On the morning of April 8, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was being held in a makeshift prison in Schönberg. Some of Bonhoeffer’s fellow prisoners, including a Roman Catholic and an atheist, asked Bonhoeffer to hold a service for them. It was Quasimodo Geniti, the Sunday after Easter, and Bonhoeffer read from Isaiah 53, that by Christ’s stripes we are healed, and from 1 Peter 1, that by God’s great mercy He has caused them to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. He preached to them, according to one participant, “in a manner which reached the hearts of all, finding just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment.” As he finished praying, the door opened, and two men entered, saying, “Prisoner Bonhoeffer. Get ready to come with us.” The words “Come with us” were known by all prisoners to mean one thing only: the scaffold. As the prisoners said good-bye to him, Bonhoeffer said to a friend, “This is the end. For me the beginning of life.”
That is how a Christian views death. It is the most terrible thing, interrupting and destroying God’s good creation. Yet for those who are in Jesus the risen one, death is now freedom from the bondage of sin.
Such is not how Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, saw death when she encountered Jesus in the Gospel reading we heard this evening. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” It is an accusation. How often we would give a similar rebuke to God. He is not caring for us. His burdens are too great, His yoke too heavy.
She was not the only one concerned that Jesus does not care. In an earlier episode, the rebuke of Martha is well known. She had complained about her sister Mary not helping. What a beautiful thing to hear, then, in John 11, “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.” Martha comes first, and her sister is not named. What does this tell us but that the Lord abounds in grace?
The disciples also were confused by Jesus. It seemed that He did not care about Lazarus, about them, or about His own safety. And they were confused about how He spoke about death, as sleep.
Why does He call death sleep? It is only possible to see it like this if there is, in fact, a resurrection, a waking up from the sleep.
None of this they understand. Thus Thomas says, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” This is brave. But it is hopeless bravado, for he is agreeing with the revilers at the cross: He saved others, Himself he cannot save. Thomas anticipates failure.
To everyone involved, Jesus seems uncaring. And then there is the accusation hurled by Mary: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” How would you react? Upon receiving an accusation of not caring, I am prone to become angry. I want to protect myself, defend myself, justify myself. What does Jesus do? He is “deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.” He joins her in her weeping. Christ does not abandon her, and neither does He abandon us to our fate. He joins us in the confessional, He joins us at the hospital bed, He joins us in our anxious messages sent back and forth as we are worried and troubled about many things. He joins us in our crosses and goes with us to the grave. Thomas had said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” But it is rather Jesus who says, “I will go, that I may die with them and for them. And then I will rise, that they might live with Me.”
This is the Jesus who was with Bonhoeffer too, as he went, bound, to his last place of suffering, Flossenbürg concentration camp. The United States Army would arrive there in two weeks. But seeing the end at hand, Hitler from in his bunker decreed, “Destroy the conspirators!”
But this execution would not be Bonhoeffer’s destruction. While a pastor in London, he had preached, “No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from [this life].” All that is here, Bonhoeffer said, is only the prologue.
Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle, it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland.
This preaching was indeed how Bonhoeffer approached death when his hour came. Between 5 and 6 a.m., Bonhoeffer was taken out along with several military leaders who had been part of the conspiracy to end the National Socialist tyranny. The prison doctor reported that he saw Bonhoeffer kneeling in prayer before being taken to the gallows. “I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”
Thus Bonhoeffer concludes his Stations on the Road to Freedom with death not as defeat, but victory:
Come now, Queen of the feasts on the road to eternal freedom! O death, cast off the grievous chains and lay low the thick walls of our mortal body and our blinded soul, that at last we may behold what we have failed to see. O freedom, long have we sought thee in discipline and in action and in suffering. Dying we behold thee now, and see thee in the face of God.
God grant us all a death in Jesus, that it become for us the beginning of freedom, coming at last with our redeemer Jesus to the final Easter, the resurrection of the body, and the renewal of the world.
Preached at Immanuel on March 11, 2015