Yegor Firsov is a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament. When Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Firsov left his home and family and joined a territorial defence unit made up mostly of civilian volunteers with some degree of combat training.

In an essay in Politico.eu, he writes about his work as a medic in his ravaged country:

“My job here is to fetch the wounded, give them some first aid and take them to the hospital. And, since there is nobody else to do it, we also collect the dead.

“You might think that people are tougher in places where death is commonplace, but I’ve found that people are more sensitive and more open. When shells are exploding everywhere and you are lying in cover with strangers, you really feel like having frank conversations. You share intimate secrets, personal experiences and sacred memories. People want to fill death-ravaged space with as much life as possible.

“Here everyone shares everything with one another and helps one another. If they see that you have no food, they will feed you. If your clothes are torn or dirty, they will offer their own. If there are no cigarettes, they will give you half of theirs. In peacetime I have never seen people have such care for one another.

“I used to like to go to bed late and get up late. Now my favourite time of day is dawn. At 4 a.m. I come out of the shelter to smoke and hear the birds singing, see the light of the rising sun, and feel the May warmth. For a moment it seems as if there is no war and all these horrors were just a bad dream, as if I could go for a walk and the streets of my hometown would look like they used to.

“Then someone from the other side wakes up and the explosions and shelling begin again. Russia starts another day of ‘liberating’ my peaceful childhood town from childhood, from peace and from me.

“After a while we get a call: There are wounded who urgently need first aid and transport to the hospital. And we go.”

The vulnerability and fragile nature of our lives are at the heart of today’s difficult passage from Luke’s Gospel. In the divisions we suffer, in the contradictions that challenge us, in the disconnect between our faith and values and the demands and expectations of our world and culture, the love of God is the one constant that brings us back to one another, that heals the rifts, that bridges what divides us.

The compassion, the selflessness, the justice that Jesus demands of those who would be his disciples are the “fire” and “baptism” through which we transform our world in the sacredness of God.

The challenge of discipleship, Jesus teaches, is not to let God’s word of justice and mercy divide us but to realize how that word can bring all humanity together as God’s holy people.