Natalya and Her Companions: An Easter Reflection

This very Easter morning I opened the New York Times to read a story of Natalya Zhornyk, a 31-year-old mother from Ukraine, who with a group of women completed a dangerous 3,000 mile journey from Ukraine to Poland to Belarus to Russia to retrieve her son Artem and 15 other children and bring them home. Artem and his companions are among the thousands of Ukrainian children forcibly detained since the Russian invasion and moved to Russia or Russian-held Ukrainian territory. There, the Times report says, these children are subject to re-education, fostering, and adoption by Russian families. One day Natalya got a phone call from Artem. “Mom, come and get me.” She did just that.

The thought that came to mind most clearly upon reading this account was that Natalya and her companions, - these mothers whose love for their children compelled them to put themselves in danger to save them - are displaying for us the divine image in a most brilliant way. Like the Holy One, in whose image they are created, they search out their own to save them.

The churches of the Western world have just completed the annual celebration of the culmination of the Christian story, in which Christ, the incarnate manifestation of God the Holy Trinity in the world, descends willingly to Hades, the realm of the dead, in order to set free the human race, held in captivity to death and destruction. Then, as the great Orthodox icon of the Resurrection of Jesus portrays it, the Risen Christ, standing over the yawning chasm from which he has emerged, clothed in glory, grasps humanity firmly by the wrists and pulls us up into the land of the living with him, free from death’s bonds and destined to share his glory.

This Easter icon gloriously portrays the Divine on a relentless search for us. We get lost, we fall by the wayside, we end up in bondage to spiritual forces which - in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, “corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” God comes after us, seeking us, relentlessly and tenderly. God’s love is set upon every last human person, the low and the high, the scoundrel and the saint, the wise and the simple.

Natalya and her companions are acting in concert with this vision of God. They are icons, then, of this Divine love, visible portrayals of the mystery of the Divine love seeking out the children of God.

I want to dwell on this a bit. There are other accounts out there in the Christian world that set out to tell us who God is. I grew up hearing one of these other accounts, in which God lacked this healthy and good maternal instinct I’ve described as shown us in Natalya and her companions. 

The account I heard earliest in my life was that of God as a severe and demanding judge whose verdict over me was handed down from before the time of my birth. The offense was having been born - along with every other baby born in history -  an inheritor of the guilt of Adam and Eve; and the sentence pronounced upon me was banishment from the presence of God into eternal conscious torment. There was, however, one possible avenue of escape from this unspeakably terrifying fate, but it was reserved only for the “elect.” These “elect” were chosen, I was informed, by a mysterious divine decree, and the one who issued this decree is immune to any protest based on human notions of justice or fairness. God, in the end, was to be understood purely as sovereign power. Furthermore, this sovereign God was offended by us to such a degree that God demanded a sacrificial death to atone for our sins, and Jesus Christ was sent here to suffer that fate on behalf of the aforementioned “elect,” but not for those who were not “elect.”

At an early age I sensed something wrong, something deeply troubling about this account of God and God’s relationship to the world. The trouble is, this God behaves in such a way that - if it were a human being behaving in this way - we would judge the behavior evil. In other words, this portrayal of God is the portrayal of a heartless monster.  This God is by no stretch of the imagination “good.”

Thinking of Natalya and her companions and the danger to which they subjected themselves on behalf of their children, how can we suppose that God would be any less persistent in a search for us?

The seventh century bishop and contemplative Isaac of Syria knew the God who searches relentlessly for us out of love for us, but he was also aware of other accounts of God around him which distressed him greatly.  In a homily he wrote:

“That we should imagine that anger, wrath, jealousy or the such like have anything to do with the divine Nature is something utterly abhorrent for us: no one in their right mind, no one who has any understanding can possibly come to such madness as to think anything of the sort about God.  Nor can we say that He acts thus out of retribution, even though the Scriptures may on the outer surface posit this. Even to think this of God and to suppose that retribution for evil acts is to be found with Him is abominable.” (Homily XXXIX)

In the same homily Isaac objects to the idea that God would be patient with us on earth and then in turn punish us mercilessly in hell. Anyone who would make such a claim, writes Isaac, “thinks in an unspeakably blasphemous way about God….”  He continues: “Not only does such a person fail to attribute something praiseworthy to God, but he also calumniates Him.”

If Isaac were alive today, what would he say about the calumnies heaped upon God in the centuries since he prayed out on the Mesopotamian plain?  If you check the website of many churches in the area where you live, I guarantee you will find a statements of belief that include the endorsement of a view of salvation in which there are those who are "in" and those who are "out", and the ones who are "out" are consigned to eternal punishment in hell. Along with this teaching typically goes the explanation of the death of Jesus as a sacrifice to appease the anger of a deity. These views are perpetuated by habits of reading the Bible that are taught in Sunday school classes and sermons and Bible Schools and seminaries and adherence to these views is enforced upon the clergy by social and institutional pressures.  I started out my spiritual journey inhabiting such spaces, so I speak from experience.

So, following Isaac, what if we listened to our moral intuitions when they suggest to us that if there is a God we can trust, it would have to be a God in whom justice and mercy are two sides of the same coin?  If there is a God we can trust, it would have to be a God who, unlike so many of us, is uninterested in retribution. If there is a God we can trust, it would have to be a God who is related to us in the way a good mother is related to us, a good father, a good parent.  If there is a God who is to be trusted, it would have to be a God who is, well, good.

The God we celebrate today is the God we see reflected in Natalya and her companions. This is God who gave us life, who birthed us into this world, who follows our path in life, who when danger overtakes us goes into the place of suffering and danger to retrieve us from harm. And the harm is always done by humans to one another. Christ suffered on the cross not to satisfy a retributive God, but because human beings sacrificed him, the one who came to show them what humanity was. The harm continues because of what humans do to one another and to the creation. In this case in Natalya's world, Orthodox Christians are doing harm to other Orthodox Christians with whom they share baptismal identity, causing misery for Natalya and her companions and their children.

I hope and pray for an awakening among Christians to the knowledge that God is like a mother, a loving parent, searching not just for some, but for all. God is the God we see in Christ, who descends into the mess we’ve made of the world and conquers by love. I hope for a Christian future in which God looks to us something like Natalya, and in which we relate to God as Artem did to his mother when he phoned her and said “Mom, come get me.”

-Icon image by Bulgarian artist, c. 1675-1700, Vatican Pinacoteca