God Is on the Cross: Reflections on Lent and Easter

by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

These forty stirring devotions will guide and inspire readers as they move thematically through the weeks of Lent and Easter, encountering themes of prayerful reflection, self-denial, temptation, suffering, and the meaning of the cross. Passages from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's letters and sermons provide special encouragement as readers prepare themselves spiritually for Holy Week and Easter Sunday. Supplemented by an informative introduction to Bonhoeffer's life and a Scripture passage for each day of the season, these daily devotions are moving reminders of the true gift of Christ on the cross.

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Hardcover, 98 pages

Published September 28th 2012 by Westminster John Knox Press (first published September 18th 2012)

tags: theology, faith, christianity, religion, nonfiction, christian

Book Quotes

“Be glad. Celebrate! Lose your mindless fear, and take courage today. No, don’t ever be afraid, no matter what’s happened to you before. That’s right, don’t be afraid, no matter what you may see coming. Take courage because Christ was crucified for you.”2 Catherine of Siena, Letters”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“God is not a matter of mood. He is still present even when we are not in the mood to meet with him. .”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“A king who dies on the cross must be the king of a rather strange kingdom. Only those who understand the profound paradox of the cross can also understand the whole meaning of Jesus’ assertion: my kingdom is not of this world. 2 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Lectures to the Congregation in Barcelona”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“[Believers] do not believe in people or in the good in people that ultimately must triumph; they also do not believe in the church in its human power. Rather, believers believe solely in God, who creates and does the impossible, who creates life out of death, who has called the dying church to life against and in spite of us and through us. But God does it alone.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“And take up their cross.” That cross is already there, ready, from the very beginning; we need only take it up. But to keep us from believing that we must simply choose any arbitrary cross, or simply pick out our suffering as we will, Jesus emphasizes that each of us has his or her own cross, ready, appointed, and appropriately measured by God.1”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Those who have found God in the cross of Jesus Christ know how wonderfully God hides himself in this world and how he is closest precisely when we believe him to be most distant.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“As Christ is Christ only as the suffering and rejected one, so the disciple is a disciple only as one who suffers and is rejected, as one crucified with Jesus. Discipleship, understood as being bound to the person of Jesus Christ, places the disciple under the law of Christ, that is, under the cross.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“it is not our will but God’s will alone that matters.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Christ is not gloriously transported from earth into heaven. He must instead go to the cross. And precisely there, where the cross stands, the resurrection is near. Precisely here, where all lose faith in God, where all despair about the power of God, God is fully there, and Christ is alive and near.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Easter is not about immortality but about resurrection from a death that is a real death with all its frightfulness and horrors, resurrection from a death of the body and the soul, of the whole person, resurrection by the power of God’s mighty act. This is the Easter message.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Slowly it gets to be a waiting whose outward sense I cannot comprehend; the inward reason must be found daily. Both of us have lost infinitely much during the past months; time today is a costly commodity, for who knows how much more time is given to us.7 Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Maria von Wedemeyer, 20 September 1943”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“self-denial is a necessary aspect of a Christian life; that the cross is central to human understanding; and that, without the atonement, every one of us would stand forever in the role of Judas.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“With their ever-available loving hearts, they bow before God and bend down under all this pain and are lower than all the other creatures on earth. Pride is rare among them.3 Mechthild of Magdeburg, “The Flowing Light of the Godhead”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him” (Luke 4:8). Jesus knows what that means. It means lowliness, abuse, persecution. It means remaining misunderstood. It means hate, death, the cross. And he chooses this way from the beginning. It is the way of obedience and the way of freedom, for it is the way of God. And therefore it is also the way of love for human beings.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“To be silent does not mean to be inactive; rather it means to breathe in the will of God, to listen attentively and be ready to obey.4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Meditating on the Word”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“To be silent does not mean to be inactive; rather it means to breathe in the will of God, to listen attentively and be ready to obey.4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Meditating on the”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“In religion, as in art and science, there are—in addition to times of great excitement—times of sober work and practice. Interaction with God must be practiced; otherwise we will not find the right tone, the right word, the right language, when he surprises us. We must learn God’s language, laboriously learn it. And we must work at it, so that we will be able to talk with him.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The word of the justifying grace of God never departs from its position as the final word; it never yields itself simply as a result that has been achieved. . . . The word remains irreversibly the last; for otherwise it would be reduced to the quality of what is calculable, a merchandise, and would thereby be robbed of its divine character. Grace would be venal and cheap. It would not be a gift.1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Easter? Our attention falls more on dying than on death. How we deal with dying is more important to us than how we conquer death. Socrates overcame dying; Christ overcame death.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Prayer The fact that we can pray is not something to be taken for granted. It is true that prayer is a natural need of the human heart, but that does not give us any right before God…. We pray to the God in whom we believe through Christ. Therefore our prayer can never be a conjuring up of God; we do not need to present ourselves before him. We can know that God knows what we need before we ask for it. That gives our prayer the greatest confidence and a happy certainty. It is neither the formula nor the number of words but faith that reaches God in his fatherly heart, which has long known us. The proper prayer is not a deed, not an exercise, not a pious attitude, but the petition of a child to the heart of the Father.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian. He was also a participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism, a founding member of the Confessing Church. His involvement in plans by members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office) to assassinate Adolf Hitler resulted in his arrest in April 1943 and his subsequent execution by hanging in April 1945, shortly before the war's end.

Overshadowed by his life and death, his theology and his view of Christianity's role in the secular world has nevertheless remained very influential.

He seems to have undergone something of a personal conversion from a theologian primarily attracted to the intellectual side of Christianity to a dedicated man of faith, resolved to carry out the teaching of Christ as he found it revealed in the Gospels.
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God Is on the Cross: Reflections on Lent and Easter

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Book Quotes

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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