Maundy Thursday Chrism Mass 2005 |
Beloved, preparing for this Easter I have had a disconcerting companion on the road.
I have been immersing myself in the story and the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was on Low Sunday exactly sixty years ago that he was hastily tried under the cover of night and hanged at dawn on the eighth day after the Resurrection.
In 1939 he had deliberately returned from the US to Germany because as he said “I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Germany after the war, if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.” In April 1945, Hitler already confined to his bunker in Berlin amidst the chaotic disintegration of the Reich sent orders that Bonhoeffer was not to be allowed to survive.
Such a life and such a death alone are sufficient to compel interest and respect. Today Bonhoeffer’s statue stands among the martyrs of the 20th century who contemplate our world from a vantage point above the principal entrance to Westminster Abbey.
I must confess however that before the invitation came to join the Bishop of Berlin and Canon of this Cathedral in marking the sixtieth anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death, I had not really engaged with his thought, put off by a misunderstanding of phrases in the Letters and Papers from Prison which speak of “a world come of age”.
To suggest that Bonhoeffer considered the reality of the world as viewed by enlightened secularists to be superior to the reality of God in Christ would be to falsify his whole life.
In words which resonate for me and I expect for you as we prepare to celebrate the Easter mystery, Bonhoeffer wrote, “The thing that keeps coming back to me is, What is Christianity, and indeed who is Christ for us today?”
He was acutely conscious of the displacement of God from the culture of Europe and his relegation to the suburbs of our interest. “One may ask whether there have ever before in human history been people with so little ground under their feet.”
Science, social policy, the study of history, our public life does not seem to find the tutelage of God necessary or desirable. There has been a decisive shift from human dependence to independence in respect of God who if he is retained at all is commonly seen as one of our assets in our strictly private life.
{One response to all this is described by Bonhoeffer as “our clerical tricks”. “The displacement of God from the world and from the public part of human life, led to the attempt to keep his place secure at least in the sphere of the “personal”, the “inner” and the “private”. And as every man still has a private sphere somewhere, that is where he was thought to be most vulnerable. The secrets known to a man’s valet – that is to put it crudely the range of his intimate life from prayer to his sexual life – have become the hunting ground of modern pastoral workers.”}
Bonhoeffer protested against any attempt to evade the reality of the present state of western culture by treating God as a supplement or an escape from reality. Jesus Christ came to initiate us not into a new religion but into life. In the incarnation God took upon him our flesh and dwelt among us, he was a drop in not a drop out. “I don’t mean” said Bonhoeffer, “the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the busy the comfortable or the lascivious but the profound this worldliness, characterised by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection.”
Paradoxically, however, the mentality of “the world come of age” has actually blocked the access to a false conception of God abstracted from the reality of the world and has opened up the way to seeing the God of the Bible who in Jesus Christ wins power and space in the world by his suffering and his weakness.
Where are we as this Easter approaches? Firstly we live in “a world in a city” where we are challenged by the co-existence of cultures that have developed in very different ways. Is modern Western culture the destination to which the other cultures represented in this city are travelling or will it be profoundly transformed in the process? We cannot seethe future which is probably not yet visible in any of the available alternative scenarios.
I grow more and more convinced, however, that the promise and the hope that we have been given in Jesus Christ is the active and the healthful ingredient of a world refreshed and renewed.
The passage from dependence on supernatural forces to independence may be irreversible but unless we find the way from the independence of possessive individualism to interdependence, the consequences could prove lethal. By living in the world without God we are tempted to become little gods ourselves, claiming the right to exploit and dominate the creation of which we are a part. Nature bears the scars of this delusion which could prove fatal to human life on this planet.
The lesson of the incarnation in which Jesus Christ did not snatch at equality with God but came in the form of a servant, is that the first step in becoming a human being is to refuse to be a little god.
Today we see him in the night in which betrayed building a new human community by taking a towel, washing the feet of the students in his life class, then giving his own body ad blood to them. He was making a new world, a word in which human beings are knit together without being depersonalised or robbed of their individuality. We see him putting the centre of his love and attention in his friends and we are called by him to give up the attempt to make something of ourselves and instead follow him, living with the suffering God in going beyond ourselves to find our true self in our neighbour.
It is the truth that as we diminish in ego in company with God in the world, we grow in soul and our full spiritual beauty is revealed. In him we know that the deadliest heresy of our time proclaimed by the prophets of darkness is this “I do not need you to be myself.”
Christ is the way to a world renewed in the image of God who has led us from dependence to independence, from slavery to idols to freedom in order to invite us to interdependence, to the suffering love which makes all things new.
The Church is reality restructured in Christ. Christ exists among us in the form of community. The Church is the place and space where the world is formed in Christ and where Christ is formed in the world. We are called to love one another as he loved us.
Like you of course I know that the Church is so often paralysed, isolated and unreal. We must all together accept responsibility for this situation and recognise that by associating ourselves more profoundly, in prayer in discipline and action with his foot washing, in the night in which he was betrayed, his self giving love we are all accepting a call not to make something of ourselves but to remake the world in his image. We shall taste the reality of his death and be caught up in the reality of his resurrection.
On Low Sunday sixty years ago, the morning of his trial Bonhoeffer held a service and expounded the text from the Epistle of St Peter, “Blessed be the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” His last words, after he knew that he had been condemned to death included a message to Bishop Bell of Chichester, “This is the end – for me the beginning of life. [Tell the bishop] that I believe with him in the principle of our universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests and that our victory is certain.”
He was praying on his way to the scaffold and the prison doctor later said, “In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor I have hardly ever seen a man die so utterly submissive to the will of God.”
Beloved I wish you a joyful Easter and thank God that he has called us together to be partners in the gospel of hope and promise, and to work and live in him at this turning point in the life of our city and world. Amen
