The Last Words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

On April 9, 1945, at Flossenbürg concentration camp, Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer knelt in prayer before his executioners. He had been arrested two years earlier for his role in the resistance against Hitler. Fellow prisoners later recalled that he went to the gallows with a quiet composure that stunned even the guards. His final recorded words, sent through a fellow prisoner to his friend Bishop George Bell, were simply: "This is the end — for me, the beginning of life."

Bonhoeffer had every reason to rage against his fate. He was thirty-nine years old. He was engaged to be married. He had been offered safe passage to America years earlier and had turned back, writing that he had no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if he did not share the trials of his people now.

In Luke's account of the Passion, Jesus walks toward His own execution with that same deliberate surrender. He breaks bread knowing betrayal sits at the table. He prays in Gethsemane until His sweat falls like drops of blood, yet still says, "Not my will, but yours be done." He speaks forgiveness from the cross while gasping for breath.

Bonhoeffer understood what Jesus demonstrated: that the deepest courage is not the absence of fear, but the willingness to entrust your life — and your death — entirely into the hands of the Father.