Dear friends,
A sermon should always be for something; it should not merely condemn but should bring hope. It should be inclined towards good, not negation. And if it is to negate, then only as a starting point for building something good. After all, this is also the basic principle of biblical interpretation. Nevertheless, today allow me exceptionally to preach against something. Against something that stands so ungodly, blasphemously, proudly, and at the same time cowardly against life, meaning, love. And that is war.
Absolute destruction, deconstruction of the world. And thus a blasphemous mockery of Him who created the world as good and gave everything for its joy. War – I do not mean a defensive war, born from aggression – is, at first glance, a manifestation of strength, power, ego, but in reality, it is the most wretched, the weakest. It is a pubescent explosion of anger from immature people, tough guys, who bolster their strength by brandishing weapons, taking pictures with beasts, showcasing their physical power, manifesting luxury that gives them the illusion of self-confidence and superiority over the ordinary world. Yet beneath all this lies uncertainty, stupidity, a complex of inferiority. The messianic complex is always inherently sinful because there is only one Messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us and rose from the dead. Thus, those who unleash war are actually ridiculous in all their horror, pathetic. They are unworthy in the profound meaning of the word. And they are a perverse manifestation of how evil distorts human nature. They are knots that prevent the strength of resurrection. Therefore, it is necessary to pray for their conversion, so that God can be all in all. Even in their hearts.
Aggressive war, therefore, lies; it lies from its very nature. It lies even by pretending to have strength that it doesn’t possess. Which can be seen not in the face of the strong but in that of the weak, the suffering. Their determination is much stronger because it is truer. Here, perhaps, we can at least somewhat understand the words of the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the Plain about turning the other cheek to the one who has already struck you on one. Brutal evil calculates with the same weapon, with evil, hence with fear, as the wicked are afraid. A firm setting of life, of face, no retreat, no lowering oneself to revenge, hatred, a loving but firm insistence on the truth, come what may, is mysteriously connected to Christ’s face on the Cross, how much more terrifying, with what greater love Jesus confronts there those who want to harm Him. Turning the other cheek is the opposite of fleeing from evil. Weak yet loving, is always stronger than the self-consuming aggressor.
It is necessary to preach against war because it is an extrusion of evil, which cannot share in God and in God's creation. In no way. For in God, there is no war, no discord; in the Trinity, there is only cooperation, coexistence, sharing, love. And God, as our tradition reveals Him, doesn't need any antithesis, evil, to realize Himself. God is from eternity full, whole, encompassing, because He is love. War does not come from God and cannot be masked or distorted by so-called divine interests, the promotion of good, some traditional values, suspiciously neglecting the most traditional values, namely love, compassion, support, respect for humanity and the freedom of its life choices. War is a fruit of sin; there is no holy war, not even by extension in an ideological struggle for some kind of purity and incorruptness of our culture. It is necessary to preach against war because, as a fruit of sin, it destroys the world, creation, cutting lives in half into which God has placed so many possibilities. War is a revelation of sinful death, it is its herald. Not the necessary, humble death of surrender, fulfillment, and transition to God, but destructive death, which claims the final word, undermining every desire for good, human coexistence, love, creation. I must not be fascinated by war. I must not – and if I do, I sin gravely – call for it as a solution, a awakening from lethargy, a release of forces. Humanity has failed this many times; remember how in the tired atmosphere of the ending long 19th century, many thinkers and artists called for war as an opportunity for the renewal of life forces. The aggressive intensity of offensive war is merely a mask for agony; it is dead, coldly dead, and deadly.
It is necessary to preach against war because it is not only an offense to God but is also the greatest degeneration of God's image in man. It is a complete resignation from culture, education, internal transformation, from the patient work on life. It is without repentance, self-reflection. Yes, aggressors often mock these very concepts, and indeed, our culture, education, public administration often grievously fails. Still, the path of education, culture, dialogue, democracy amidst all problems is the only path suitable for human freedom. Good ideas cannot be implemented by force, violence.
It is necessary to preach against war because such strong human emotions like anger, fear, anxiety are not cultivated; they do not help us utilize them, transform them, but misuse them, accelerate them, ignite them into an uncontrollable force. Those who engage in aggressive war toy with negative emotions. And they sin mortally in how much anxiety and fear they inflict on people. How many elderly people today recall with intensity, even surprising themselves, traumatic memories from World War II or from the occupation of 1968! By what right do the elderly, already so severely tested by illness, often existential uncertainty, the demanding approach towards the end of life, have to be distressed by the wicked war instigators? And there are young people, those who have not experienced any war violence in our territory. Many of them, in their agitated, fragile soul, are already so burdened with the awareness of responsibility for the course of the world, climate change, social injustice that surrounds them. By what right do they have to fear bringing children into the world? After all, this is the greatest perversion and the greatest shame that evil causes, that what should fill young people with desire, joy, meaning, they often associate with great fear and apprehension.
Finally, it is necessary to preach against war for completely "ordinary" reasons. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Franz Kafka noted in his diary after the declaration of the First World War: "Germany declared war on Russia – in the afternoon an hour of swimming." At first glance, this surprises. Shouldn't we be doing something else at such a time? It might evoke pangs of conscience. What do I think of when such horrible things are happening? But is this wrong? It is necessary to preach against war also because it wants to overwhelm ordinary life, it plays with great words, concepts, demands attention, and yet devours life, which has so much good even in the seemingly small. Small life is a hundred times more truthful than war pomp. And normal people, including those who must defend their country – and who are forced to use words that we otherwise must spare, like patriotism, justice, sacrifice – even they would a hundred times rather go for a swim, take a trip with their children, to the club, or for a beer. It is necessary to preach against war also because it despises ordinary life, mild feelings, quiet joy. Yes, Jesus was angered in the temple when he witnessed the abuse of God’s things for trade and the self-presentation of the powerful, but He was certainly happier at the wedding in Cana, at Zacchaeus's banquet, at Martha and Mary's.
For all these reasons, it is necessary at least once to preach about the current war, the aggressive war led by Russia, Putin’s elite, and propaganda, not all Russians, against Ukraine. For all the reasons and images mentioned above, this is not meddling in politics but a necessary, albeit certainly clumsy, personal experience and character of the preacher inevitably simplifying, an attempt to orient itself in a situation where we are all short. The Church must not represent political solutions, must not bless weapons, must not incite hatred. However, it must speak about the suffering of people; it must, at the command of the Savior, stand up for the attacked; it must warn, as Pope and the Czech Bishops' Conference are doing, of the sinful dimension of war. This follows from the doctrine of just defensive war, which is part of the Church's social teaching. Certainly not a part of it from which we should derive joy, but regarding the state of sinful humanity, which is only on the way to eternity and is still threatened by sin, a necessary part. Due to the hardness of the human heart, it is necessary to have laws, sanctions – not as an end but as means.
The Church, especially outside Ukraine and Russia, cannot resolve the complicated issue of the Ukrainian East, but must point out that in a state of imperfection, it is impossible to proceed otherwise than by adhering to international treaties and laws and through complicated negotiations. However, negotiations are only possible until one side chooses a forceful solution. Therefore, it is not possible in any way, not even in the most complicated situations, to justify the breach of these treaties and the violent solution. The Church also has its memory, weighed down by disastrous religious wars; it keeps in its memory shared with the whole society events of Munich, the situation in the Sudetenland, the reprehensible failures of democratic states in the face of military aggression, and has in memory the tragedy of collective guilt in the expulsion of Germans. Just defense is not primarily about using violence but about protecting positive values. The position of the aggressor and the victim can never be relativized. Sure, the victim is not perfect either; not all those attacked are heroic angels of light, but the aggressor's act cannot be called into question by any flaw of the victim.
Thus, just defense is not a denial of Jesus' words about not repaying evil with evil. His words must lead us to a firm stance of love, not to hatred. Even in defense, we should not seek revenge; hatred is only the first reaction we must necessarily work on; otherwise, it would devalue all our actions. Surely, this is difficult; this difficult time directly calls for a pathetical evocation of the forces to resist and defend. But for defense to be effective and for us to stand even after the war, it must not be motivated by hatred but by the defense of good. War is a revelation of injustice, and when we preach against war, we must also preach against ourselves. Such an glaring injustice as the aggression of one power against another free state is just a greatly swollen form of injustice that begins in small ways. For a long time, some of us, even in the Church, suffered from instigation of hatred and enmity against various groups of inhabitants; for a long time, we – and many still do – supported the crusade of the so-called healthy East against the so-called immorality of the West and sought in the idealized, never-existing Russia shelter from the complexity of life; for a long time, we were unconcerned with the hatred with which some (far from all) conservative currents of Christianity overlooked the immorality, aggressiveness, arrogance of politicians shouting about the protection of life and traditional values, but who do not hesitate to silence other opinions, incite to evil. Recently ended the screaming Olympic games under a regime that demonstrably decimates the opposition, Olympic games that became a farce of the Olympic ideal. And even worse: we have the right to be horrified by what is happening near us, but genocides, wars in other parts of the world, hundreds of thousands of dead refugees left many of us long indifferent. And even today, our world hesitates with clearer sanctions because it – and I also – fears for our comfort to which we have grown accustomed. By opening doorways to evil in all these directions, through tolerance or even the use of lies, disinformation, conspiracies, hardening some basal trust in God and in people with proud conviction that we know more than the overwhelming consensus of scientists, doctors, than the overwhelmingly predominant consensus of world intelligence services, we have allowed lies to become almost a legitimate means of politics and argumentation, even in the Church. After all, in many of our important elections, proven lies scored points, amidst the Church, lies about Pope Francis, insults to the Church in other countries spread. No, if we must preach against war, we must mention all this. And not only mention it; primarily we must ask God for forgiveness, for the gift of repentance. And when we preach against war, we must not preach against any nation or group of people collectively. Russia is not identical with Putin. It is necessary to gratefully appreciate the courage of those who, despite the danger they face, oppose the war even in Russia.
When we preach against war, we must not incite despair, a dark image of the world; we must simply clearly reject any cooperation with evil, painting black on white. When we preach against war, we preach against death in favor of life. We must take a stance that is clear at this moment. If, God willing, the war ends, there will be time, and it will certainly be necessary to think more differentiatedly, to think about the arrangement of the world with greater precision. But that is not the main task of the Church. Its task is to stand on the side of protecting innocent lives. And above all, after the negative, after condemning war, then to diligently work on the task God has given her: the reconciliation of people with each other and with God, the defense of freedom of conscience and human rights, the dignity of every human life, which is guaranteed by God. We will all stand before God's face. The judge will be He. We must clearly oppose the lies of the aggressor's words and evil deeds, but we must not judge his soul. Before God we will all stand. We usually invoke – and rightly so – His mercy in this context; forgive me that today, exceptionally, I remind you that we should also fear Him, not with anxiety over every mistake, sin, irregularity of our lives, but with the awareness of the seriousness of life and our responsibility for the world. We should not fear God's wrath but His love. So heavily wounded in every person killed, in every destroyed work, in every trampled possibility.
Let us now help Ukraine with prayer, repentance, financial assistance; let us wait and see how the situation develops towards perhaps helping with housing, let us not act in panic and therefore to soothe our conscience; systemic solutions will be needed through state institutions and the charitable work of the Church. And let us pay more attention to Ukrainians or Russians who live with us. I think we have often secretly looked down on them, we have taken them for granted as auxiliary forces, we did not know their lives, we did not want to know them.
And one more thing: let us calmly go (for now) swimming. Life is worth living. Otherwise, there would be no need to defend it.
(P. Petr Beneš, sermon from Sunday, February 27, 2022
delivered at the Church of the Most Sacred Heart of the Lord in Prague)
