Why Ukraine found hope in ancient psalm

The psalms have fed and watered the spiritual lives of God’s people for millennia. One of  the most dramatic expressions of this nourishing quality was during the early days of  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. 

It was a video, made by the Church of Christ the Saviour and shared by the Ukrainian Bible Society, of people reading Psalm 31. So far so ordinary, but: these readers were in bomb shelters, in cellars, outdoors, in houses shattered by shellfire. 

The video is, of course, in Ukrainian, which not many British readers will understand. Even subtitled, though, it has an extraordinary power. Here are ordinary people, under the most painful, exhausting and terrifying conditions, who find that words written thousands of years ago speak across thirty centuries straight to their hearts. The psalm gives them comfort, not just in the sense of an arm around the shoulder and soft sympathy, but because it strengthens them to face what has to be faced. It speaks of a God who is with them, and with whom they will overcome. 

What makes it such a psalm for their times? It begins with a statement of faith and a cry for help: ‘I come to you, LORD, for protection; let me never be defeated.’ Right from the start, it sets a scene of conflict: the psalmist is being menaced by enemies. Perhaps these are spiritual enemies as well as material: ‘You hate those who worship false gods,’ he says (verse 6). 

In the rest of the psalm, there is an emotional ebb and flow. It moves from expressions of faith – ‘You have not let my enemies capture me’ (verse 8) – to cries of anguish: ‘I am exhausted by sorrow, and weeping has shortened my life’ (verse 10). It calls out the ‘liars’ and the ‘wicked’, and ends with an exhortation: ‘Be strong, be courageous, all of you that hope in the LORD’ (verse 24).  

Among these verses are some that seem to relate directly to Ukrainians in the front line. ‘All my enemies, and especially my neighbours, treat me with contempt’ (verse 11) speaks to the divided loyalties and communal tensions arising when countries with such long-entwined roots are set against each other. The NIV translation of verse 21 is, ‘Praise be to the LORD, for he showed me the wonders of his love when I was in a city under siege.’ The recording was made while Ukrainian cities like Mariupol were being reduced to rubble by Russian shells. 

There are many other echoes, too. One of them is the sense of the reality of evil, and that there is wickedness that has to be resisted, because otherwise it will destroy everything. It isn’t just opposed to the psalmist’s people, it’s opposed to God. 

We should always be wary of dividing the world too neatly. In his book The Gulag  Archipelago, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn – a victim of Stalin’s purges who saw first-hand what dictatorship, paranoia and nationalism could do – wrote: ‘If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being ...’  

This is absolutely true, and it’s very noteworthy that while some of the psalms contain scalding rebukes of the ‘wicked’, they call us to examine ourselves as well. It’s clear, too, that while enemies are to be resisted, they aren’t beyond redemption. As Dr Steffen Jenkins says in an article for Tyndale House’s journal, Ink: ‘Repentance of the wicked is the preferred option for the enemy in the Psalms as a whole.’  

But at the same time, the psalms – including Psalm 31 – do identify the wicked, with absolute clarity. They are ‘those who worship false gods’ (verse 6) – including the gods of nationalism and empire. They are ‘liars’, ‘proud and arrogant’, who ‘speak with contempt about the righteous’. Ukrainians might well feel that pro-war Russians fall into those categories, and here in the psalm those instincts are given a voice. 

In Psalm 31, then, a whole cluster of perceptions comes together in a kind of faith-filled unity. There’s the sense of trust in God; the exhaustion and terror of invasion and siege; the condemnation of evil; hope; and the call to be strong and faithful. And reading it in wartime is both an act of resistance and a commitment to building a better future on the ruins of the present. War makes chaos, but this psalm makes meaning. 

This first appeared in Preach magazine preachweb.org