(Read Colossians 3:1-4.)
Dear congregation, it is as if our whole life were carried, raised up, and protected in these words. Say what you will against this “Seek the things that are above.” You may suspect that those who are constantly seeking things above may lose contact with the ground under their feet. “If he reaches up and raises his head to touch the stars, then his unsure feet will have no foothold, and he will be the plaything of clouds and wind.” No matter how the individual feels about it, human society suspects with good reason that people with their heads in the clouds like that might be useless extra mouths to feed, instead of using burning hearts and a strong arm to create order and progress here on earth; that they would dream of a better afterlife and would be unfit for the great revolutionary action that each generation must take, smashing old tablets and setting up new and better ones. Because of sentences like this, “Set your mind on things that are above and not on things that are on the earth,” Christians are being stood up against the wall and shot. Because of sentences like this, Christianity is accused of betraying the earth. “Stay true to the earth”; set your mind on things that are on earth. For countless people that is a holy cause—and we understand their zeal. We understand the jealousy with which they want to bind the planning and work and efforts of human beings to this earth. For we are bound to this earth. It is the place where we stand and fall. An accounting is demanded for what happens on earth. And woe to us Christians if we should fail there; if at the end of all things, it should have to be said of unbelievers: Well done, good and trustworthy slave, you have been trustworthy in a few things; I will put you in charge of many things, enter into the joy of your master; because they were faithful in an earthly way in the earthly tasks that were given them, because they had invested the talents that were entrusted to them, while it would have to be said of us Christians: As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, because we had buried our talent in the ground—for all our setting our minds on things that are above. [See Matthew 25:14–30.]
The Russian film The Road to Life probably made a shocking impression on many people. There you saw how whole bands of neglected, criminal boys and young men were gathered by a superior leader and through voluntary and orderly work were changed from vagabonds into human beings. And the shocking part of it was this: the building where this working group was living was a cloister church. The clergy had been driven out; worship services and prayer had come to an end. But now a new era and a great earthly goal flooded through these rooms: to lead people out of earthly night and into earthly light. Set your mind on things that are on earth!
Today, immensely important things will be decided by whether we Christians have strength enough to show the world that we are not dreamers and are not those who walk with their heads in the clouds, that we don’t just let things come and go as they are, that our faith is really not the opium that lets us stay content in the midst of an unjust world, but that we, especially because we set our minds on things that are above, only protest all the more tenaciously and resolutely on this earth. Protest with words and action, in order to lead the way forward at any price. Must it be that Christianity, which began in such a tremendously revolutionary way long ago, is now conservative for all time? That each new movement must forge a path for itself without the church, that time after time the church does not see what has actually happened until twenty years after the fact?
If that really is the way it must be, we should not be surprised if for our church, too, times will come again when the blood of martyrs will be required. But this blood, if we really still have the courage and honor and faithfulness to shed it, will not be as innocent and untarnished as that of the first witnesses. On our blood would lie great guilt of our own: the guilt of the worthless slave, who is thrown into the outer darkness.
And yet, however grave the danger that lies in these words—“Seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God”—the danger that we could misunderstand it, the danger that we might become useless servants, the danger that people accuse us of betraying the earth, we feel nevertheless that in these words our life is carried, raised up, and protected, that only in these words our life acquires a meaning that it would not have at all, however much we were faithful to the earth, however eager for action we were, and with however holy an urge to improve the world we would storm ahead. There may be innumerable things that are urgent and necessary, but there is only one thing that is needed: just this, that our whole life be protected by God. And just that, for which we human beings did not even dare to ask from afar, is simply assured to us: You have been raised with Christ, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
We would really like to say all of that in a more modern, plain, and simple way, wouldn’t we? The way it is preached in some churches and as it is believed by all too many Christians: Set your mind on things that are above, for your life is hidden in God. That is after all what we really would like to hear on Sunday: We bring all the fullness, the whole richness of our life along with us into church. And here the clergy should do their duty, should bless and consecrate, should, over the depths and heights of our days, over suffering and joy, over sorrow and tears, over work and worries, speak the one word of salvation: that all of it is protected and hidden in God, the Creator of the world.
Outside in the world, of course, we are told something different. We are told that with our work and with our plans we are descending into a crisis, that with all our efforts we are only pushing ahead into the dark and boundless void. Perhaps we are told that our life is hopeless, that we must be suffocated by illness, misery, and guilt. Maybe the enticing call breaks in on the life of a happy family: Set your minds on things that are below, for the human being comes from the animals and must become an animal.
And from all these frightening things in the real world, we could flee into the church as into an old, familiar home. There, there everything would be bright and light: see, everything you plan and do and suffer is protected in God, the Creator of the world. For that reason, set your minds on things that are above.
Haven’t we all already felt that the frightening truth of the world simply swallows up this church talk? If the animal in us insists on its rights, what good does it do us to talk of the godliness of human beings? If the voice in us calls to us, “Set your mind on things that are below,” what help to us is the most urgent warning, “Set your mind on things that are above”? When catastrophic demonic forces attack us and tear the rudder out of our grip, so that we feel as if the fate of our world were driven by a raging hurricane, what consolation for us is the thought that all this is God’s will? And if even death is reaching out for us, what good is all our talk about immortality?
Set your minds on things above, for our life is hidden in God—that may be a nice, pious, edifying sentence, but it doesn’t stand up to the reality of the world. And this sentence must be contradicted by the world. It must be suspected of tempting us to betray the earth, of lulling us into a false sense of being protected in God, of robbing us of the initiative of the fighter and allowing us to be at rest in the midst of the most screaming injustice in the world.
But no such thing is in the Bible. The apostle knows very well what he is doing when—completely without concern for our cries that it was not modern enough, that it was too hard to understand, that it was not plain and simple enough—he holds fast with all tenacity to this: Set your minds on things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God, for your life is hidden with Christ in God. And as we eagerly crowd around this with all our common sense, and maybe also with a great deal of human wisdom, to find out what this “hidden with Christ in God” might mean—there, like a cherub with a flaming sword [Genesis 3:24], stands that other word in the middle of the passage: “You have died.” That is the strange part about it, that wherever there is talk of the living God, this death always comes in between; that wherever there is talk of gaining life, this losing of life always comes in between. What does that mean anyway, this dying or even this having died in the midst of life?
Here an impassable boundary is proclaimed with respect to our whole life, a barrier and boundary that we not only do not want to know anything about, but about which we also, frighteningly, cannot know anything. You have died—that does not mean only something like: You all without exception are headed for death; you are captive to death at every step. Rather, it must mean: Life has already become captive to the power of that riddle which is the essential riddle of death. That last, deepest human destiny to which our dying gives such strange witness is also the destiny of our life. There is a power that stands behind our living and our dying—and this power is really not to be compared to life, as we are always tempted to do, but rather, if one is to find something comparable to it, it is more comparable to death.
Only if one could see through God’s own eyes could one view death and life along the same line in this way, that is, from the perspective of death. Because for us human beings the differences between life and death are unbelievably great, while for God they fall together into one. For God a person is not more and not less, not farther away and not nearer, whether he or she lives or dies. But when speaking in human words and for human understanding about how it is for a human being, whether living or dying, whether in the eyes of God even human death is like continued living—in that case our text admonishes us with the greatest firmness to think about just the opposite case. What if it were so that in God’s eyes even our life was like death? Precisely not the triumphant “Life,” which we human beings make such a big thing of, but actually and fundamentally a completely unstable, futile, hopeless, and godforsaken “Death.” “You have died.”
The Bible still dares to think that frightening thought, for which we modern people are much too weak, that it is not “nothing” that we face there, whether we live or die, that we do not simply sink into emptiness, free of all responsibility, but that we come to ruin, confronted with the very God, and are shattered by God, who is closer to us than our own blood, that we are confronted by the wrath of God. “You have died”— that means in the final analysis nothing other than: you are lost, godforsaken, whether you die or live. That is the frightening boundary that is proclaimed to us here. That is the message against which we rebel in our innermost being.
We are glad to let ourselves be taught, we even let ourselves be taught about religious matters, but we want all of that to happen in such a way that we who speak and we who hear walk back and forth together in the beautifully decorated, cozy, warm rooms of our life. We let ourselves be preached to; we let ourselves be scolded; we let ourselves be advised and helped. But no one may lead us up to that boundary. We decided that for ourselves long ago. The boundary—that whether we live or die, we could be godforsaken people—we long ago discovered that to be an antiquated, false doctrine. We, of course, know so much better that it is just the other way around, that we, whether we live or die, actually are hidden in God; that it is only one step from us over to God; that it is as if God lives in the room next door, as Rilke occasionally hinted.
Because we know that our life in the final analysis is life sheltered in God, divine life, for that reason we also know what expectations we can have of the church. Our visible life should be talked about. It should be examined down to its divine depths; it should be transfigured by divine consecration and divine blessing. But where does our knowledge of all that come from? Have the sciences brought us to the understanding that the human being’s standing before God is not so bad? Or should that possibly be true because Goethe and Hölderlin were of that opinion?
“You have died,” says the apostle, and he certainly knows: If it is really true that our living and dying are nothing before God, then our thinking is also of no use. Then we could think a thousand times about how much nicer and simpler and more edifying it would be to have a God with whom we could not be lost—but these thousand thoughts would go astray. If it is true that we have died, we will have to let God himself tell us that we have died. For a lost way of thinking doesn’t realize it is lost. Neither Paul nor we would know anything about this line of death, about this boundary, this being lost, if it were not God who told us all this. It is God who speaks to us; it is God who comes to us; it is God who tells us that we are lost. But when God does that, then God, the one we have lost, is of course already with us; then we have already long been helped; there God scoffs at all our lostness; there God triumphs over everything that could separate us from God’s love. There God’s love has drawn us close, and no power in the world can tear us out of God’s hand.
The apostle wants to tell us this incomprehensible, wonderful message. You have died—he doesn’t say that to us to torture us, not to cast us into despair, but simply and only because he can say in the next breath: “And your life is hidden with Christ in God.” We have not been left alone at all in our lostness; instead, there is One who has stepped across the boundary that separates us from the Creator and from true life, has broken into our territory of death, has tasted all our living and dying to its deepest depths, and has still broken through this death, broken through to the eternal Father, to eternal life, where he is seated at the right hand of God. And he has pulled up the whole world with him to life and to the light, has swallowed up death in victory, has taken our whole prison captive and brought us freedom, the glorious freedom of the children of God.
Dear friends, we don’t want to give the impression that we understood all that. That is the one event that takes place beyond the boundaries of all that is human and for that reason also beyond the boundaries of our understanding. That Jesus, the great wise man of Galilee, should be the Christ who breaks through the whole line of death, of human dying and living, and leads us in triumph to the Father—no human being yet has understood that. There would be a thousand objections and doubts. There would be insurmountable difficulties.
But Christ came into the world not so that we should understand him but so that we should cling to him, so that we simply let him pull us into the unbelievable event of the resurrection, so that we simply have it said to us, said to us in all its incomprehensibility: You have died—and yet you have been raised! You are in the darkness—and yet you are in the light. You are afraid—and yet you can be glad. Right next to each other the completely contradictory; right next to each other, just the way the two worlds, our world and the world of God, are right next to each other.
“You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” That is the one glowing promise that is given to us. However our visible life may be: whether it leads us to the heights and brings a rich harvest of recognition, honor, and fame; whether it has to take a lower path through humiliation and collapses under the heavy burden of misery and guilt; whether it is heroic and noble and great or petty, foolish, and dull; whether our conscience rejoices in blissful joy or throbs in terrible self-accusation: This life should not be glorified and not be raised to the heavens by us human beings. If we tried to do this, we could only come to ruin before God.
But precisely that, coming to ruin before God, does not have to happen to us—however our visible life may be—if we give it up, give it up before God, if we lose it, lose it for the sake of Christ, this whole visible life that is at the same time so elevated and so hopeless.
For close by us in that majestic hiddenness where God is all in all, where the Son is enthroned at the right hand of the Father—there, oh wonder of wonders, our true life has been prepared. Our life is hidden with Christ in God. We ourselves are already at home in the midst of our homelessness.
Our visible life flows away like a dream and often like a curse. Dominated by demonic ideas, involved in crises, laden with misery and guilt— this life is a life that has died. It takes its all-too-familiar dark paths, but all of that is taken care of in God. As that which has come under the power of death, it is torn away from death by God; as the lost, it is saved by God.
Oh, God certainly would have the power to destroy us sinful human beings and to create new human beings. He certainly would have the power first to extinguish our life and afterward to have a completely new, redeemed life ready for us. But no, he lifts up our life, just as it is, into his majestic hiddenness; just as it is, it is glorified in his boundless glory. Our visible life, with its joys and successes, with its worries and its sorrows and its painful disobedience: holy and blameless and perfect it stands now, for the sake of Jesus Christ, in that hidden world of God before the eyes of the Almighty, today and tomorrow and in all eternity. And no tear falls in vain, and no sigh goes unheard; no pain is ignored, and no rejoicing is lost. The visible world strides brutally and heartlessly and violently past all of this.
But out of grace and mercy and great kindness, God gathers our burning, blazing life; he glorifies it for the sake of Jesus Christ; he builds it up new and good in that hidden world where the line of death that separates us from God has been taken away. Our true life is hidden—but it is grounded firmly in eternity. “When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in his glory.” Amen.
***Sermon from The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer edited by Isabel Best copyright © 2012 Fortress Press admin. Augsburg Fortress. No further reproduction allowed without the written permission of Augsburg Fortress.***
