Solidarity

In the summer of 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the following from his Prison Cell.  (1)

"I discovered and still am discovering right up to this moment that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith … By [in this world] I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures … In doing so we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world — watching with Christ in Gethsemane.  That I think, is faith: [that is repentance]; and that is how one becomes a human being and a Christian."

Bonhoeffer would shortly be executed for his participation in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.   Bonhoeffer is the exemplar of a reading of our tradition that I have been attempting this Lent.  If indeed, in Jesus Christ we are meant to see the life of God, then the Christian path is not an escape from this world to a better one among purer people; rather, to be truly alive is to follow God into the midst of the world we have.

Along with Bonhoeffer and others, I do not understand the death of Jesus as a substitutionary sacrifice of a perfect human to satisfy the wrath of an angry God.  Rather in Christ’s suffering, I see the life of God made vulnerable to us in solidarity with the world.  It is a great mystery, but if our faith is true, God has chosen to hide God’self in the midst of compassion for the world God loves. 

(1) This quote and this reflection is inspired by Douglas John Hall, Waiting for the Gospel: An Appeal Dispirited Remnants of the Protestant ‘Establishment’