For Me, the Beginning

In early April 1945, Allied forces were closing in on Germany from every direction. The war would end in weeks. At Flossenburg concentration camp in Bavaria, however, Adolf Hitler's vengeance still had reach. On April 9, guards led Dietrich Bonhoeffer — Lutheran pastor, theologian, and conspirator against the Nazi regime — to the gallows. He was thirty-nine years old.

Bonhoeffer had spent two years in captivity, first at Tegel military prison in Berlin, then at Buchenwald, before his final transfer to Flossenburg. Throughout his imprisonment, he wrote letters and poems that revealed a faith not diminished by suffering but deepened by it. He was a man steeped in Martin Luther's theology of the cross — the conviction that God meets us not in glory and triumph but precisely in weakness, suffering, and death.

Just before his execution, Bonhoeffer spoke his last recorded words to fellow prisoner Captain Payne Best of British Intelligence: "This is the end — for me, the beginning of life."

Those words are Philippians 1:21 made flesh: "For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain." Bonhoeffer did not merely believe this verse. He staked his life on it, and his death confirmed it.

For those of us shaped by Luther's teaching, Bonhoeffer's witness reminds us that Christian courage is not the absence of fear. It is the deep, baptismal certainty that the One who holds us in life does not release us in death. The cross is not the end of the story. It never was.