When the war in Ukraine broke out within the last month in bloody and ruthless fashion at the hands of Vladimir Putin and the Russian state, I immediately searched to find what the response from the Russian Orthodox church would be. My admiration for the church led me to believe that I would find a strong rebuke of Putin’s actions from church leadership. Instead, I was dismayed to see Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox church, express support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, an invasion characterized by the brutal killing of Ukrainian civilians, with the chilling assertion that the invasion was justified due to Ukraine’s embrace of Western values and support of gay rights.

My reaction was partly due to the fact that I was not up to speed with the history of Kirill and Putin. I learned recently in an interview with Cyril Hovorun, Orthodox Archimandrite and professor at the Stockholm School of Theology, on The Unbelievable Podcast that the Kremlin and the Orthodox church had entered into a collusion of power shortly after Putin’s election as President.

Hovorun describes how when Putin came to power, “there was an offer from the Russian church, an offer of a sort of ideology to substitute the Communist ideology. … And it was exactly this idea of the ‘Holy Rus’ … And the Russian church managed to offer, I would say to sell, this ideology to the Kremlin, to Putin, and the Kremlin adopted it… And when I listened to Putin just a week ago before he launched his attacks against Ukraine, I heard the voice of the church.”

What strikes me most about Hovorun’s description is the idea of the church reaching out to the political power of the state with an offer to collude with it on Nationalistic terms. The concept of Holy Russia concerns the idea that Russia and several of the surrounding countries, such as Ukraine and Belarus, are part of a holy land established over the last thousand years, and that it is a holy duty carried out by both the church and state to protect this Holy Land from the influences of the West.

Such an agreement between church leaders and authoritarian political leaders should seem chillingly familiar to us in America. It was in January 2016, in a campaign speech at a Christian college, that Donald Trump promised that if he was elected president of the United States, that “Christianity will have power. If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that” (qtd. in Dias).

In the election later that year, 81 percent of white evangelicals seemed to accept that deal when they helped to vote him into office. At that moment, like the agreement made between the Russian church and Putin, the church threw its hat in with the strong arm of the state. Trump had already tipped his authoritarian hand in with a preview of his penchant for lawlessness as it was in this same speech that he infamously stated, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

READ: An Open Letter to His Holiness Kirill from US Christian Leaders  

We have seen the repercussions of that agreement between this large swath of the American church and Trump in the frothing forms of Christian Nationalism that have emerged in the U.S. One needs to look no farther than the crosses and Jesus signs held high by those storming the capitol building in Washington DC, to use what power they still shared with Donald Trump to disrupt the functioning of democracy in murderous fashion.

The idea of something like a “Holy Russia” as a Holy Land made special by God should not be unfamiliar to Americans either. Many of the original European settlers brought this view with them to the new world, the Puritans most of all, as seen in ideas like John Winthrop’s Puritan colony as a “city upon a hill.” Puritan descendant and theological leader of the First Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards, once planted the eschatological seed in American theology that concerning God’s ultimate renewal of all mankind, “this great work of God must be near. And there are many things that make it probable that this work will begin in America.”

Edwards believed it was specifically America’s chosen destiny to fulfill God’s ultimate will. When we consider the similarities that America shares historically with Russia when it comes to deep-seated beliefs that our countries represent some holy reiteration of God’s chosen people, and then combine that with these beliefs being used to infuse dictatorial, and cruel, strongmen with great power, we see the terrible danger that is being posed.

This current crisis causes us to ask, what if they had succeeded in their goals to upset democracy and handed power to a burgeoning autocrat? What would have happened if the representatives of the American Church that yearned for political power aligned themselves with a dictator and helped to hand him control of the country? What would the fruit of such a union be? Perhaps this moment of Vladimir Putin, authoritarian dictator, marching in-step with the leader of the Russian Orthodox church, has shown us the true consequences of Christian Nationalism: slaughter in the name of Christ.

Jesus warned us about the combination of religion and earthly human power, when he denied a similar offer made by Satan himself. In the book of Matthew, while Jesus is fasting in the desert, it is written that “Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only’” (Matthew 4: 8-10). It often seems that the temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness are ones which humanity must also confront time and time again. So, we must take this moment to learn from Christ that our allegiance is to God, and we “serve him only,” for when the allegiance of the church is tied to the aspirations of the state, we have lost any moral authority, and we have departed from the way of Jesus.

As we watch the current tragedy unfold in Ukraine, our hearts and prayers must be with the suffering, and we must pray fervently that the Holy Spirit will change the heart of Patriarch Kirill and the leaders of the Russian church, but at this flashpoint of outrage that has so uniquely unified the people of America, we must let the horror we feel in our hearts as we gaze upon the violent fruit of the oxymorons of Christian Nationalism and Holy War cause us to remember how close America has come to handing the reins of our religious conscious to authoritarian power, and how seriously that threat still looms on our horizon.

Unfortunately, many in our culture and in our church have reacted with an instinctive defensiveness to such revelations, often desiring to shield themselves from the shame of their own communal complicity with the oppression of our society. The fruit of this is often denial of, or rationalizations for, the presence of these injustices, as opposed to repentance, compassion, or corrective action. 

Many others in the church, however, have sought a more gospel-based response to the presence of systematic suffering, especially that which has existed in the margins of society. According to the behavior of Jesus, how are we to learn to react to the cries for justice gaining volume in our society, while understanding how the injustice that is being protested is not a new evil in our culture but one that has existed for centuries?

I believe we can find an answer to this question in the gospel story of Jesus’ interactions with, and deliverance of, the Gerasene demoniac, which reveals the way Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven itself responds to the cries of the marginalized. It is in the actions of Christ in this encounter that we see Jesus as the deliverer that shines the light of the Kingdom into hidden places to free us from oppression and suffering. 

The story, as it appears in the fifth chapter of Mark, begins with Jesus arriving by boat to the area known as the Gerasenes, where he is immediately approached by a man suffering under the torment of demons. The opening verses reveal how the suffering that Jesus is confronted with here has correlations to the current cries for mercy we hear today from those suffering under long term systematic racial prejudice and any other type of institutionalized injustice. The passage reads as follows:

“They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him. This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain.  For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him.  Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.” (Mark 5:1-5)

What may strike us first is the degree of suffering that this man was in. Not only is the visceral description of him cutting himself with stones descriptive of his suffering, but we see that he was at a climactic point in his suffering, where no one could bind him anymore. We see here a long term suffering that has reached its pinnacle and will no longer remain in the margins and the shadows of the graveyard. 

It is this location of the tombs that shows us a disturbing connection between the condition of this suffering man and the wounds of systematic injustice that have long festered in our own country. When we see how this man was sequestered in the graveyard, we see a society attempting to silence the cries of his suffering.

READ: Announcing a Season of Nonviolent Moral Direct Action

In his commentary on this section of Mark, R. Alan Cole states how it was “probably part of his ‘treatment’ to drive him away from inhabited areas, to find in graveyards on desolate hillsides his ‘isolation block’” (156). Instead of trying to save this man from the torment of demonic oppression, the society around him tried to push him out far enough that he could be isolated and forgotten, but the gospel is clear that suffering of this magnitude is impossible to truly hide or ignore as it is written that the whole area could not help but hear him as he would cry out at night while cutting himself with stones.

In the society around him, his suffering was known and recognized, but at this point had become an accepted part of life in the area. We will see, however, that Jesus does not accept suffering as an acceptable aspect of the status quo, for Jesus’ immediate response to seeing this man was to deliver him from his bondage, tearing down that which oppressed him by commanding, “Come out of this man, you impure spirit!”

The immediacy of Jesus’ actions is important in understanding Jesus’ view of suffering. Jesus does not question the man at length to determine whether he deserves deliverance or whose fault it is that he is suffering. Instead, we see Jesus’ uncompromising view of suffering. He is here to confront it openly and defeat it through the manifest power of the Kingdom of Heaven. 

As Americans we have come into a clearer and clearer understanding in recent years of the litany of injustices that litter the history of our country’s genesis. And we are more and more confronted with the present suffering that has stemmed from these injustices. If we are to follow Jesus, we are not to respond to the appearance of true and profound suffering with rationalizations for its existence but to seek, like Jesus, to deliver those who are suffering and in pain.

To portray Jesus as intentionally seeking to deliver this man out of suffering is worth considering. There is no clear reason as to why Jesus is even in this area of the country at all. As N.T. Wright explains, this area of the Gerasenes “had never really been Jewish territory . . . it wasn’t Jewish land, and the people weren’t Jews. Why if they had been, would they have been keeping pigs?” (55).

Just being in this non-Jewish area shows that Jesus is off the beaten track here, and this area near the graveyard was even more of a strange place to find him traveling. Wright goes on to say how “Graveyards were also considered places of contamination. For a Jew [at the time], contact with the dead, or with graves, made you unclean” (55). When we look at the setting of this chapter we see Jesus in the most out of the way, fringe zone of a gentile area, a place where we have no reason to expect to see him. Yet, where we see suffering, we often see Jesus. Jesus’ arrival in the Gerasenes shows us how he breaks into the marginalized areas of our societies where those who are suffering have been left to languish. And when he breaks into these areas, he does so with the light of the Kingdom, the light that the darkness cannot overcome.

Knowing that Jesus is a deliverer and savior to those who suffer in the margins, we know that as followers of Jesus we are called to be the same. We are called to carry the light of the Kingdom into the darkened corners of society, and to move with Jesus as he delivers the power of the Kingdom to those crying out for justice and mercy. We are not called to make rationalizations for the existence of suffering. We are not called to defend ourselves from the shame of complicity with the status quo, but to instead throw off the pretense of innocence, repent, and join Jesus in his redeeming work. 

When our society has shown with heartbreaking evidence that racial prejudice, gender inequality, and economic oppression have been allowed to exist with oppressive power in our country, we are called not to ignore the cries for justice, but to move into it with Jesus, the light that shines in the darkness.