The Easter Message

In this sermon preached by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Barcelona, 1928, the young pastor (just 22 years old), preaches on Mathew 28:20 and the promise of Jesus to be with the disciples, even after he ascends to the Father. Bonhoeffer’s sermon addresses the contrast between that message and the general state of Europe in the 1920s, a place still feeling the effects of the horrific First World War:

The question, how can we believe in Jesus’ promise, is the implicit subject of this excerpt, and while it is almost a century old, many of the same themes emerge in our world today, where despair, loneliness, and depression afflict larger and larger numbers of our population.

Remember, I am with you . . . that is the Easter message, not the distant, but the nearby God, that is Easter. A searching, an anxious groping and questioning for divine things permeates our own age. A great loneliness has come upon our age, the kind of loneliness found only in a godforsaken age.

The enormous distress of isolation and homelessness has come upon the colossal, wild activity of countless masses of people in the midst of our big cities. Yet the yearning grows for the time when once again God might abide among human beings, when God might be found. A thirst for contact with divine things has come upon people, a burning thirst demanding to be quenched.

Currently a great many remedies are being offered for sale that promise to quench this thirst in a radical fashion and for which hundreds of thousands of hands greedily reach out—in the midst of this wild activity and marketing frenzy with new means and ways, we find the One Word of Jesus Christ: Remember, I am here. . . . You don’t need to search very far at all, nor to question or engage in all sorts of mysterious activity.

I am here; that is, Jesus does not promise his coming, does not prescribe paths that might take a person to him, but simply says: I am here; whether we see Jesus or not, feel him or not, want him or not—none of this makes any difference over against the fact that Jesus is here with us, that he is simply wherever we are, and that we can do absolutely nothing. I am with you always . . .