not – always ends up on the side of the one who does the harm. External partners, even with good intentions, sometimes want from us the fruit of the process while forbidding us the process itself. They want to see forgiveness, without granting us room for lament, for anger, for hatred, and for justice. We cannot agree to this – not out of stubbornness, but out of faithfulness to those entrusted to our care.

III. The Scar. Restoration that does not pretend at healing

Now I would like to return to the body of the Risen One. Let us recall Thomas. He sets a condition that may strike us as insolent, as a lack of faith: “The other disciples therefore said to him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ So he said to them, ‘Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe’” (John 20:25).

But Christ does not rebuke him. He comes and says: “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing” (John 20:27). And so the only proof the Risen One offers to Thomas’s doubt is His scars. Not radiance, and not majesty. Scars.

In Luke, Jesus says to the disciples: “Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see… Have you any food here? So they gave Him a piece of a broiled fish and some honeycomb. And He took it and ate in their presence” (Luke 24:39–43). The risen body is recognized not by the erasing of the marks of suffering, but by the fact that these marks are kept within it. The same body that bled from torture and was pierced by nails and a spear now eats broiled fish. It does not pretend that Friday never was. And it does not give Friday the last word. This is why I say: resurrection, restoration, is not the erasing of scars, but their transformation into testimony.

What does this mean for our word “restoration”? We often imagine it as a return to the state that was before. To restore life as it was before 2022, or before 2014. To become as we were before the news came of a brother, a husband, a son, or a father killed. To restore – through pacification – relations with Russian evangelicals as they were before, as though nothing had happened (and most likely that is exactly what will happen, under pressure from church structures).

But the Garden of the Resurrection is not a return to the Garden of Eden. God erases nothing. He transforms, rather than restoring what was. Healthy restoration is not “through 2022 back to 2021,” but “through 2014, through 2022 – and onward.” With wounds that still bleed; and with scars that have remained, but no longer bleed.

And here, in our theology, we are missing a day. We are used to telling the story of salvation as Friday and then at once Sunday, as though there were nothing in between. But between them lies Holy Saturday. The day when the body is in the ground and heaven is silent. For Ukraine this is not an image, but a present, existential position in the calendar, in which we have been living for a fifth year now – even as we are pushed, knowingly or unknowingly, toward Sunday, with no room given us for lament. The work of the Holy Spirit on this Saturday is not to carry us into Sunday more quickly, but to remain with us in the midst of Saturday. This is that “remaining,” μένειν, of which the Gospel of John speaks. Theologians from Ukraine (in the context of a full-scale armed Russian aggression) must remind the theologians of Europe, America, and the whole world of one simple and difficult thing: restoration does not mean that there were no wounds.

Let us hear how Paul describes this restoration – in four blows, not three: “We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor. 4:8–9). Notice: he does not say there is no pressure. He does not say there are no hard or hopeless circumstances, no persecutions, no stumblings. All of it is there. The wounds are real. But they are not final. This – this is restoration that does not pretend at healing.

IV. The Witness. The wounded one before others

And so we have come to the fourth stop, where the answer to our opening question at last begins to show through. The first three stops were about what happens to us and why; this one is about to what end it happens to us. Why did the Risen One keep the scars? Among other reasons – so that there would be someone able to believe. Thomas believed not in spite of the wounds and scars, but because of them. The scar of Christ became the place of another’s faith. He showed the wound not to put His pain on display, but to heal another’s doubt. This is not only about faith; it is also about being human.

I want to draw our attention to something else as well. On the one hand, Christ showed the scars to Thomas only when Thomas asked. He does not burst into the room, parading His sufferings for show. Thomas had to name his condition. And this is a boundary that we, as leaders, must keep. For there is a version of “vulnerable leadership” that is in fact one more costume of the love of power – when a leader constantly puts his own wound on display, shows it, uses it to draw attention to himself, to be admired more, to gain more power, to build his career: “because I suffered more than you.” That is performative vulnerability. The Risen One shows the scars to the one who needs them for the strengthening of faith, and at the moment when it can change something. We show our scars to the one who needs to touch them for his own restoration – and not to the one who would consume them as spectacle or for profit, or use them “for the balance of two perspectives.” This is the first aspect of the testimony of wounds – turned outward, toward the other: the wound and the scars become the place where another’s faith is born, a place of meeting, of touch, and of recognition.

But there is a second aspect, turned inward, into the very mystery of salvation. For the wounds and scars of the Risen One testify not only to someone; they testify publicly about something. “But He was wounded… and by His stripes we are healed,” said the prophet Isaiah long before Golgotha (Isa. 53:5). And Peter repeated it on this side of the empty tomb (1 Pet. 2:24). The visible scars on Jesus’ hands and side are not a chance mark that God did not manage to remove as He hurried from hell and death into the glory of the post-Resurrection. They are part of God’s truth about what really happened to Christ. To remove them would be to say that the cross was a regrettable mistake, which the resurrection corrected and closed, so as not to hurt the feelings of those who did it to Him.

To keep the scars is to say that the cross was not a mistake but a price, and that this price is written into the very body of the Risen One forever. So the scar here is not proof of weakness, but the seal of what has been accomplished: the sign that the healing of the world passed through the wound, and not around it. And when we, for our part, do not hide our own wounds and scars, we not only open ourselves to the other; we confess the same truth about ourselves: that God heals us not by going around what happened to us, but precisely through that experience.

…I think of the hands of a combat physician in the hell of battle – like those of my brother Andriy (a combat physician of the 11th special-forces battalion of the 112th brigade), whom the Russians killed in July 2024 in the Kherson region, on his birthday. Forever thirty-three… A combat medic has no undamaged hands. Saving others on the front line, he is wounded himself and scars his own hands and body. And he cannot wear gloves forever to hide those scars, because the next wounded person needs hands that work, not hands that look pious.

This, for me, is the image of our calling: of pastoral, chaplaincy, volunteer, and teaching leadership. Hands that touch wounds and broken bodies do not become flawless after that touch. The question is not whether they remain unwounded and unstained. The question is whether they remain working…

To be a leader-witness means to remain. Not to fix, not to explain, not to hurry to heal, not to rush a person toward a convenient pacification with those who are still killing, or with those who refuse to condemn not only the war but also its cause. Simply to remain present in the long silence between the cross and the resurrection. This is the discipline of not leaving. And for leadership it is harder than any theological or pastoral word, because it requires us to be there where we have no answers, and not to flee from the wounds of those entrusted to our care by filling the silence with pious, formulaic phrases such as “God takes the best,” or “you have too little trust in God, since your scars have remained and you have not been healed, even though your hands are still in working order.”

In place of a conclusion

I promised not to close the question with which I began – about leadership through vulnerability, leadership that does not hide its wounds, the leadership of restoration that does not pretend at healing, leadership through testimony – and I do not want to close it. In place of a conclusion, I want to leave you with an image. Recall the rising of the sun over Penuel, and the weary, limping man, Jacob, who after a whole night of wrestling with God limps toward the sunrise and the new day, toward a new stage of life, toward new blessings of God in his leadership among his small people. He is not healed into unrecognizability, but he is blessed in his limp. And he is the one through whom a whole people will go forth – a people that from a small family of seventy souls will grow into a countless multitude by the time of the exodus from Egypt.

To those who, through vulnerable leadership, lead God’s people across this Saturday, it is given – as a blessing, and not as shame – not to hide their wounds and scars, and not to pretend at healing. It is given to us to testify by our wounds and scars to those who need them for the strengthening of their trust in the Risen One, in the Truth about Him and about our reality. And it is given to us to remain beside those for whom we care – precisely when we often have neither strength nor words, neither for explanation nor for comfort.

The body of the Risen One still bears, through all eternity, the marks and scars of the nails and the spear. If the glory of God was not ashamed of wounds and scars, then neither should we be… Keep your children away from war…