Joy Alone is Credible
Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Advent as A/biding
I gave this lecture last year as the Wheel of Becoming Lecture (Trinity Church Wenatchee, WA). I included the video of the talk (which—surprise, surprise— veered wildly at times from what I’d written) as Part 3 in the Advent series I did on Bonhoeffer Ethics. I’m unlocking those posts for the season so you can access them here and share them with any and all your friends (especially if they were subjected to that one book on Bonhoeffer that is not to be named).
1. Introduction
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is in some ways the victim of his own popularity. Due in part to what we think we know about his story and in part to what we think we know about his most famous work, we’re liable to think of him as a theologian of suffering and grit, concerned above all with clinched-fist, teeth-grinding obedience. But in truth Bonhoeffer is above all a theologian of abandonment to joy. It is not for no reason that his work is sustained at every point by Christmas carols!
With that in mind, I want to consider his theology of Advent as we’ve received it from a series of his texts—including letters, journal entries, lectures, essays, and sermons—written in particular places (Berlin, London, Barcelona, Havana) to and for particular people at particular times. As I share them, you’ll hear (or taste) a series of notes emerge, themes which repeat in varying patterns: faith, hope, time, love, boredom, singing, suffering, prayer, work, restlessness, modesty, and the unabashed joy of waiting for Jesus like his mother.
Beginning to end of his theology, this much is always clear: Bonhoeffer stands convinced that God is never present-in-general, never simply “out there.” No, God is always present for me, for you—as grace, as care, as kindness, as light. And that means God is always present somewhere, sometime for someone—not anywhere, anytime, for everyone as such. Evil is nothing, so the devils deal in abstractions and generalities. But God works always only personally, seeing and seeing to the specific, the real. The good is always particular. So, as I reflect in the next little while on Bonhoeffer’s work, I trust that something of his wonder will enkindle your heart to joy.
2. Tegel Prison (West Berlin): 1943
In a letter to his dear friend, Eberhard Bethge, dated November 21, 1943, Bonhoeffer wrote these now celebrated lines:
Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent: one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other—things that are really of no consequence—the door is shut, and can be opened only from the outside.
Taken out of context, and read through the lens of our assumptions about Bonhoeffer and his work, these words sound dark, and perhaps even despairing—as if Bonhoeffer believes Advent is a time of waiting-in-suffering, a time of biding, a time of being weighted down, a time of being locked in. He is, after all, writing these words while shut up in a Nazi prison, condemned to die in the coming days? But in point of fact his concern is not the weight of suffering. As Charles Marsh explains, Bonhoeffer refused to consider himself a martyr in any sense of the term:
To suggest that he was suffering, as some friends did, seemed like a “profanation” to him. The first weeks had been wretched, as he only obliquely revealed to his parents and more candidly to Bethge. Still, it would be a perverse “indulgence” to claim suffering—and he had no hankering after martyrdom. “These things must not be dramatized,” Bonhoeffer cautioned. “A great deal here is horrible,” he said, “but where is it otherwise?” The Jews suffered; the families of the fallen brethren suffered; the mental incompetents murdered by death squads had suffered; his anxious parents suffered. “No suffering must be something quite different, must have a quite different dimension from what I have so far experienced.”
Taken in context, then, these lines show that Bonhoeffer sees Advent as a time of abiding—in spite of boredom. He saw that it is not our suffering which weighs us down and wears us thin—it is our inability to suffer, our incapacity for it. We cannot suffer as we should either because we are too weighed down by the cares of life or totally carried away by carelessness. And in either case, we are, each in our own way, caught up with “things that are really of no consequence,” doing “this, that, or the other” instead of giving ourselves attentively to the other person, the neighbor in need. Like Martha, we are “worried and distracted by many things,” obsessed with everything but the one thing that is needful. And we cannot find our own way out of our offices— our studies, our studios, our labs, our kitchens, our stores, our lounges. The door is shut—not by God!—and only Jesus can open it.
In May of that same year, 1943, Bonhoeffer scratched down some abbreviated thoughts on waiting and boredom as notes in his prison journals. “Emptiness of time despite all that fills it. ‘Filled’ time very different.” Under the word “different” he inscribed “Love.” And below that he marked off “time as help” from time as “torment” and “enemy,” identifying boredom as “an expression of despair.” This set of notations ends with a disquieting observation about memory—“only griefs that have not been overcome (unforgiven sin) are always fresh and tormenting”—and a final reminder for himself: “overcoming in prayer.” The last word is underlined.
The notes in this section are spare, terse, almost cryptic. But taken as a whole they suggest a trackable line of thought. At the top of one page, Bonhoeffer traces what we might call the way of life, the way of blessing. At the bottom, below a line drawn across the page, he traces what we might call the way of death, the way of cursing.
If I’m reading his notes rightly, then in his view disciples are called to wait against boredom and into suffering, not only for God but in God. We do this, he says, by attending to the work we have been given to do, refusing to let our fortunes, good or ill, cut us off either from the present or the past. In this way, time is allowed to do its best work—the work God has entrusted it to do—helping us heal by helping us forget what needs to be forgotten. And as our memories heal, as we forget what needs to be forgotten, remembering our past differently, we find we are ourselves increasingly unafraid of the future, increasingly confident about what may be. With the dignity of the worthy woman of Proverbs 31, we “laugh at the time to come.”
The way of death, suggestively sketched below the line he’d drawn, begins with “dissatisfaction”—a refusal to accept what is, what has been given, as good. If indulged, this bad restlessness gives way to “tension,” “impatience,” bad “longings,” and, eventually, “boredom.” At the end of this broad, steep path, one is found to be “sick—profoundly alone,” given over to “indifference” and/or to the urge for novel experiences, constantly needing the feel of “difference.” Bonhoeffer’s notes suggest that it is living like this that necessarily leaves us “blunted” and susceptible to “fantasy”—a fever of the imagination, which distorts our memories as well as our hopes, unmooring us from our times and places, tangling us up in the ties that bind. And in such a state, diminished and delusional, we may and perhaps must be tempted to suicide: “not because of conscious guilt but because I am already dead...” It may be that that shift to the first person indicates how Bonhoeffer feels about himself in the moment.
3. St Paul’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church (London): 1933
Almost exactly ten years earlier, Bonhoeffer preached to the congregation of St Paul’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church in London on the first Sunday of Advent (December 3, 1933). He took as his text that day Luke 21:28: “Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
He began by recalling a recent tragedy. Only two weeks before, fourteen miners had died in a collapse. He asked his audience to consider the inherent dangers of such work: “The men who have to go down every day into the mine shafts, deep into the earth, to do their work are constantly in danger that some day one of the tunnels will collapse or that they will be buried alive by an underground explosion.” He also asked them to consider the experience of being buried alive, trapped in the darkness and awaiting rescue, and drew the analogy to the experience of awaiting Christ:
You know, don’t you, why I am talking about this on this first of Advent? What we have been talking about here is Advent itself. This is the way it is: this is God coming near to humankind, the coming of salvation, the arrival of Christ... It is not for the well-satisfied with their full stomachs, this word of Advent, but rather for the hungry and the thirsty. It knocks at their door, powerfully and insistently. And we hear it, just as the miner trapped in the mine heard and followed with all the energy he had left, every hammer blow, every new stage as the rescuer approached. Is it even imaginable that he would have paid attention to anything else, from the moment when he heard the first knocking—anything except his approaching liberation? What the first of Advent says is no different: Your redemption is near! It is knocking at your door now; can you hear it? It wants to make its way through all the rubble and hard stone of your life and of your heart. That will not happen very fast. But he is coming, Christ is clearing his way toward you, toward your heart. He wants to take our hearts, which have become so hard, and soften them in obedience to him. He keeps calling to us during these very weeks of waiting, waiting for Christmas, to tell us that he is coming, that he alone will rescue us from the prison of our existence, out of our fear, our guilt, and our loneliness.
4. German-Speaking Congregation (Havana): 1930
Bonhoeffer did not always speak of Advent as waiting for God to save us. Sometimes he spoke of it as preparation for the coming of a God we cannot be saved from. On December 21st, 1930, Bonhoeffer gave a sermon to a German-speaking Lutheran congregation in Havana on the fourth Sunday of Advent, taking Deut. 32.48-52 as his text:
On that very day the LORD addressed Moses as follows: “Ascend this mountain of the Abarim, Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab, across from Jericho, and view the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites for a possession; you shall die there on the mountain that you ascend and shall be gathered to your kin, as your brother Aaron died on Mount Hor and was gathered to his kin; because both of you broke faith with me among the Israelites at the waters of Meribath-kadesh in the wilderness of Zin, by failing to maintain my holiness among the Israelites. Although you may view the land from a distance, you shall not enter it—the land that I am giving to the Israelites.”
In the light of Moses’ death, Bonhoeffer told the congregation, “the seriousness of the Advent season becomes clear to us.”
Great things are being promised and are already under way, unprecedented events are being proclaimed, things no human ear has ever heard, unrevealed mysteries are being revealed, and already the earth and humanity is quaking at what is approaching, and the voice of a prophet cries out into the anxious world: the kingdom of heaven has come near, God, the Lord, is coming; the Creator and Judge is approaching humankind in love and will take us home to the eternal festive meal. God is coming. Are you prepared? Here that one great question... Are you prepared for God?
Bonhoeffer readily admitted how strange it is, especially in a moment like theirs, to celebrate Christmas. And yet, he maintained, the coming of Christ simply cannot be avoided, whatever we might wish. Christ is not waiting on us.
Hoards of unemployed stand before our eyes, millions of children throughout the world are hungry and miserable, people are starving in China, the oppressed in India and in other [unhappy?] countries, and in everyone’s eyes one sees an expression of despairing perplexity. And despite all this, Christmas comes. Whether we want it or not, whether we are in the mood for it or not, we must hear again that Christ, the savior, is born...
That last part of that last line needs to be sung to be heard.
5. Foreigner Parish (Barcelona): 1928
During his time serving as a visiting vicar in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer preached on the first Sunday of Advent, taking as his text Rev. 3:20: “Behold I stand at the door and knock.” He painted waiting as itself a good, a necessary and sanctifying discipline, and emphasized the ways in which Advent is as much about our relationship with our neighbor as it is about our relationship with God.
Celebrating Advent means being able to wait. Waiting, however, is an art our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to pick the ripe fruit even though it has hardly finished planting the seedling. But greedy eyes are all too often deceived because the apparently precious fruit is still green on the inside, and disrespectful hands ungratefully throw aside that which has disappointed them so. Those unfamiliar with the bitter bliss of waiting, of doing without while maintaining hope, will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment. Those who do not know what it feels like to wrestle anxiously with the most profound questions of life, of one’s own life, and then to keep watch in anticipation and yearning until the truth is unveiled—cannot imagine how glorious is the moment when clarity emerges; and for those who do not know what it is like to court the friendship, the love of another person, to ope nup one’s soul to the soul of that other person until it comes, till it arrives—for those people the profound blessing of the life of two intertwined souls will remain eternally concealed. We must wait for the greatest, most profound, most gentle things in life; nothing happens in a rush, but only according to the divine laws of germinating, growing, and becoming. Of course, not everyone can wait, especially those who are sated, satisfied, and disrespectful. Only people who carry a certain restlessness around with them can wait, and people who look up reverently to the One who is great in the world. Hence only those whose souls give them no peace are able to celebrate Advent, who feel poor and incomplete and who sense something of the greatness of what is coming, before which one can only bow in humble timidity, in anticipation till God inclines toward us—the Holy One, God in the child in the manger.
“Only those whose souls give them no peace are able to celebrate Advent...” This line captures something essential in Bonhoeffer’s preaching: Christ is the Great Physician; only the sick have any need of him. And the line before it is also crucial (in the strictest sense): “Only people who carry a certain restlessness around with them can wait...” Perhaps what he means most for us to hear is that our only hope against bad restlessness is good restlessness, a deeper-than-anything ache for God mysteriously intensified by our gratitude for and contentment with the less-than-ideal circumstances and often inadequate goods we have received.
6. Sydenham and St Paul’s (London): 1933
Boredom, in Bonhoeffer’s judgment, is the condition of perhaps ours most serious temptations. And he believed churches are especially to blame for the listlessness and apathy so many suffer. In the candidate sermon he gave to the two congregations in London on October 22, 1933, he held nothing back, calling for immediate, decisive change:
How is it possible that thousands upon thousands of people are bored with the church and pass it by? Why did it come about that the cinema really is often more interesting, more exciting, more human and gripping than the church? Can that really be only the fault of others and not ours as well? The church was different once. It used to be that the questions of life and death were resolved and decided here. Why is this no longer so? It is because we ourselves have made the church, and keep on making it, into something which it is not. It is because we talk too much about false, trivial human things and ideas in the church and too little about God. It is because we make the church into a playground for all sorts of feelings of ours, instead of a place where God’s word is obediently received and believed. It is because we prefer quiet and edification to the holy restlessness of the powerful Lord God, because we keep thinking we have God in our power instead of allowing God to have power over us, instead of recognizing that God is truth and that over against God the whole world is in the wrong. It is because we like too much to talk and think about a cozy, comfortable God instead of letting ourselves be disturbed and disquieted by the presence of God— because in the end we ourselves do not want to believe that God is really here among us, right now, demanding that we hand ourselves over, in life and death, in heart and soul and body. And finally, it is because we pastors keep talking too much about passing things, perhaps about whatever we ourselves have thought out or experienced, instead of knowing that we are no more than the messengers of the great truth of the eternal Christ.
These were not the overheated words of an inexperienced young preacher. In his Ethics, written near the end of his life, Bonhoeffer doubled down on this critique:
The church confesses it is guilty of the loss of holidays, for the barrenness of its public worship, for the contempt for Sunday rest. It has made itself guilty for the unrest and disturbance of working people, as well as for their exploitation above and beyond the workweek, because its preaching of Jesus Christ has been weak and its public worship so limp.
Those of us who have been shaped by populist and moralistic Christianities are apt to conclude that “strong” preaching is marked by fist-pounding calls for “costly discipleship” and red-faced condemnations of sins and sinners. But nothing could be more at odds with Bonhoeffer’s thinking or practice. He insisted at every turn that “strong” preaching of Jesus Christ is always only the announcement of his weakness, his suffering, and his failure. “Strong” preaching is not about sin but about the one who became sin and died for the sake of sinners. “Strong” preaching is the announcement of the gospel, not the imposition of a new “law.” And that kind of preaching, Bonhoeffer believed, can and does catch us up into the Christ-reality so that we are baptized into his sorrows and thereby filled with his joys.
7. Home (Berlin): 1942
On November 29, 1942, the first day of Advent, Bonhoeffer sent out his final letter to the Finkenwalde students who had studied with him in the underground seminary. He focused on the call to live and die with gladness, and warned against all sentimental or self-pitying thoughts of suffering:
From early times the Christian church has considered acedia— the melancholy of the heart, or resignation—to be one of the mortal sins. “Serve the Lord with joy” (Ps. 100.2)—thus do the scriptures call out to us. For this our life has been given to us, and for this it has been preserved for us unto the present hour. This joy, which no one shall take from us, belongs not only to those who have been called home but also to us who are alive. We are one with them in this joy, but never in melancholy. How are we going to be able to help those who have become joyless and discouraged if we ourselves are not borne along by courage and joy? Nothing contrived or forced is intended here, but something bestowed and free. Joy abides with God, and it comes down from God and embraces spirit, soul, and body; and where this joy has seized a person, there it spreads, there it carries one away, there it bursts open closed doors.
The return of that metaphor—the closed doors that must be opened for us—takes us into the heart of Bonhoeffer’s theology of Advent. It is joy, the joy of the Lord, shared with us and awakened in us by the Lord’s delight over us, that frees us from our prisons of boredom, bursting open the closed doors so we Marthas can do what the Marys have already done for our sakes.
We are not, Bonhoeffer reminded his students, called to save the world. We share in Christ’s work, to be sure. But we are not ourselves redeemers. We must not think of ourselves as anyone’s salvation. “We are called only to gaze full of joy at the One who in reality suffered with us and became the Redeemer.” And we can do what is ours to do only as we are filled up with his joy:
Full of joy, we are enabled to believe that there was and is One to whom no human suffering or sin is foreign and who in deepest love accomplished our redemption. Only in such joy in Christ the Redeemer shall we be preserved from hardening ourselves where human suffering encounters us.
We are called to live Christ’s death, to share in his sufferings. But it is the joy of the Spirit, and it alone, that can keep us from being deadened or blunted by what we undergo:
Some among us suffer greatly because they are internally deadening themselves against so much suffering, such as these war years bring in their wake. One person said to me recently, “I pray every day that I may not become numb.” That is by all means a good prayer.
In an earlier letter to the brothers, he had warned: “When the joy in Christ is lost for us, so too is the love for Christ and the faith in Christ. Without the joy in the Son of God, who became human and was resurrected, we fall into grumbling, into contradiction, into sadness.” And in this last letter, he returns to those concerns, differentiating true joy—the joy the Lord gives—from false:
A sort of joy exists that knows nothing at all of the heart’s pain, anguish, and dread; it does not last; it can only numb a person for the moment. The joy of God has gone through the poverty of the manger and the agony of the cross; that is why it is invincible, irrefutable. It does not deny the anguish, when it is there, but finds God in the midst of it, in fact precisely there; it does not deny grave sin but finds forgiveness precisely in this way; it looks death straight in the eye, but it finds life precisely within it.
What matters is this joy that has overcome. It alone is credible; it alone helps and heals. The joy of our companions who have been called home is also the joy of those who have overcome—the Risen One bears the marks of the cross on his body. We still stand in daily overcoming; they have overcome for all time. God alone knows how far away or near at hand we stand to the final overcoming in which our own death may be made joy for us.
Hans Urs von Balthasar argued that it is love that alone is credible. But Bonhoeffer recognized the truth of love is shown only in its joys, because it is only those joys, ever set before us, that make it possible for us to endure the sufferings that inevitably come as we love. Joy alone is credible because the Lord’s strength—the strength God enjoys simply by being God—is joy.
8. St. Paul’s (London): 1933
For Bonhoeffer, all these themes—faith, hope, time, love, boredom, singing, suffering, prayer, work, restlessness, modesty, and the unabashed joy of waiting for Jesus—coalesced in the person of Mary, Jesus’ mother, and her story told in the Gospels. In a sermon on the Song of Mary (Lk 1.46-55), delivered to St Paul’s on the third Sunday of Advent 1933, he made it plain:
She, of course, knows better than anyone what it means to wait for Christ. He is nearer to her than to anyone else. She awaits him as his mother. She knows about the mystery of his coming, of the Spirit who came to her, of the Almighty God who works his wonders. She experiences in her own body that God does wonderful things with the children of men, that his ways are not our ways, that he cannot be predicted by men, or circumscribed by their reasons and ideas, but that his way is beyond all understanding or explanations, both free and of his own will...
Bonhoeffer described Mary’s Song as not only “the oldest Advent hymn [but] also the most passionate, the wildest, and one might almost say the most revolutionary Advent hymn that has ever been sung.” He recognized the ways in which her Song, like her son’s Sermon, threatened the rules and rulers of the world, the workings of power that make the world go round, the lies by which we’ve all agreed to live and die:
For those who are great and powerful in this world, there are two places where their courage fails them, which terrify them to the very depths of their souls, and which they dearly avoid. These are the manger and the cross of Jesus Christ. No one who holds power dares to come near the manger; King Herod also did not dare. For here thrones begin to sway, the powerful fall down, and those who are high are brought low, because God is here with the lowly. Here the rich come to naught, because God is here with the poor and those who hunger. God gives the hungry plenty to eat, but sends the rich and well-satisfied away empty. Before the maidservant Mary, before Christ’s manger, before God among the lowly, the strong find themselves falling; here they have no rights, no hope, but instead find judgment.
Mary is blessed because she is at home in the lowest places.
“Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed!” sings Mary joyfully. What does it mean to call her blessed, Mary, the lowly maidservant? It can only mean that we worship in amazement the miracle that has been performed in her, that we see in her how God regards and raises up the lowly; that in coming into this world, God seeks out not the heights but rather the depths, and that we see the glory and power of God by seeing made great what was small. To call Mary blessed does not mean to build altars to her, but rather means to worship with her the God who regards and chooses the lowly, who “has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” To call Mary blessed means to know with her that God’s “mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation,” who are amazed as we reflect on the ways of God, who let the Spirit blow where it wills, who obey it and say humbly, together with Mary: Let it be with me according to your word (Lk 1.38).
9. University of Berlin (Berlin): 1932
In his lectures on creation and fall, given at the University of Berlin right at the beginning of the rise of the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer reflected on what it means for Adam to name Eve “the mother of all living.” At the end of that lecture, he offered a tightly-compressed, riddle-like comparison of Even and Mary: “Eve, the fallen, wise mother of man—this is the first beginning. Mary, the innocent, unknowing mother of God—this is the second beginning.” What does he mean? The key is the “unknowing.” As he says in his 1932 Pentecost Sunday sermon: “one can only abide in love unknowingly.”
Just as the eye does not see itself, love does not see itself. If I think that I am abiding in love, I am not abiding in love, because I am seeing myself. But only in blindness toward myself do I, abiding in love, walk my path with the confidence of God. I believe all things; I hope all things; I endure all things; I forgive all things. If it is really all things until the end, then there is no disappointment, no doubt, no stopping.
Mary, the Gospels show, loved Jesus in just that way. And what is more, she taught him to love like that. Obeying his mother, Jesus grew “in divine and human favor” (Lk 1.51-52). And in the end, as he dies, she stands with him—without disappointment, without doubt. Loving like that, loving as God loves, is what makes Easter, as well as Good Friday, possible.
10. Conclusion
As I said at the beginning, Bonhoeffer is a theologian of Advent joy. That is why he’s drawn to Mary’s story, I believe. She shows us that all we’re waiting for is Jesus, who comes to us not as one among many but the life and the light of everyone and everything. She shows us that Advent begins not with waiting but with a word that makes the waiting possible. She shows us that God’s will for us is always better than we imagine, exceeding, abundantly beyond all we could ask or think. She shows us that we are not meant to bide time, but to abide God. Bonhoeffer recognized all this because he never forgot the wonder of her vocation: she did not pray to be the mother of God, and she could not have been happier to bear that burden.
At the end of the final lecture in his seminars on creation and fall, Bonhoeffer offers lines from a song, lines which again call up that image of the door that must be opened from outside:
He unlocks again the door
Of paradise today:
The angel guards the gate no more.
To God our thanks we pray.
We are kept behind a closed door, a door that only God can open. But Mary’s story reveals God opens it not from without but from within. She is not a prison. She is a garden, a sealed fountain. And her womb and her will are opened without violence, without intrusion, because in her womb and in her will the joy of the Lord found the strength required to save her and us with her, the joy that burst open the doors at last—without bloodshed—into son, into song.
“Subjected to that one book on Bonhoeffer not to be named” 😂