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Dear sisters and brothers,
A lot has happened since we met last time in Cyprus. We were witnesses of so many Good Friday experiences in the months since then. The ongoing Israeli attacks on what is left of Gaza, the blockade of humanitarian help by a government that seems to leave behind all basic standards of international law. Hamas, which has completely forfeited the claim of being a liberation movement by continuing to deny every respect for human dignity by holding innocent civilians hostage under terrible conditions. It is a sign of hope when people in Israel and Palestine protest against these actions that block all efforts to overcome the suffering and open the way to a peaceful coexistence for both Israelis and Palestinians.
The continuation of the Russian invasion in Ukraine constantly creates more Good Friday experiences with so many soldiers dying on both sides and innocent civilians being killed by Russian bombs on Ukrainian apartment buildings. This killing must end! And all religious justification of such aggressive acts of violence must end!
Many other Good Friday experiences reach us. The humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan is one of them. I am glad that WCC has continuously brought this catastrophe to the attention of a global public that tends to overlook tragedies that are not happening in the power centres of this world but in what is seen as the margins.
Witnessing all these Good Friday experiences is a great challenge for our ability to hope. Empirical evidence so often seems to speak against keeping hope. We desperately need backwind for our hope from other sources. We need the backwind of Easter.
Celebrating Easter on the same date this year in all our churches was a big theme in the media that I could follow. For me it is an obligation to persist in calling ourselves as churches to follow the path that Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and the late Pope Francis so forcefully entered. Let us not leave this common Easter experience behind and move on as always, but strengthen all those who are committed to celebrating Easter together not as an exception but as normality. We must clearly say that theologically celebrating Easter at different times is the exception and being one in the joy of Easter as those who follow Christ is the normality!
In the last months I have felt backwind for hope not only from Easter but also from people who have died recently or long time ago and have been strong witnesses for life, earthly and eternal, even in their death.
Archbishop Anastasios of Albania who died in the age of 95 at the end of January was one of them. His commitment to the WCC was truly impressive. The ceremony for his burial in Tirana was very touching. I could feel the love by so many people for this exceptional man of God. And it was a great honour that WCC was invited to speak during the burial ceremony. The invitation to speak gave me the opportunity to tell heads of states and heads of various churches and all those in six countries who watched the ceremony on TV about the great importance of the late Archbishop for the ecumenical movement. From just a few priests left from the communist time in Albania, Anastasios had built up the church into a truly important factor of Albanian societal life including hospitals, schools, and diaconal institutions. For me it was a big inspiration to see how a committed church leader can make a strong difference – way beyond the realm of the church. What I found was practiced and lived public theology.
The other church leader who died, was, of course, Pope Francis. The general secretary and I represented the WCC at his funeral in Rome. In my many encounters with him, also in my earlier functions, I always sensed the “ecumenism of the heart” of which the WCC 11th Assembly in Karlsruhe spoke. The consequences for new church laws – also in ecumenics – have not always lived up to the expectations raised by his desire for change. But even where he has reached the limits of this desire for change, his powerful testimony of love will remain and continue to have an impact. In his special commitment to refugees and other vulnerable groups, in his engagement to overcome violence but also in his commitment to the integrity of creation, he was a true witness to the love of Christ. This witness inspires us in the World Council of Churches to continue our Pilgrimage for Justice, Reconciliation, and Unity.
Francis died at Easter into the light of Jesus’ resurrection. I am touched by the fact that his last words to the world were words of blessing. Let us take these words with us from him and continue our Pilgrimage of Justice, Reconciliation, and Unity with the backwind of these blessings.
Let me finally also draw on someone who died long time ago. On 9 April we held a touching prayer service in the former concentration camp of Flossenbürg on the place and at the time where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was murdered by the Nazis exactly 80 years before. In the international conference the days before I was invited to speak about his importance for the ecumenical movement.
It is well known how committed he was to the ecumenical movement. It was Willem Visser’t Hooft who – in the name of the ecumenical movement – published for the first time, texts by Bonhoeffer that would later become some of the most famous ones in his work. At the end of the year 1945, only a few months after his death he produced a booklet with these texts and sent it to many people in the ecumenical movement.
What is less well known is how outspoken Bonhoeffer was in the theme of social justice. In a passage from a letter to his brother Karl Friedrich, dated 14 January 1935, he makes some strong remarks about it.
“I believe I know,” Bonhoeffer says in this letter, “that I would only be truly clear and sincere within myself if I really began to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously.” And a little later he continues: “There are things that are worth standing up for without compromise. And it seems to me that peace and social justice, or rather Christ, are such things.” “... peace and social justice, or rather Christ” – it is hard to imagine a stronger link between the theme of justice and Christ as the cornerstone of Christian existence. These words reveal a radicalism that does not attempt to interpret away the unsettling nature of the biblical texts, as we so often try to do, but rather exposes itself to it. “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me...” (Matthew 25:40) It is this biblical spirit that inspires Bonhoeffer to uncompromisingly advocate social justice as an integral part of the witness to Christ.
It was the inseparable link between witness to Christ and a passion for justice that opened Bonhoeffer’s eyes and heart to the social reality that was acutely affected by the global economic crisis and, more lastingly, by discrimination against African American people during his stay at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1930. The fact that he spent much of his free time not primarily in academic circles at Union Seminary or Columbia University, diagonally opposite on Broadway, but in Harlem with his Black friends from the Abyssinian Baptist Church, was a testimony to Christ that had grown deep in his heart through academic and theological reflection.
His sermons in particular reveal how deeply Bonhoeffer was moved by the question of social justice. In addition to his experiences in New York, his contact with his confirmation students in Berlin, most of whom came from socially disadvantaged families, played an important role in his further development. In a sermon on 29 May 1932, in Berlin, he interpreted the parable of the rich man and poor Lazarus (Luke 16:1-31). He warned against spiritualizing this parable: “We must put an end to this brazen, hypocritical spiritualization of the Gospel. Take it as it is, or hate it sincerely.” He particularly targets those who want to keep social protest at bay through religious consolation: “... is it not perhaps itself a mockery to console those who live here in misery and woe with the promise of a better future in another world? Doesn't it sound almost as if one only wants to prevent these unfortunate people from rebelling against their fate here? As if one praises them as blessed just so that they remain quiet, as they are, and do not bother others? Isn’t it downright cynical to speak of heavenly consolation because one does not want to give earthly consolation?”
And in a sermon in London on 2 Corinthians 12:9, he urged the congregation as early as 1934 to take the view from below, which was to be expressed even more explicitly in the Prison Letters. Life, he predicted, would be different. It would bind us inextricably to the poor and oppressed. Christianity, he said, “stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and the arrogance of power, and with its commitment to the weak.”
In our Pilgrimage of Justice, Reconciliation, and Unity we need a lot of backwind. We need a lot of Easter backwind, however, also a lot of backwind by people who have left us in their earthly existence but continue to walk with us. We could also name Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Oscar Romero, Desmond Tutu, and many more. Whether you call them “saints” or just “role models in faith,” is not decisive. However, that we do not walk alone but are accompanied by a cloud of witnesses gives us the backwind we need.
So, we can be what we are called to be: witnesses of Christ and his radical love which moves the world to reconciliation and unity.
Bishop Dr Heinrich Bedford-Strohm
Moderator of the WCC central committee