Seek the welfare of the city to which I have sent you, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
— The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah 29:7
Imagine a man who has nothing. His home, his freedom, his language have been taken from him, even the right to his own prayer. And it is precisely to this man that the prophet says: seek the good of the city that enslaved you. That sentence sounds like a scandal. And yet it is one of the deepest discoveries of biblical patriotism: to love one's homeland not with hatred of someone, but with love of something.
Why Patriotism Is a Spiritual Matter
Patriotism is often mistakenly confused today with contempt for foreigners. But the Christian tradition knows a different model. It is love for a concrete place, a language, the cemetery where one's grandparents rest, the song sung at the family table. It is the love of rootedness, and rootedness is not hostility toward others; it is simply the truth about a human being, who is not a bodiless spirit but a son and daughter of the earth.
The struggle for independence, in its deepest sense, was never merely a matter of borders. It was a matter of dignity. The point was that a person might speak the truth in their own language, raise children in their own culture, kneel at their own altar. Independence is space for conscience.
The Light of the Gospel
Jesus did not found a state in the political sense, yet he immersed his entire mission in a concrete land: Galilee, Jerusalem, Bethlehem. He wept over Jerusalem like a son over his mother. At the same time he taught that man's highest homeland is the Kingdom of God, not in order to abolish love for one's native soil, but to purify it and open it up.
And this is remarkable: a Christian never loves his homeland absolutely, because only love of God is absolute. And precisely because of this, he loves it truly: without pride, without myths of his own innocence, without contempt for his neighbor. The patriotism of a Christian is a love that also knows how to ask the homeland for forgiveness.
A Struggle That Does Not Destroy
In the history of many nations there were generations that fought with weapons, and generations that fought with the word, with song, with fidelity of conscience, with hidden schools, with clandestine printing presses. Both forms of struggle share one thing: the readiness to pay a price for the good of others. That is strikingly close to the Gospel. Christianity does not teach passivity; it teaches that the highest form of courage is to give one's life, not to take the lives of others. Whoever builds freedom without hatred builds for good. Freedom built on hatred always gives birth to new enslavements.
Our Responsibility Today
For us, the struggle for independence rarely takes its old forms. Today the homeland needs people who do not lie, who pay honestly, who teach their children respect, who vote according to conscience, who do not buy into contempt. It needs people who cultivate memory, but memory of reconciliation, not of resentment.
Jeremiah told the exiles: build houses, plant gardens, pray for the city. That is a program for every time of captivity and for every time of freedom. For true patriotism is not a nostalgic shiver at the sound of the anthem. It is daily, small, patient work for the common good, with the hope that God, who is the Lord of history, does not cease to write his story of freedom through us.
Independence is a gift and a task. A gift received from the hands of those who paid the highest price. A task entrusted to us: today, tomorrow, in every generation. And the hope of a Christian is as hard as rock: no borders on the map are final, but every love offered in sacrifice for one's neighbor remains forever.
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