'Remember, I am with you…that is the Easter message'

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20 ESV)

Jesus entered Jerusalem yesterday, beginning the final lap (so to speak) that will take Him through the horrors of the Crucifixion, the gates of Hell, and across the finish line a week later as Victor over death, the Devil, and sin, with nothing more than an empty tomb as a trophy. During our Palm Sunday service yesterday morning, I got to thinking about a sermon delivered on April 15, 1928. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's post-Easter message of almost 90 years ago still speaks to me in 2016 as we accompany Jesus through his Passion this week. [In 1928 Germany, unions were forcing up wage rates, and a spiraling rise in wages and prices appeared. Germans were accumulating debts. In September, 650,000 Germans were unemployed (and by 1929 three million had lost their jobs). Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party brand, his Nazi renommierschmiss ("bragging scar"), was still only a peal of thunder beyond the horizon.]

An excerpt to meditate on follows, as the season of Lent comes to a close:

Our Bible recounts the story of the fall as the turning point in history. Human beings were driven from the garden in which they lived with God; now they lived separated from God in guilt and unhappiness that increased from generation to generation. The rift between God and human beings deepened. Humanity sank into the night. And as long as human beings can remember, they know only the night, the time when God no longer moves freely among us, and many look longingly back to the primal age of the fairy tale, to paradise, as if to a lost home they themselves never even knew. Or people of powerful hope speak and spoke about coming days, when God would once more dwell among human beings, when the kingdom of God would be established on earth. God and human beings somehow belong together, and God will return and be their guest.

There was one day in human history when this hope had to be radically demolished, a day on which people had to become aware of the eternal distance between human beings and God—the day humanity raised its hand against the God dwelling among them and nailed Jesus Christ to the cross—Good Friday. But there was also a day of divine response to human action, a day when God took up dwelling among human beings anew and for all eternity, the day when the outstretched but unholy hand of humanity was filled, against all hope, with divine grace, the day when Jesus Christ was raised, Easter. 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…

But if all this is indeed true, if Jesus really is with us, then God is also with us wherever we are, and we are no longer abandoned, homeless, lonely, then—let us follow this line of thinking to its conclusion—then the age of the legends has become reality again, and God is living among us. The only important thing now is to keep our eyes open to see where we find God—as was true for those people in the legend who had to recognize the Lord God in the foreign wanderer. God wants to be among us—do we want to make a liar of God by not believing? God is still with human beings despite Good Friday—Remember, I am with you always...

But before we all start rejoicing too quickly, one serious reflection. What does it really mean to say that Jesus or God is with us? that God is in the world? Where and how are we aware of that? God lives, lives for the world, the world is filled with God, is transfigured, is meaningful, sub specie aeternitatis [from the viewpoint of the Eternal]—that was the Easter message. But now we ask further: Where can I sense something of this divine fullness in the world and in my own life? And we answer that today, too, God is still walking among us; today, too, we can speak with God; we are together with God, walk down the street with God, encounter God in the foreigner on the road, the beggar at the door. The world is God's world; wherever we go, we encounter God, and Jesus, the Resurrected, is with us. Remember, I am with you…

Amen. Amen.