"Who Is Jesus Christ for Us Today?"

Today's Scripture

Before we hear Bonhoeffer's question, hear Scripture's answer.

Colossians 1:15-17 — "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together."

John 14:8-9 — "Philip said to him, 'Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.' Jesus said to him, 'Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.'"

The Big Idea

In April 1944, from a cell in Tegel military prison, Bonhoeffer wrote his friend Eberhard Bethge a question that has haunted readers ever since: who is Jesus Christ, for us, today? Not "what did people believe about him long ago" — who is he now, here, for me? "Christology" is simply the church's word for answering that question. Today we let Bonhoeffer's prison-cell question drive us into Scripture's answer.

Reflection

A question from cell 92

Strip away everything we usually lean on. No church building. No worship band. No Christian friends down the hall. Bonhoeffer in Tegel prison had a cot, a Bible, smuggled letters — and a question that would not leave him alone:

"What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Be careful not to misread this. It is not the sound of a man losing his faith. It is the sound of faith being refined — like ore in a furnace, with everything that is not gold burning away. In prison, Jesus could no longer be a Sunday habit or a cultural assumption or a topic Bonhoeffer lectured about (he had given brilliant university lectures on Christ back in 1933). Either Jesus was real in cell 92, or he was not real at all.

And by every account, he was. Fellow prisoners and even guards sought Bonhoeffer out during the air raids, when the building shook and grown men wept. He read the Psalms daily, prayed for his captors, and smuggled out letters so full of calm that they unsettle comfortable readers to this day. The question "Who is Christ for us today?" was not despair looking for an exit. It was a man discovering that when everything else is confiscated, Christ is not.

Most of us never get our props knocked away that completely, which is why our version of the question stays comfortably unanswered. Here is a quieter test: when the phone is dead, the room is silent, and nobody is impressed by your answers — who is Jesus Christ for you, there?

The One who holds all things together

Scripture's biggest answer to Bonhoeffer's question is bigger than most of our Christianity. Colossians 1:15-17 — Christ is "the image of the invisible God," all things were created "through him and for him," and — read this slowly — "in him all things hold together." Not just religious things. Atoms. Galaxies. History. Your Tuesday. The writer of Hebrews stacks up the same claim: Hebrews 1:3 — "He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power."

If that is true, then Jesus is not a corner of life labeled "spiritual." He is the floor under every room. You do not visit him on Sundays the way you visit a relative; you live inside his sustaining word the way you live inside gravity. Bonhoeffer hammered this point from prison, because he had watched people treat God like an emergency service — called only when human strength ran out, like a spare tire that stays in the trunk until the blowout:

"God is the beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

In the middle of the village — in the cafeteria, the group chat, the hospital waiting room, the kitchen at 6 p.m. A Christ who only matters at church is not the Christ of Colossians. And Paul pushes the claim one verse further, to the place where cosmic power and personal rescue meet: Colossians 1:19-20 — "For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross." The hands that hold the galaxies took nails. That is who we are dealing with.

The wonder of the gospel is that the One who upholds the universe actually moved into the village: John 1:14 — "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory." The early church father Athanasius, defending this truth when most of the empire wobbled on it, put the exchange in one staggering line:

"For he was made man that we might be made God." — Athanasius, On the Incarnation

He does not mean we become gods. He means the Son took on our humanity so that we could share his life — adopted into God's own family, remade in his likeness. The Creator became carryable, arrestable, crucifiable. For us.

The man for others

So the answer to "Who is Christ?" starts impossibly high — and then bends impossibly low. Philippians 2:6-7 — "though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant." Jesus himself described his job in one sentence: Mark 10:45 — "For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Sketching a book he would never live to write, Bonhoeffer compressed all of this into a phrase that became famous:

"Jesus is there only for others... The church is the church only when it exists for others." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

The man for others. Every other power in Bonhoeffer's world — and ours — exists to secure itself. Hitler's entire regime was self-protection with an army. Most of our smaller kingdoms — reputations, friend groups, careers — run on the same fuel. Here is a Lord whose entire being moves outward: healing, feeding, washing feet, dying. Which means you can test whether the Christ you follow is the real one: does knowing him bend your life toward other people, or does it just decorate a life still curved in on itself? A church that exists for its own comfort has lost its Lord's shape. And that, Bonhoeffer realized, is exactly why this Christ can help us. The same week the plot against Hitler failed and his own hopes collapsed, he wrote six words that we met on Day 1 of this journey through suffering writers — and that land differently now:

"Only the suffering God can help." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

A god above the fray could only watch our pain. The true God entered it, carried it, and broke its power. C.S. Lewis insists we face what this claim does to our polite categories. A merely human Jesus who said what Jesus said — "I and the Father are one," "your sins are forgiven" — is not available to us:

"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Philip wanted something more impressive: "Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us." Jesus' answer is gently devastating: John 14:9 — "Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." We are all Philip — scanning the horizon for a dramatic God while the man for others stands right in front of us.

Whoever I am, I am thine

Prison pressed one more question on Bonhoeffer, and it is secretly the same question. Other prisoners and guards saw him as calm, cheerful, unbreakable — one report said he walked out of his cell like a squire leaving his country house. Inside, he felt restless, trembling, homesick, "weary and empty at praying." So which was the real Bonhoeffer — the composed pastor others admired or the weary man only he knew? You know this split. There is the you in the photos and the you at 2 a.m., and they do not match. Bonhoeffer wrestled it into a poem and ended it like this:

"Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine!" — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Here is the gospel turn: the question "Who is Jesus Christ for us today?" turns out to answer the question "Who am I?" Your identity does not finally rest on your self-assessment on a good day or a bad one. It rests on whose you are. The One in whom all things hold together holds you together — and he has promised never to leave: Matthew 28:20 — "And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age."

When the risen Jesus appeared to John on the prison island of Patmos, John fell down as though dead. Jesus' response is the answer to every cell, every diagnosis, every fear: Revelation 1:17-18 — "Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades." The man for others has the keys. Bonhoeffer staked his death on that. You can stake your Tuesday on it.

Going Deeper

Answer Bonhoeffer's question on paper today: "Who is Jesus Christ for me, right now, in this season?" Not the catechism answer — your answer. Start with your actual circumstance ("In this stressful semester... in this hospital waiting room... in this boring stretch..."), then finish the sentence: "...Jesus is ___." If you get stuck, borrow from today's verses: the one holding it together (Colossians 1:17), the servant who gave his life for me (Mark 10:45), the living one with the keys (Revelation 1:18).