Travelling the road to freedom

This is a sermon that I will preach/have preached on 9 April 2025, at the online Eucharist of Holy Trinity Church Geneva, at which my husband, Alan Amos, is presiding. The Eucharist will commemorate the 20th century martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Given the clearly ‘European’ focus of the address and its subject it seems appropriate to share it also on this blog.

Clare Amos, Director of Lay Discipleship, Diocese in Europe.

Today, April 9, marks the 80^th anniversary of the execution, perhaps better described as a judicial murder, of the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was put to death less than a month before the Second World War came to an end in Europe, when it was obvious that Germany was going to lose the conflict. His killing was a deliberate act of pure revenge on the part of the Nazi leadership – his name was on a list of those whom Hitler was utterly determined would not survive to see any post-war freedom.

As it happens in 1945, April 9 fell 8 days after Easter Sunday. This year the commemoration comes about the same amount of time before the Easter weekend. It seems appropriate as the story of Bonhoeffer speaks even today of both cross and resurrection and how neither can be fully understood without the other.

As I think you all know I am deeply committed to the ecumenical movement, of which the World Council of Churches is one of the formal fruits. Many of those who, in the first half of the last century, worked for Christian unity did so because they were deeply marked by their experience of the two world wars which scarred landscape and people in Europe and beyond. In their struggle for Christian unity they wanted to bear witness and live out the reality that their – our – common identity as Christians was more fundamental than their national or ethnic identity as Germans, French, British, American, Japanese, Italian or whatever. Bonhoeffer was close to the circle of those such as the Church of England bishop George Bell, who in the early post-war period, were instrumental in bringing the World Council of Churches to birth. Both as a Christian pastor and as a patriotic German Bonhoeffer deeply wrestled with the choices he felt compelled to make in his opposition to Hitler and the Nazis. He knew that his opposition to Hitler would certainly require of him very difficult moral challenges. There was no possibility of the luxury of keeping his hands clean in the midst of the muck and morass that he had to live through. Bonhoeffer certainly believed that his Christian identity was more fundamental than his German one, yet that cost of discipleship was very great indeed – in so many ways.

One of Bonhoeffer most remarkable writings is a poem written during his prison years entitled ‘Stations on the road to freedom’. There are four stanzas, marking the four ‘stations’ of discipline, action, suffering and death – all are important and build on each other. The final stanza reads (in translation):

Comenow, highest feast on the road to eternal freedom,
Death, lay down the burdensome chains and walls
of our temporal body and our blinded soul,
that we may finally view what we have been unable to see here.
Freedom, long we sought you in discipline, in action, and in suffering.
Dying, now we recognize you yourself in the face of God.

I find it a fortunate coincidence that both in relation to Bonhoeffer – and in relation to current events in our world today – our lectionary Gospel this current year is the Gospel of Luke. Because the Gospel of Luke is the text among our four canonical Gospels in which the Christ we meet is presented as a intensely ‘worldly’ figure. By that I mean that Jesus’ life, ministry and death were played out in the awareness and context of the political world of his day. One of the significant features of Luke’s passion narrative is the way it overtly takes account of the political tensions of Jesus’ day between Jews and Romans which would about 30 years after Jesus’ crucifixion break out into open war.

Luke does not provide us with any easy answers: he refuses to allow Jesus to be identified as either an anti-Roman Zealot or Jewish collaborator – but equally he insists that Christ’s freedom struggle cannot be understood apart from such a political context. The Christ we meet in this Gospel will not withdraw into a holy and pietistic quietism, although he will weep over Jerusalem and the pain that the city will know over the centuries because it has been and will continue to be loved so hatefully. This Christ will travel to the Cross seeing it as the ultimate station on the road to that freedom that he had proclaimed in his inaugural speech in the synagogue in Nazareth, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me … he has anointed me to proclaim release to the captives and to let the oppressed go free.’ 

At his transfiguration on the mountain Jesus had conversed with Moses and Elijah about the ‘exodos which he was to accomplish in Jerusalem’ (Luke 9.31). As Luke then suggests this would be both an intensely political and worldly event (as indeed was the original biblical Exodus from Egypt), yet at the same time constituting a refusal to play by the normal political rules of his day. Such a ‘freedom struggle’ is immensely costly to those who engage in it. It crucified Christ. It killed Bonhoeffer. What is the Exodus that we need to accomplish in our place and our time? What road to freedom do we, as followers of Jesus, have to travel today? And what will it cost us?

A final comment. One of Bonhoeffer’s most often quoted remarks is, ‘Only a suffering God can help’. Bonhoeffer’s vision was of a God who, in Jesus Christ, did not allow himself to be separated from human suffering, but was willing to share in it. When Bonhoeffer’s life and theology first became known in the English speaking world in the early 1960s, it was an idea that was seen as unbelievably radical. In the decades since perhaps we have come to realise that there are indeed times when, ‘only a suffering God can help’. So I find it intriguing that just at the moment we are celebrating the 1700^th anniversary of the Council on Nicaea and the Nicene Creed which eventually resulted from it. The idea of a ‘suffering God’ was anathema in the world and religious thinking of Nicaea.

Intriguingly however another – though linked – aspect of Nicaea was that this was also the moment when the state in the form of the Emperor Constantine decided to control the life and thinking of the Church. That ‘Constantinian captivity of the church’ had an immense effect on Christian life for many centuries – even today I would suggest that the view of the relationship between state, religion and church shared by both President Putin and President Trump is one that owes a great deal to Constantine’s vision. Bonhoeffer’s challenge 80 and more years ago to his fellow ‘German Christians’ who colluded with the injustices being wrought by the German state sometimes even in the name of Christianity, is a challenge we still need to listen to in our world of today.