God Is Love

Berlin, Pentecost Sunday, May 12, 1932

Pentecost, or Whit Sunday, is the fiftieth day after Easter, often called the “birthday of the church.” The text for the day—Acts 2—recalls the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Jesus’ disciples. Since ancient times, the church has observed Pentecost Sunday with the celebration of baptisms. We have here Bonhoeffer’s homily when he baptized his eight-month-old nephew Thomas, son of Klaus and Emmi Bonhoeffer, on a Pentecost Sunday at his parents’ home. It includes a quotation from 1 Corinthians 13, a text on which Bonhoeffer would preach a sermon series two years later.

It was quite customary at the time to hold baptisms, and even weddings and funerals, at home with family and friends. A brief homily was usual on such occasions. In 1943, when Bonhoeffer was in prison, he had been expecting to preach at the wedding of his niece Renate to his dear friend Eberhard Bethge. Bonhoeffer wrote his homily in prison, in accordance with his generation’s (rather old-fashioned) concept of marriage, and it was read at the home ceremony. Thomas Bonhoeffer, by then a boy of eleven, played the piano in a trio by Mozart and took part with his sister in a traditional dance.

1 John 4:16b: God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

This word is to be spoken today over this child. And not the way one might give him just any other word of one’s choice—as they say—to take along on his way in life, but rather with the very particular claim that this is God’s word at this time over this child; that means that this word becomes real at this moment and shows itself to be true and valid. God is love—from today on in the life of this child, that is no longer a general word of wisdom or unwisdom for his life, but is the real, only indestructible basis on which his whole life is built. It is truth, and it is reality. That is the meaning of baptism.

It is part of the role of the church that it must say such things to people, who must feel that this is either a well-meant phrase and an untruth, or else something you take for granted. The expression “God is love” is completely vulnerable to this criticism. It is extremely tempting to consider this a well-intentioned exaggeration, a phrase for use in church celebrations, and in doing so fundamentally to reject it as untrue and rob it of its seriousness. But the seriousness of this word is also destroyed if one considers it to be something one can piously take for granted. No, when the love of God is spoken about, we are speaking about something that simply cannot at all be taken for granted, something improbable, unbelievable. But what is completely improbable here is also true, so true that a person’s whole life should be built on it.

God is love. That means that the beginning and the end of this child are safely in God’s hands. But at the same time, it means that something has broken into the life of this child in the world, something that contradicts everything visible, understandable, and able to be experienced, something that sets this life on a foundation that lies beyond all human possibilities, on the foundation of God’s own self. The laws of human life are broken through when God’s love comes over a person.

For that means that the human being who we know is vulnerable to the powers of fate is bound to the One who is also Lord over fate. That human beings, whom we know life frightens, because they do not know what the immediate future will hold, are freed of this fear because they know the ultimate future, which is God’s very self. That human beings, who love themselves more than God and their neighbor and therefore sin in this, are still loved by God and their neighbor, that they are forgiven. That human beings, who we know are deeply lonely in the world, can never be lonely, because God is with them and with all God’s called people.

When God’s love stands over a person, that means not that his or her life goes on any differently from that of any other person, but that his or her life has been stripped of its last selfish inclination and has been won for God. It is not that the fate of the person is love—that is how we often misunderstand this word—but the One who is Lord over fate is love. And these are not wishes that we give the child on his way, but realities of which the church assures him on behalf of the living God. It is good that this verse starts by speaking of God’s love. That takes away the danger that later, when the text speaks of a person’s love, we think something very human is meant. “Those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them . . .”; what can “abide in love” mean, at first, other than being called now to break through the laws of the world as God breaks through them?

To take the very special path that love takes, a path that is foreign and incomprehensible to the world? A path that can never lead one astray, that is completely self-sufficient, has its own laws, that is always right, even if it seems so strange? A path that is interrupted a thousand times, because it is the path, not of the priest who blindly passes by the man who had fallen into the hands of robbers, but of the one who has eyes to see and sees everywhere. To abide in love means to have open eyes, to be able to see something that only a few see, namely, the outstretched, begging hands of the others who are along the way, and now not be able to do anything else but to act, to help, to do one’s duty, using everything one has. That may be here or there. Most important is that, wherever it is, one can always allow oneself to be interrupted by God.

But one can only abide in love unknowingly. Just as the eye does not see itself, love does not see itself. If I think that I am abiding in love, I am not abiding in love, because I am seeing myself. But only in blindness toward myself do I, abiding in love, walk my path with the confidence of God. I believe all things; I hope all things; I endure all things; I forgive all things. If it is really all things until the end, then there is no disappointment, no doubt, no stopping. Then it is true that love never ends but continues through from time into eternity.

Those who abide in love take not the prescribed path of excellence in the world but their own, often incomprehensible, often foolish paths. They lack the last bit of worldly cleverness that is called selfishness. But in these foolish, strange paths the one who has eyes to see will see some of the glow from God’s own glory.

Only one person walked that path in the world completely. It led him to the cross. It leads us through the cross, but to the true life in God.