Dietrich Bonhoeffer was killed 75 years ago today, the 9th of April 1945. He was only 39 years old at his death, and, though he didn’t know it, the war would come to an end just a few weeks after he was killed.
Bonhoeffer’s death became a much more realistic possibility as the war groaned on and his imprisonment in various settings continued to unfold, but death was the condition that had framed his thinking and praying and theological work for a much longer period of time before this situation came to be. In fact, his book Discipleship (German: Nachfolge) is written in the valley of the shadow of death, and this is both because it is so intensely focused on Jesus Christ in his life, death and resurrection, a broad context that includes a number of calls to die to self in order to carry a cross while following the way of Jesus, but also because it was so focused on the kind of day-at-a-time-discipleship that was called forth by the situation in Germany.
These two contexts – Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and the passion of Jesus – placed death and dying as a condition for discipleship. I think this is one reason for Bonhoeffer’s crucial insights into discipleship throughout the book: he, as a disciple of Jesus, was walking a road overshadowed by death, a reality that rachets up the intensity and radicality of his call to costly discipleship.
Death is always a condition within which our discipleship takes shape, but our ability to take it as a serious or real condition has been numbed by our political realities and the massive medical apparatus that keeps most of us living much longer than people in previous generations. When one isn’t living under the threat of being killed or the threat of a short lifespan, it is more and more difficult to recognize “today” as the only time one truly has, or better, inhabits (because we never possess “our” time).
Reading through the so-called Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel, with or without Bonhoeffer’s meditations in Discipleship, puts this “today” context front and center; it is discipleship a day at a time rather than an ethic for one’s entire life, assuming one could settle such a thing and then live out of it for 60 or 70 years.
Death: The death of Jesus, our death through baptism in Jesus, Bonhoeffer’s death at the hands of the Nazi regime, our own deaths. This is the context within which one can make peace, love enemies, pray for God’s will to be done, render compassion rather than judgment, trust the Father with the day ahead, give thanks for the concrete realities of life with all of its constraints and inherit the kingdom.
On our way to the cross this Holy Week, perhaps we can reflect on the question Jesus posed to James and John: “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?” That’s discipleship in the valley of the shadow of death, one day at a time.
I have no idea if the Grim Reaper dressed in COVID-19 is coming for me, someone in my family or someone amongst my friends, but I do know that death is becoming a more realistic condition within which to be a disciple of Jesus.
Jameson Ross is the Director of Fellowships for the Center for Pastor Theologians. He served in pastoral ministry for over 10 years before moving to England to pursue his PhD in Theology from Durham University. He joined the CPT staff full-time in 2019.
