When Shepherds Speak Quietly

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 becomes controversial.

The position of the Patriarch cannot, however, be understood solely through contemporary politics. The Greek Patriarchates have for centuries constituted one of the principal instruments through which Hellenic civilization continued to exist far beyond the geographical limits of Greece itself. Jerusalem, Sinai and Alexandria are not isolated ecclesiastical institutions but parts of a historical network extending from the Eastern Mediterranean into Africa.

While the geopolitical weight of the Greek Republic has naturally changed over time, the Patriarchates (Alexandria, [till the 20th c.]-Antioch, Jerusalem, Sinai) continue to preserve a continuity that reaches back through Byzantium, the Arab caliphates, the Crusader period, the Ottoman centuries and the modern Middle East. They represent far more than ecclesiastical administration. They preserve historical memory itself.

Perhaps this explains something frequently misunderstood.

The Churches have become diplomatic not because diplomacy belongs to their vocation, but because survival has become one of their ministries.

The Gospel did not become diplomatic. The Divine Liturgy did not become diplomatic. Prayer did not become diplomatic. History obliged the Churches to become so. For centuries, they have learned that monasteries are preserved not only by prayer but also by negotiation, that schools remain open not only through conviction but also through prudence, and that continuity frequently depends upon patient dialogue with governments that change while the Church remains. The diplomacy of Jerusalem is therefore not political ambition. It is the practical discipline of historical survival.

Few examples illustrate this more clearly than the annual remembrance preserved in the official calendar of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem concerning the Covenant traditionally associated with Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab and Patriarch Sophronios. Historians naturally continue to discuss the textual history of the surviving documents. Yet within the Patriarchate another reality has always remained more important. Jerusalem has preserved the memory of an historical equilibrium through which Christian communities, together with the Jewish presence according to the local tradition, continued to exist under Muslim sovereignty. Whatever inequalities undoubtedly characterized that society, continuity itself remained possible.

Curiously, this institutional memory is maintained more consistently in Jerusalem than elsewhere. It survives not because it answers every historical question but because it belongs to the lived memory of the city itself. It reminds successive generations that civilizations are rarely built upon absolute victories. More often they endure through imperfect but lasting equilibria.

This distinction becomes increasingly important today.

The danger presented by movements such as Daesh-ISIS, the Islamic State, does not consist solely in acts of terrorism. Their deeper ambition lies elsewhere. They reject precisely those historical equilibria that gradually emerged over many centuries. Their project is revolutionary and Jihadistic (fighting for “truth and combatting for purity”) rather than historical. It is not merely a question of establishing political control but of replacing accumulated historical memory with ideological certainty. Jerusalem occupies a central place within that vision because Jerusalem has always represented universal legitimacy. Whoever claims Jerusalem claims far more than territory.

This is precisely where one must distinguish between the historical development of Islamic civilization and revolutionary jihadism. Classical Islamic societies produced legal frameworks through which Muslims, Christians and Jews continued – however unequally – to inhabit the same historical landscape. Revolutionary movements reject those accumulated arrangements. Their objective is not continuity but permanent purification through rupture. They seek to begin history anew. For Islam, this “House of Peace/Dar as-Salaam – بالسواحلية:”  is expressed as a continuum of societal eternity.

One cannot ignore the possibility that the prolonged instability stretching from Gaza through Syria, Golan, West Bank and Lebanon toward Iraq may once again create precisely the conditions in which such movements reorganize themselves. They flourish where institutions weaken, where political authority fragments and where societies lose confidence in historical continuity. They exploit vacuums. Indeed, they rarely create them.

Seen from Jerusalem, the question therefore extends well beyond military developments. The gradual weakening of historical balances may prove more dangerous than any single battle.

The same observation also casts a different light upon the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. Public debate often reduces it to territory, settlements, borders or property. All these questions are real and profoundly important. Yet none entirely explains the extraordinary persistence of the conflict. Beneath visible disputes lie another struggle concerning historical legitimacy, sacred memory and universal vocation. Land has become the visible expression of realities that transcend land itself. This perhaps explains why political negotiations repeatedly encounter limits that no technical agreement alone can overcome.

The ancient Churches instinctively perceive these deeper currents because they have lived through them before. They have survived Byzantine emperors, Arab caliphates, Crusader kingdoms, Mameluke sultans, Ottoman governors, the British Mandate, Jordanian administration and the modern States of Israel and… Jordan. Every generation imagined that its own political order would define the future. None proved permanent. Yet the Churches remained with its stones and the living witnesses, survivors.

Their perspective is therefore measured less by political or electoral cycles than by centuries.

This is also why both Metropolitan Onufryi and Patriarch Theophilos often appear less dramatic than the political world surrounding them. Neither commands armies. Neither governs a state. Neither possesses military alliances. Yet both carry responsibilities extending beyond immediate events. They know that once historical continuity is broken it cannot easily be restored.

Perhaps this explains their apparent reserve. They are not merely protecting institutions.

They are protecting time, and they are overshadowed by resurrection and the world-to-come.

They know that civilizations collapse not only through conquest but also through the slow disappearance of those habits of coexistence that generations patiently learned to practice. Once those habits disappear, ideological absolutism quickly fills the void.

History, after all, rarely ends. It changes its language.

The old biblical question nevertheless remains unchanged: “Where is your brother?”

Metropolitan Onufryi answered that question by speaking of Cain.

Jerusalem continues to hear it every day, not only within churches, synagogues and mosques but also in the streets where successive civilizations have learned, however imperfectly, to inhabit the same sacred landscape.

Whether that fragile equilibrium can still be preserved remains uncertain. Yet perhaps the quiet witness of these two hierarchs suggests that the future of civilization will depend less upon those who promise final victories than upon those who continue preserving historical continuity while history itself appears to unravel.

In an age fascinated by revolutionary certainty, that patient ministry of continuity may prove to be one of the last remaining forms of hope.