Bonhoeffer's Last Crossing

In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a safe apartment in New York City, surrounded by colleagues who had arranged his escape from Nazi Germany. He had every reason to stay. The Gestapo had shut down his seminary. Friends had been arrested. Yet within twenty-six days, Bonhoeffer booked passage back across the Atlantic. He wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr: "I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people."

His friends warned him. They pleaded with him. They told him plainly what awaited him — and they were right. Six years later, he was executed at Flossenburg concentration camp, just weeks before liberation.

When the Pharisees warned Jesus that Herod wanted to kill Him, He did not flinch. He set His face toward Jerusalem, knowing exactly what that city would do to its prophets. And then came the lament — not anger, but aching love: "How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings."

This is the heart of God. Not a love that calculates risk, but a love that walks deliberately toward the people who will reject it. The Almighty does not flee to safety. He crosses every ocean to reach us.