There’s been a lot going on in the news this week. But amid resignations, reports and indictments, the Ukrainian armed forces have begun their long-awaited counter-offensive. Many in the UK and elsewhere have welcomed Ukrainian refugees into their schools, workplaces, and homes. Like I suspect most in our community and probably in our country, I think that the Ukrainians have the right to be a sovereign nation, and it’s hard to see how this can be achieved save with their victory on the battlefield. Their valour against an apparently superior foe has been stirring.
That’s what I hope for. But what should I pray for? Put another way, if prayer is in good part trying to align my heart with God’s, what does God yearn for? In Exodus 15, the children of Israel, delivered from slavery, sing that: ‘the Lord is a man of war: Pharaoh’s chariots and hosts hath he cast into the sea’. There is much we could say about the Exodus, perhaps the Bible’s greatest Origin Story. We could talk about its universality, how it prefigures our pilgrimage as Christians, how it represents Jesus’s passion, or how it has inspired freedom movements around the world. But I was always very taken with a gloss on the Exodus from the Talmud where a weeping God says: ‘How dare you sing for joy when my children are dying? The Egyptians are my children too.’
One day, of course, all nations will beat their swords into ploughshares under the Lordship of the King of Kings. For now, a Ukrainian victory is, I’m sure, necessary. But we know that in God’s heart is not just Ukrainian courage, but also civilians displaced by flooding or harmed by missile attacks, those thousands of miles away who rely on Ukrainian food or energy to keep prices manageable, the Russian conscript or convict who had little choice but to fight someone else’s war, and many others besides. God’s heart will be in the hard work of the decades to come in somehow making a lasting peace. Let us pray for our heart to be shaped like God’s heart.
Chris Braganza
