Bonhoeffer's Return to the Darkness

In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood on the deck of a ship bound for New York, watching the German coastline disappear. Friends had arranged a safe teaching position at Union Theological Seminary — a way out of the gathering storm of Nazi tyranny. He had every reason to stay in America. The Gestapo knew his name. His seminary at Finkenwalde had been shuttered. The darkness over his homeland was thickening by the day.

He lasted twenty-six days.

In a letter to Reinhold Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer wrote words that still burn with conviction: "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." He boarded a ship back to Berlin, back into the shadow of the Reich, back toward a destiny that would end at a gallows in Flossenburg.

Matthew tells us that when Jesus heard John had been arrested, He did not retreat to safety. He walked straight into Galilee — the region of shadow, the land the prophet Isaiah called a place of darkness. And there, in that dangerous territory, He began to preach, to heal, and to call ordinary people to follow Him into something extraordinary.

The Kingdom of Heaven has never advanced from places of comfort. It breaks through where someone answers the call and walks toward the darkness, carrying the light of the Almighty with them.