On Sunday 12 May 1940, the third of the five war days in which the Netherlands was overrun by Nazi Germany, writer Antoon Coolen noted in his diary: ‘I hear people say: if Germany wins the war, I will no longer believe in God. It’s a very understandable reaction, but I don’t think it’s a reasonable one. God is required to recognize our standards, and their application by Him.’
In times of need, God is cursed, but also invoked – it will be no different in Ukraine today. In laetare, ‘magazine for liturgy and church music’, Jan Marten de Vries wondered in 2020 whether in the women’s camp Ravensbrück, where his mother Jenneke Romkes stayed during the last year of the war, ‘something from Easter was still being celebrated’. The archives were inconclusive about this. About the Holy Week before Easter in 1945, he read only that the construction of a crematorium – where 800 to 1,000 bodies could be burned every day – had just been completed. That the maternity ward got a new coat of paint. That Russian detainees made red flags to greet the Red Army. That the children of barrack 27 played the game ‘selection for the gas chamber’. That the camp guards took a boat trip on a neighboring lake. And that Dutch women have a variety show with sailor song and Bauerntänze cared for. SS men had also come to see it.
Easter was celebrated against the backdrop of this ‘fantastic, irrational chaos’. About the life of faith in Ravensbrück, Jenneke Romkes remarked that ‘the will to entrust life to God gave us peace of mind and tranquility’. Her son adds, “Yet there are just as many stories of women who have found no support in their faith or even abandoned their faith.” Sometimes Romkes could put himself in the position of that. Years later, for example, she fulminated against the evangelist Corrie ten Boom, who was also interned in Ravensbrück, who allegedly gave her fellow sufferers false hope with the assurance that God would bring about a speedy deliverance. And shortly after liberation, Romkes had ‘rebelliously run away’ from a church service in which the pastor had spoken of ‘the atoning blood of Golgotha’. ‘Damn. Haven’t you learned anything yet?’, she would have called to the pastor afterwards. “Jesus is not the only Jew who was murdered. All these were God’s sons. His suffering lasted only a day. Of these years. Endless.’
The Cross of Good Friday
‘The misery of the war can lead to a challenge to the faith’, acknowledges Monsignor Gerard de Korte, bishop of Den Bosch. “If God judges me, I will not only be questioned but I will also ask questions,” said the priest Romano Guardini: why, God, does history, full of light but also darkness, continue for so long after Easter? In other words: why such a detour to final salvation?’
Yet in times of war and hardship, Easter can indeed offer comfort, thinks De Korte. At Easter we celebrate that death does not have the last word. The crucified Jesus has received new and different life. I hope that many Christians in Ukraine take heart from this. Although I can imagine that Good Friday, the day on which the crucifixion and death of Jesus are commemorated, means more to them than Easter under the current circumstances. Their cross obscures the light of Easter.’
‘In Boetsja there is the cross of Good Friday’, says Jessa van der Vaart, pastor of the Dorpskerk in Bloemendaal. ‘And let’s be honest: in previous years when we celebrated Easter, there was always that cross somewhere in the world. There have always been wars, there has always been oppression and occupation, there have always been torture chambers. It just wasn’t as close as it is now. So this year, the war in neighboring Ukraine is pushing us to face an essential theme of the Easter story, perhaps the core of it: that it is about the suffering people inflict on each other in the struggle for power. Vulnerable people everywhere are perishing in violence and the clatter of weapons. On Good Friday we learn that Jesus is their ally. He does not avoid suffering, but shows solidarity with people on battlefields and in torture chambers. He shares their fate, he takes it upon himself.’
‘Zelensky as contemporary Jesus for his people’
The Amsterdam preacher Tim Vreugdenhil does not know how relevant Easter is currently for the beleaguered Ukrainians (not counting the fact that Easter in the Eastern Orthodox churches will not be celebrated until next week). For himself, Easter has gained in expressiveness due to the war in Ukraine. ‘The Lent before Easter is also called ‘suffering’. What is normally the liturgy of the church is taking place on the world stage in these weeks. We make a gruesome and elongated edition of The Passion along. In the extremely uncomfortable form that also characterizes the original passion story: nobody knows how this will end.’
The cast of the drama in Ukraine also resembles that of the Passion, says Vreugdenhil. ‘Putin plays the cold Pilate who has life and death. Volodimir Zelenski acts for his people as a contemporary Jesus: my struggle is also your struggle. The big difference between the two is of course that Jesus was completely defenseless, and also deliberately remained defenseless.’ Van der Vaart: ‘On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey, the animal on which the poor moved. In doing so, Jesus showed that his way is that of meekness, vulnerability and peace-loving. You need not fear this king.’
Leap of Faith along the Way of the Cross
And we, the news consumers who are closely following the events in Ukraine, are the bystanders of the cross, rethinking their role. ‘It is the question that belongs to the passion’, says Vreugdenhil. ‘Will you keep watching or will you join in? The world took a leap of faith in days, David Brooks wrote last month The New York Times† The belief in freedom has become much stronger. We should be deeply grateful to Ukrainians for reminding us how much life is a moral undertaking. And that true belief in values can lead to brave deeds. This is what a ‘passion’ can do to a person. You can change from bystander to fellow combatant, although that battle is not always fought with the sword.’
‘The story did not end with the crucifixion of Jesus,’ says Van der Vaart. ‘It can inspire us again and again. What it tells me is that the hard hand, the tank and the brawn don’t have the last word – in the end the soft forces will win.”