Today’s
Scripture Reading (June 3, 2017): Ezekiel 38
On
July 20, 1944, there was an attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler at the Wolf’s
Lair where Hitler was planning a conference with other German military leaders.
The July 20 attempt is probably the most famous of the attempts to assassinate
the reigning Hitler. It was designed, at
least in part, by cooperation between
factions inside the German Military as well as inside the German Military
Intelligence. The plot was coordinated by
Claus von Stauffenberg, who was executed by
firing squad the day after the failed assassination attempt. Von Stauffenberg
knew that his actions in accordance the German Resistance constituted high
treason, but he justified his actions by referring to the right under natural law to defend
millions of people's lives from the criminal aggressions of Hitler. For von Stauffenberg, he was right because Hitler was
so wrong.
But the justification for the actions of the resistance
was not so easy for all of its members. One of the members of the German
resistance that struggled with ethics of what they were doing was a pastor and
theologian – Dietrich Bonhoeffer. For Bonhoeffer, the morality was far from
clear. He was not sure that God would approve of his actions – especially a God
that demanded the high requirement of love from all those who followed him. For
Bonhoeffer, all that he was willing to ask from God was mercy as they acted
against Hitler, it was too much to ask for God’s blessing over their actions.
Bonhoeffer seemed to understand something of which we
have lost focus. Not all of our thoughts are worthy of God. Ezekiel speaks of
the day when Gog and Magog will attack Israel, and on that day the actions that
they will think of and end up planning will seem like the right thing – and the
godly thing – to do. But the rightness of
the action will be a mirage – what appears
to be right, will actually be wrong. And
the work of Gog and Magog will only serve
as the reason why God will end up taking a stand against them.
For Bonhoeffer, all actions had to be judged by the overarching fact of God’s
love. And it was this insistence on love that made Bonhoeffer question his
actions and the repeated attempts on the Fuhrer’s life. For Bonhoeffer,
spiritually he suspected that there must have been another way, but in the
reality that Bonhoeffer was living in, he just couldn’t see it. So he asked for
God’s mercy in his actions.
And that might be precisely the lesson that we need to
learn from Ezekiel and Gog and Magog as well as from Bonhoeffer. Sometimes we
seem to want to simplify right action too much. We desire all of our steps to be clearly right or clearly wrong, but
that kind of determination is not always
possible. We tend to make excuses for our behavior especially as it opposes
God’s law of love. Sometimes, we simply have to find another way – find a way
to love. But when we can’t, we cannot assume that God’s vengeance is on our
side – or that we fight on the side of right. In those moments, we need to
learn from Bonhoeffer and simply ask for
God’s mercy – and not his blessing.
The aftermath of the July
20, 1944, attack on Hitler was that it
gave the German leader the excuse he needed to arrest over 7,000 people and
execute 4,980 problem people in Germany – and only a fraction of those executed
had anything to do with the assassination attempt. In hindsight, it seems that the events of July 20 only gave evil a
chance to multiply. Maybe there was another way. Maybe …
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