March 16, 2015

• Bonhoeffer, The End

  

  Today I finished reading the biography of Dietrick Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, all 542 pages of it! At the end Bonhoeffer had been in prison well over a year and was thirty-nine years old. It has been discovered he had been part of a conspiracy to take Hitler's life. A bomb had been set off in Hitler's presence on July 20, 1944 but Hitler was not killed.

  "So three weeks before taking his own life, in what was one of his final eruptions, Hitler railed against the men who had done this to him and gave instructions to Rattenhuber, the SS commander assigned to him: 'Destroy the conspirators!' Thus were the fates of Canaris, Oster, Sack, and Bonhoeffer sealed." .
  
  In a sermon he preached while a pastor in London, Bonhoeffer said,

  "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 bodily existence.
  
  Whether we are young or old makes no difference. What are twenty or thirty or fifty years in the sight of God? And which of us knows how near he or she may already be to the goal? That life only really begins when it ends here on earth, that all that is here is only the prologue before the curtain goes up--that is for young and old alike to think about. Why are we so afraid when we think about death?...Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. 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, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace."
  
  One of the men in the prison with Bonhoeffer wrote this, "He had hardly finished his last prayer when the door opened and two evil-looking men in civilian clothes came in and said:

  'Prisoner Bonhoeffer. get ready to come with us.' Those words 'Come with us'--for all prisoners they had come to mean one thing only--the scaffold.

  We bade him good-bye--he drew me aside--'This is the end,' he said. 'for me the beginning of life.'"

  • 5:24 pm
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