Spiritual Reflection, May 2022
The Time of the Good Samaritan
“Where is God? Why doesn’t he stop this mindless war? Why doesn’t he intervene to punish the evil-doers?” Since the day when Russia, my country, attacked Ukraine, my parents’ and friends’ country, I have been wrestling with these nagging questions. Millions of people all over the world now repeat the lamentations of Job, echoed in the twentieth century by the bitter cries of Eli Wiesel on behalf of the innocent victims of war and persecution.
Sometimes it seems that there is no answer, and God is silent. We stand before him, helplessly trying to respond to his silence. "Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD. Lord, hear my voice!" (Psalm130:1-2).
For people of the “age of success,” with its illusion that all problems can be solved, it is hard to accept our own helplessness. It is even harder to accept the helplessness of God. “You are Almighty! Where is your might now?” Our current context demands that we rethink our former answers to this question. Just as the twentieth century gave birth to a “theology after Auschwitz,” so today we need a “theology after Mariupol and Bucha.” It will be a theology of repentance, understood not as concentration on our own unworthiness, but as metanoia, a turning of our minds towards personal responsibility for history as a space of co-working between God and human beings.
It will also to be a theology of otherness, because the Absolute Other became a human being; a theology of the inalienable dignity of human life, rooted in the Incarnation; and a theology of hope, born from compassion and solidarity. The center of this theology will be the human person, his or her acts, choices, and face, as articulated by the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.
"A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead… But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity…" (Luke 10:30, 33). We are living in the time of the Good Samaritan. From Jerusalem to Jericho, from Kiev to Warsaw, from Kharkov to Berlin, from Kherson to Haifa, from Mariupol to Montreal, and onward everywhere.
Svetlana Panich