On February 24, 2022, when Metropolitan Onufryi of Kyiv and All Ukraine described Russia’s invasion as the sin of Cain, he did not begin with strategy, diplomacy or military balance. He reached instinctively for the oldest biblical image of violence: a brother raising his hand against his own brother.

More than four years have passed since those first days of the invasion, yet those words have lost none of their force. They remain among the clearest moral judgments pronounced by any Church leader directly engulfed by the war. Curiously, however, the question now most frequently asked is no longer what he said, but why he no longer appears to speak enough.

The question itself says something about our own age. We have become accustomed to measuring authority by the frequency of public statements, while forgetting that there are moments when words themselves become part of the battlefield.

Metropolitan Onufryi continues to preach, celebrate the Divine Liturgy and address his faithful. Yet long before the invasion he had already entered another conflict. The ecclesiastical decisions of 2018 profoundly altered the landscape of Orthodoxy in Ukraine and left him carrying not only the burden of a nation approaching war but also the fracture of his own ecclesiastical world. Thus, when the invasion began, and he denounced it as Cain’s crime, he did so not from institutional security but from within a Church already wounded by years of division, suspicion and mutual accusations. Since then, some bishops and clergy have departed, others have remained, while millions of faithful have found themselves divided not only by political frontiers but also by ecclesiastical loyalties. Every sermon is now interpreted politically before it is heard pastorally.

Jerusalem knows another form of the same burden.

Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem recently travelled abroad amid reports that he might discreetly contribute to diplomatic efforts concerning the Middle East. Whether such initiatives produce visible results is almost secondary. What matters is the position itself. The Patriarch of Jerusalem presides over one of Christianity’s oldest Churches callled “The Mother of all God’s Churches”, but also over one of the world’s most sensitive historical territories. Every public sentence spoken in Jerusalem immediately echoes in Israel, among Palestinians, in Jordan, Egypt, Greece, throughout the Orthodox world, in Europe, Moscow, Washington and increasingly throughout the Arab and the whole world. Silence itself is interpreted. Prudence itself........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)