Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Final Communion

On the morning of April 9, 1945, in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, Dietrich Bonhoeffer knelt in prayer before his execution. The camp doctor who witnessed those final moments later wrote that he had never seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God. But what strikes the heart is what Bonhoeffer did the evening before. He gathered fellow prisoners and led a small worship service — reading scripture, praying aloud, offering what little bread they had as a makeshift communion. He lifted that meager cup in thanksgiving, not bitterness.

Bonhoeffer had spent two years in Nazi prisons. He could have escaped to safety in America. Instead, he returned to Germany, believing his vows to God and to his people required his presence in their suffering. "What shall I return to the Lord for all His goodness to me?" the psalmist asks. Bonhoeffer answered with his life.

Psalm 116 speaks of one who has been freed from chains — not always physical chains, but the chains of despair, of meaninglessness, of a life lived only for self. The psalmist vows to fulfill his promises to the Almighty in the presence of all God's people. Bonhoeffer fulfilled his in a concrete cell, surrounded by the condemned, lifting a cup of salvation even as death approached. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His faithful servants — not because God delights in suffering, but because such faithfulness reveals the deepest kind of freedom.