Plowshares and Swords

“Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weakling say, ‘I am a warrior.’” Joel 3:10.

No one ever wants this verse from Joel to apply to them, but that’s the reality of life for the people of Ukraine now. As Russia attacks from multiple directions, using planes, artillery, tanks, and everything else they can throw at their neighbor, the citizens of Ukraine are being pulled into action. The government calls for all citizens who can contribute to the war effort to do what they can in the defense of their country. School teachers are becoming field nurses. Cooks are taking up rifles. Farmers are becoming soldiers. 

This is a particularly scary time for the world. This is the first full scale invasion of a European country since World War 2. Most of the world is siding with Ukraine, giving supplies to them while putting strict economic sanctions on Russia. The Ukrainians have been valiantly fighting back, making Russia pay dearly for every inch they take, but this has made Putin nervous and he has put his nuclear deterrent forces on high alert. While we don’t realistically need to worry about global nuclear war here, the situation is still very troubling. 

Though Putin has provided justifications for this invasion, they don’t really seem to stand up to scrutiny. When we judge this situation, the answer seems clear. Russia is in the wrong with this invasion. Ukraine is now trying to defend itself as a sovereign state against an invader, and most of the global community is backing the underdog in this fight. President Zelenskyy of Ukraine is heroically staying to lead his country, while Russia continues to add forces to the fight. Someday, this war will be recounted as a story with heroes, villains, and innocent victims, but today it isn’t a story. It’s a war, and that is scary. As much as we hope the underdog will win and the villains will fail, we can’t know the outcome until we reach that point in time. We don’t know if the ending will be happy. We can’t regard this as a story, because it hasn’t all been written yet.

When faced with the reality of war, we have a tendency to mythologize. We want to turn things into a story that we can make sense of. The pure chaos and agonizing tension of military conflict is too much for us to bear. We want to reduce and simplify. It is easy to hate the bad guys when we can declare them to be unequivocally evil. It’s easy to cheer on our favored side when we can say that they are righteous people fighting for a righteous cause. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really work here.

While it is true that the Russians are invading, many of the soldiers don’t actually want to be there. According to recent reports, some of the units seeing combat were conscripted and told they wouldn’t actually have to fight. This realization makes the Russian casualty numbers harder to celebrate. Though they do represent small victories for Ukraine, these aren’t battle hardened veterans with a thirst for Ukrainian blood. These are frightened teenagers and young adults fighting a war in the cold of an eastern European winter for the glory of some people they’ll never meet. 

Furthermore, while sanctions may seem like a non-violent way to bring Russia back in line, the rise in price of consumer goods and the decline in the power of their currency will affect the poor and middle class first and most. Russian people will be struggling to find food and medicine. Russian children will go hungry. People in Russia may very well die for lack of food and medicine as their transportation infrastructure struggles to meet demand with new constraints laid upon it. The defeat of the great evil enemy in the stories we tell ourselves will mean the misery of thousands upon thousands of innocent people who want no part in a global conflict. 

Of course, we can simply lay all the blame on Putin, and certainly a lot of blame should be laid upon him, but that doesn’t take into consideration Putin’s perspective. To be honest, I don’t know his perspective, and I don’t think I ever will. However, considering that the United States has its own history of invasions that have toppled foreign governments justified on grounds that not everyone believed, we might not have to think too creatively to understand why Putin may be doing this. This is to say, perhaps the answer to why Putin is doing this, is the same reason that we have done it: gaining a better position in global politics, making sure our borders and those of our allies are safe and secure, and perhaps more cynically, for power, wealth, and glory. 

But even if we see Putin as uniquely evil and Russians as all following his orders eagerly, every Russian soldier killed means someone has to deal with the emotional and mental trauma of having taken a life. Even if Russia loses quickly, the scars left by war on the land and the people will remain. All small victories are tragedies. There is no joy in war.

With this bleak outlook, we turn our thoughts and prayers to the most vulnerable: the civilians whose bodies and valuables are in the path of war, the young soldiers who don’t want to be there, and all those who will go hungry as a result of this conflict. We pray for a time in which powerful nations don’t feel the need to flex their might destructively, costing the lives and well being of the smallest in their midst. We pray for a time when we can repurpose our weapons of war for something better..

The quote that I opened with from Joel finds a response in Isaiah 2:4. It isn’t exactly clear which came first, but whenever war rears its ugly head, Isaiah reminds us of a better future. We pray for a future in which all the world will know peace, where we don’t feel joy from the tragedy of another, where farmers, cooks, and school teachers can leave the battlefield behind and return to their work. We pray for a world in which God’s peace prevails. Isaiah 2:4 reads as follows:

“He shall judge between the nations,

    and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

    and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

    neither shall they learn war any more.”