If I strive to love my neighbor as I love myself, is it ever right to pray for the death of an enemy?
As we bear distant witness to the continuing outrageous war that Vladimir Putin wages against the people of Ukraine, I’ve been thinking about the power of destruction and death that one person can control. The unprovoked war is approaching its first-year anniversary, and Putin’s military continues to ruin the nation, leveling so much to rubble. Schools, apartment buildings, power stations, airports, markets, train tracks, hospitals: all have been targets of Russian guns, bombs, missiles, and drone attacks aimed at killing civilians and demolishing infrastructure. Putin is hell-bent on destroying the very land he covets, and that seems like certain insanity.
He is the Destroyer. I keep praying that his own people would grow sick of him draining their resources to build weapons, rage against him conscripting their own young men to kill mothers, grandparents, and children in their name, and topple him from power. I seethe at the way the Russian Orthodox Church continually blesses the Putin regime and its leaders. He is a terror to the world, saying he is willing to launch nuclear weapons, and yet is afraid of his own inner circle. Putin has become a singular threat to millions of exhausted, traumatized Ukrainian children who may not live to have a normal life. And still the Ukrainian people battle on, fighting the giant to their north who wants to destroy them. We send them money, weapons, food, as do European allies. And we watch.
I struggle with my hatred of a man I don’t know, whose behavior is so deadly to so many. He is just one man on a long list of megalomaniacal leaders throughout human history, consumed with their own importance, legacy, and dominance over others. But unlike the others, Putin controls a vast country historically tolerant of such power and he has innumerable weapons of mass destruction at his command. It’s a frightening combination.
I notice that each time this war comes to my mind, I pray for an end, and increasingly, I believe that end means Putin must die. No one seems able to end his ruinous rule, and while I pray for his victims, I pray for his death. I fool myself thinking that Jesus would understand. As a Jew under first century Roman occupation, Jesus grew up under an empire much like Russia’s. It was that same Roman empire that considered him a local threat. But my savior was willing to be killed by empire rather than meet force with force. His power was unfailingly one of love, the very model of the heart of God. It’s that power, the power of love, that I believe is what creates, enlivens, and enlightens the world.
I admit I still can’t puzzle this riddle out: what would Jesus say people of faith should do when faced with the unchecked evil of a dangerous dictator? This is the same question that Christians asked themselves during World War II when confronted with the reality of genocide by the Nazi German government. I have come to settle alongside the arguments, theology and ethics of a young Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He spent years working within his German Lutheran church to raise the alarm about the genocide, teaching, writing, traveling through Europe and finally to the United States, to gather support for the Allied resistance from our churches and our government. So many wanted him to remain in the US, safe from the war. But he returned.
And this young theologian returned to join a plot to assassinate Hitler. Yes, he wanted Hitler dead so many others could live. The plot failed, and in 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to prison, and then Flossenburg concentration camp. It was there where he was hanged on April 9th, 1945, just 3 weeks before the collapse of the Nazi regime and Hitler’s suicide.
Perhaps it is too broad a stroke to say that love compels the death of evil, but I think it does. It is love for the stranger, the vulnerable, the powerless, the innocent that compels us to forcefully resist evil human beings. History teaches repeatedly that evil is not some abstract force outside of us, some weird spiritual animated devil competing with God, tempting us to step outside God’s path. Evil is human power turned inward, consumed by the self, feeding on hatred, aggression, and power to destroy other living things. We see it in American school shootings, car jackings, domestic violence, child abuse, murders, domestic terrorism. We see it in Putin’s violence.
I think of these things when I pray in Jesus’ name. For the end of Putin’s power, one way or another. For evil to be cast down. For war and violence everywhere to end, for love to win, for justice to be for all living things. For God’s kingdom to come. God help me.
(Published in MN SW Media / Savage Pacer 1/28/23)