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Dying and Death

Easter?  We are paying more attention to dying than to death.  We are more concerned to get over the act of dying than to overcome death.  Socrates mastered the art of dying: Christ overcame death as “the last enemy” (I Cor. 15:26).  There is a real difference between the two things: the one is within the scope of human possibilities, the other means resurrection.  It is not from ars moriendi, the art of dying, but from the resurrection of Christ, that a new and purifying wind can blow through our present world.  Here is the answer to “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.”  If a few people really believed that and acted on it in their daily lives, a great deal would be changed.  To live in the light of the resurrection—that is what Easter means.  Do you find, too, that most people do not know what they really live by?...It is an unconscious waiting for the word of deliverance, through the time is probably not yet ripe for it to be heard.  But the time will come, and this Easter may be one of our last chances to prepare ourselves for our great task of the future.

            Dietrich Bonhoeffer from “Letters and Papers from Prison”