Two thousand years ago, on a Friday morning in Jerusalem, at the season of Passover, a young Jewish rabbi named Jesus was led out to be executed, to be crucified on the orders of the imperial Roman authorities. That is what we commemorate today. In the eyes of the Romans he was a trouble-maker guilty of sedition, an actual or potential rebel who was no better than a bandit: hence this particularly cruel and humiliating method of execution.
Among his own Jewish people there was a variety of beliefs and opinions about him. To some he was a prophet, even the promised Messiah, come to free them from the Romans and to restore the independence and power of Israel. For some he was a teacher, a rabbi, come to recall the Jewish people to their spiritual roots and their mission to become a true ‘light to the nations’. Others, though, saw him as a heretic, as another crazy rabble-rouser or dangerous zealot whose activities risked bringing the wrath of Rome down on all their heads. And some saw him as a threat to their own positions of privilege and power.
So who was Jesus? Can we ever disentangle him from the myths and legends, from the myriad doctrines, dogmas, creeds and confessions that have been woven around him over two millennia? Probably not! All we can do is read what the early Christian communities wrote and believed about him at a time when there were still people who actually remembered him, or at least who had access to what a living oral tradition preserved of his life and teaching. It is from what they wrote down, rather than from the creed-mongers of later centuries, that we try to construct our own Jesus. But the four canonical gospels are primarily works of faith, not of history.
But they are not without some basis in fact and in actual events, and the Jesus who emerges is, for me, a radical Jewish teacher inspired by the Hebrew prophets. He taught a spiritual and ethical way of living founded on love and the creation of a community which both comprehended the sacred traditions of Judaism and, in the spirit of the prophets, also transcended them. His goal was to inaugurate a universal commonwealth, a Kingdom of God. Here all people, regardless of the divisions that we impose, are deserving of compassion, justice, and freedom from external and internal oppressions: freedom from our own alienation, our own false values, our own failure and refusal to live up to the best that we know. In short, liberation from our own sin: and sin is what makes for all the inhumanity, cruelty and evil in the world.
This then, I believe, is what Jesus was about, the reason why some of his contemporaries saw him, in the words of the soldier at the crucifixion, as “a son of God” (Mark 15:39).
It was such people who founded the tradition that has kept his vision and his spirit alive, despite the efforts of Christianity’s enemies and opponents, and despite the betrayals of those who, at various times throughout its history, have perverted Christianity into something wholly at variance with its true ideals.
Eighty years ago, in the early months of 1945, the Allied armies were fighting their way across Europe in the closing stages of the Second World War. As they did so they discovered the concentration and extermination camps in which the Nazis and their collaborators had imprisoned and murdered millions of human beings. The Nazis refused to respect or to recognise their victims’ humanity, and so abdicated their own.
Not all Nazis were Germans – they had their followers and representatives in many nations, including this one. And not all Germans were Nazis. Many opposed them, at great personal risk, and many paid the ultimate price for doing so. One such German worthy of our remembrance today suffered a cruel and brutal death eighty years ago in April 1945. His death was, of course, but one among the millions of those murdered by the Nazis. They were drawn from many nations, ethnicities, faith communities and political affiliations. Six million were Jews from across Europe. But this man was a German and a Christian, a true disciple of the Galilean Jew whose suffering and death we remember today. His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
The evil which the Nazis did they did, at least in part, in the name of Christianity. Drawing on Christianity’s shameful record of anti-Semitism, they claimed to be a bulwark against a world-wide Jewish conspiracy and the atheistic Communism which it had supposedly created. In Germany they invented a movement called the ‘German Christians’ to supplant the churches and to foster this deception. But not all of Germany’s Christians fell for this counterfeit, in particular those who – in defiance of it – formed what was called the Confessing Church. Another was Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor and radical theologian, and as such had his differences with the Confessing Church, while sharing its opposition to the Nazis. As war was approaching he was working in the United States and he had offers to stay there when it came. However, he felt his place was in his homeland. When he went back to Germany the Nazis first barred him from writing, teaching, lecturing or otherwise speaking in public but then, in the spring of 1943, he was arrested, imprisoned and finally – on April 9th 1945 – he was hanged in the Flossenburg concentration camp. His last words to his friend and fellow-prisoner, Eberhard Bethge, were these: “This is the end. For me the beginning of life.”
One individual Dietrich Bonhoeffer may have been amongst those millions murdered by the Nazis in the name of their evil ideology. But like the Jewish teacher he followed as a Christian, he might be said to have died for us all – leaving his example of how to be a true human being and a child of God in a time when it seems that humanity has been abandoned and betrayed. And in so doing, like Jesus, like others who have walked that path, he redeemed humanity from the depths into which it had fallen.
Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House 