Following Christ - whatever the cost

We thank God for the many service men and women who courageously served in the Allied Forces against the Third

Reich and the other Axis Powers. Many of them lost their lives in the conflict. There were also people in Germany who, both before and during the war, courageously stood against the power of Adolph Hitler.

One of them was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a Lutheran pastor and theologian. As Hitler rose to power and his anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions intensified, Bonhoeffer, and others, united in opposition to him. They organised the Confessing Church that publicly announced its first allegiance to be to Jesus Christ.

Bonhoeffer was banned from teaching theology and taught in an underground seminary at Finkenwalde until it was discovered and closed in 1937. Bonhoeffer went into hiding for two years and was banned from Berlin. Yet when synagogues and Jewish businesses were burned and demolished in November 1938 he went to Berlin.

He became a leader in the German underground movement. He raised money to enable Jewish refugees to be evacuated. The Gestapo arrested him in April 1943. He was hanged at the Flossenbürg extermination camp on 9 April 1945, just days before the camp was liberated. He was 39 years old.

A camp doctor who witnessed Bonhoeffer’s hanging wrote: “I was deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he prayed and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued in a few seconds. In almost 50 years as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”

In 1937 Bonhoeffer wrote a book entitled “The Cost of Discipleship” that was a call to faithful and costly obedience to Jesus Christ. In it he wrote, “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” His life and death are a great example of what it means to choose to follow Jesus Christ whatever the cost.