At around noon on April 5th 1943, Reverend Dietrich Bonhoeffer called his sister on the telephone. When the call was answered, not by his sister, but a man whose voice he did not recognize, Bonhoeffer hung up. The ominous voice on the other end of the line could mean only one thing, Bonhoeffer knew. It meant that the Gestapo were looking for him.
He knew it was only a matter of time.
If this was an action movie, the main character would surely leap into the nearest vehicle and speed off to the border. Bonhoeffer did no such thing. He went to his room and quietly arranged his papers. When he was done he sat down and enjoyed a meal with his father.
Later that day, as he suspected, two men had arrived. Bonhoeffer reportedly took his Bible and a copy of Plutarch and surrendered. The Gestapo men handcuffed him and led him to a black Mercedes.
Bonhoeffer was 37 years old.*
**
You may not be aware of it, Rikki, but a few minutes ago, you just made UCJ history. When you read scripture for us just now, it was the first time – certainly the first time during my ministry here – that a lay reader has come up to the lectern and read an entire book of the Bible to us, from beginning to end.
If you tried that with Genesis or Exodus, or almost any other Book in the Bible, we’d be here all day… But in a matter of two or three minutes, Rikki just read the entire Epistle to Philemon.
The epistle that the Apostle Paul wrote to Philemon comprises only 335 words, in the original Greek. It is a concise piece of writing, but it is all the more interesting for being so. There is plenty here that is worthy of our careful consideration.
An epistle, of course, is another name for a letter – a piece of writing that is written from one person to another.
If the Apostle Paul wrote a letter today, he would slap a stamp on it and pop it in a mailbox – but during Antiquity it was not that easy. One can be sure that, if he went through the trouble to write it and also impose upo someone else to travel long distances to deliver it, it must have been important.
Even though we don’t write letters very much anymore – most of you, like me, are old enough to remember what it was like to write and receive letters.
Most letters began with a salutation…
“Dear so and so”
There was also a convention for how to end a letter…
“Sincerely” or “Warm Regards” or if you were writing to a family member, “love.”
Naturally the conventions that dictated these things were different in the first century AD.
Even so, it is not hard to recognize, from the first verses of Philemon, that this is a letter.
Interestingly, with the first words, Paul does not address the recipient – He does not write “Dear Philemon.”
Instead he identifies himself as…
“Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus…”
“Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus…”
Is that some kind of metaphor?
Well, in some narrative or poetic contexts it might certainly read as a metaphor.
But in this case it is not.
As it turns out, Paul was actually stating a fact – at least about the prisoner part.
Paul wrote this letter from a prison cell.
That said, let it not be lost on us that Paul did not describe himself just a “Paul, a prisoner…” He described himself as “a prisoner of Christ Jesus.”
“a prisoner of Christ Jesus” ?
What does this mean?
Was Christ Jesus the warden of the prison?
Or maybe Christ was the Sheriff – like the one you see in the old Western movies – the laconic old law man in a ten gallon hat who falls asleep with the keys to the lockup dangling from his belt.
No.
Of course not.
That is not what it means to be a “a prisoner of Christ Jesus”
**
Eleven years before his arrest, in November of 1932, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, then a recently ordained Lutheran pastor, led a group of young Christian reformers, in an effort to oppose the election of a slate of church leaders who professed allegiance to the soon-to-be-chancellor Adolf Hitler. Despite Bonhoeffer’s strenuous efforts, the pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen dominated the election, taking the great majority of the positions. On that day, the Christian establishment in Germany effectively lined up behind Hitler and his dark ambitions.
Undaunted, Bonhoeffer became a central figure in establishing the Confessing Church. In 1934 this church’s initial declaration reaffirmed that Jesus Christ was the head of the church, not Adolf Hitler.
Twenty percent of German pastors signed onto this declaration.
But the majority of German pastors, for some reason, could not make this basic affirmation of faith in Jesus.
From his prison cell, Reverend Bonhoeffer could not so easily disavow his saviour Christ Jesus. Meditating about the fear and deprivation that were his daily fare in prison, Deitrich Bonhoeffer wrote:
There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below; from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled — in short, from the perspective of those who suffer. The important thing is that neither bitterness nor envy should have gnawed at the heart during this time… We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune.
Unsure, each day, if he would live to the next, Bonhoeffer recognized that seeing the world from the vantage of the outcast, powerless and reviled, was an experience of “incomparable value.” It was here, in his prison cell, that he came to the spiritual realization that it is not personal good fortune, but personal suffering that reveals the profound depths of our shared human life, and our proximity to the divine.
I cannot read these words without thinking of the 25th chapter of Matthew, when Christ tells his disciples that if they feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and visit the prisoner, they are actually feeding, welcoming and visiting Christ himself.
**
The Bible records three occasions in which Paul was imprisoned.
What were his crimes? By all accounts, the Apostle Paul’s multiple imprisonments happened because he could not help making a nuisance of himself when he kept insisting on moving here and there, far and wide, spreading the message of Christ’s forgiveness and love.
Modern scholars agree. Paul lived during a time when the religion of state was imposed by the Roman Empire, and Caesar was considered divine. To travel around the Mediterranean proclaiming the divinity of a Carpenter from Nazareth, did not endear him to the authorities.
Paul’s crime – the reason he was imprisoned was that he could not restrain himself from being a Christian.
But what landed him in jail is one thing. What he did while he was in jail – how jail transformed him – this, as Deitrich Bonhoeffer has shown us, is where we should look to learn what it means to be “a prisoner of Christ Jesus?”
It is here that we can profitably return to The Epistle to Philemon to ask the question – what happened to the Apostle Paul when he was imprisoned.
What does the letter reveal about Paul’s imprisonment? Can we learn something from the letter? Why was it important enough to demand its writing and its delivery?
Philemon, you should know, was an affluent Roman citizen who Paul had converted to Christianity. Well off, and well established in society, Philemon hosted the gatherings of one the early Christian communities in his home.
Paul writes to this Philemon on behalf of a man named Onesimus. Before coming to Paul in prison (through circumstances that are not known) Onesimus had been a slave in Philemon’s house. Onesimus had somehow managed to incur Philemon’s wrath and had run away. The purpose of Paul’s letter is to reconcile the two.
The letter reveals that Paul’s faith in Christ made him bold enough to follow his savior’s example, and upturn social custom to tend to the suffering of the reviled. We might have forgiven Paul for feeling sorry for himself while he was in jail. But Paul’s incarceration did not stop him from living out his faith. Indeed, like Bonhoeffer, his life in prison strengthened his faith and put it into action.
Paul asks Philemon to accept his former slave back. He asks Philemon to be merciful and not punish the runaway slave. Paul goes much further than this. Appealing to their shared faith in Christ, he asks Philemon to accept Onesimus “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother.”
Paul knows that, by asking this, he asks Philemon to demonstrate his faith through an act of mercy.
Finally, Paul writes:
…if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. If he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge that to me. I, Paul, am writing this with my own hand: I will repay it.
**
The suffering and humiliation of prison gave Bonheoffer a deeper understanding of the human pain — a greater capacity for empathy and love. For Bonhoeffer, prison was not merely a time when his freedom was restricted, it was a time of transformation… a time when Christ’s message changed from being something that he read in the Bible, to something that he understood from the inside out.
In a manuscript that was found after the war, hidden in the roof-beams of his parents house, Bonhoeffer wrote:
No one wants to meet fate head-on; inward calling and strength for action are acquired only in the actual emergency… Christ kept himself from suffering till his hour had come, but when it did come he met it as a free man, seized it, and mastered it. ..
Worn down by the fear and humiliation of prison he did not renounce his faith – indeed his faith became stronger, fuller, richer, more nourishing.
We are not Christ, he wrote, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes, and by showing a real sympathy that springs, not, from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent the last two years of his life in prison. He wrote a vast amount of poems, prayers, essays, and letters. At dawn on April 9th, 1945, he was executed.
In the end, he died at the order of Adolf Hitler.
While he lived, and in death, Reverend Bonhoeffer, like the Apostle Paul before him, gave us ways to understand what it means to be a Prisoner of Christ Jesus.
Amen
——-
*(The details of Deitrich Bonhoeffer’s arrest are adapted from material found here: The Bonhoeffer Project)