Over the period of about a year, beginning in 1942, Hans Scholl, his sister Sophie and some of their closest friends (all in their 20s) began to daub graffiti around the campus of their university in Munich. Using tar-based paint that would be extremely difficult to remove, they would scrawl messages demanding freedom from Adolph Hitler and the National Socialist Government, around the campus. One of them would paint, another would stand guard with a pistol. They were members of the White Rose movement in Germany, opposed to the Nazis, horrified by the losses of war and by news of the extermination of Poland’s Jews in the concentration camps of the east. By 1943 the group had obtained a machine to help them print leaflets. These they carefully left around the campus for fellow students to pick up.
In February 1943 Sophie and Hans had completed a drop of 1500 leaflets around the university buildings. With just a handful of leaflets left to dispose of, Sophie scattered them from the top of a stair well so that they would float down to the hallway below. But she was seen. A janitor locked the building and alerted the Gestapo. Hans and Sophie were arrested. One of them had the name of a fellow conspirator in their pocket – Christoph Probst who was soon picked up by the police. A short trial found the three guilty of treason. They were executed the same day having been allowed to share a cigarette together by their guards. Christoph, the older of the three, had a wife and a newborn baby in hospital whom he had never seen. Before he was taken to the guillotine he was baptised and received communion from a Catholic priest. Hans and Sophie asked to receive communion from the prison’s Protestant pastor. Christoph was at peace: his last recorded words to his friends were ‘In a few minutes we’ll see each other in eternity’. Hans’ last words were ‘Long live freedom’. We don’t have Sophie’s last words. What we do have is her diaries. One entry in particular speaks to this day of the Feast of Christ the king. In it she speaks of her awareness of God’s presence and of the temptation peculiar to humanity to separate itself from His presence. She also speaks of the human capacity to chose. She wrote:
Isn’t it mysterious…that everything should be so beautiful in spite of the terrible things that are happening? My sheer delight in all things beautiful has been invaded by a great unknown, an inkling of the Creator whom his creatures glorify with their beauty. That’s why man alone can be ugly, because he has the freewill to disassociate himself from this song of praise. Nowadays one is often tempted to believe he’ll drown the song with gunfire and curses and blasphemy. But it dawned on me last spring that he can’t, and I’ll try to take the winning side.
‘I’ll try to take the winning side’. The article I have taken this story from is from a quarterly magazine that my oldest son (Richard) subscribed to on my behalf for my birthday last year. The Plough is produced by the Bruderhof Community: as you might imagine, the community has its roots in German Protestantism and the communities that the Bruderhof found are scattered around the world. Made up of individuals and families their communities hold everything in common. They live frugally, share their belongings and (I suppose) have a common rule (something akin to a monastic existence except for families).
The quote from Sophie’s diary (‘I’ll try to take the winning side’) sits within an edition devoted to the subject of Freedom. What does it mean to be ‘free’? The story of the three friends from the White Rose movement was filled out with some of the fellow students’ thoughts about ‘freedom’. Amongst these was a recognition that it is not enough to be free from something (National Socialism) but that our freedom must be ‘for something’ too. What will we live for?
The Feast of Christ the King presents us with a choice. ‘Who will we serve?’
I’m put in mind of the song writer Bob Dylan. Born into the Orthodox Jewish tradition (Robert Zimmerman, with a Jewish name of Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham) converted to a pretty fundamentalist kind of Christianity in the late 70’s and produced three albums that reflected his new faith. On one of them there is the song ‘Gotta serve somebody’
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You might be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody,
it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Might be a rock ‘n’ roll addict prancing on the stage
You might have drugs at your command, women in a cage
You may be a businessman or some high-degree thief
They may call you doctor or they may call you chief
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody,
…and so on. There are a lot of verses. The Gospel always presents us with choices and questions. Who are we going to serve? How will we live?
For Hans, Sophie and Christoph the choice that they made cost them their life. Of course, they are not alone. Christian history is filled with martyrs for the faith: people who decided that loyalty to Christ and the service of His Kingdom mattered more to them than obedience to the powers and authorities of this world. Every week we pray that we will not have to face the choices others have faced – ‘lead us not to the time of trial’ is the modern (and probably more accurate) translation of the phrase in the Lord’s prayer.
Our choices present themselves less directly. Are we generous? Are we kind? How do we speak of others…most especially those with whom we disagree? Are we reliable, faithful in our dealings with family, friends. Are we trustworthy? Is forgiveness something we do? Is grace something that marks us out? Think of the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control – are these things seen in me, in you? All of them represent a choice. We can nurture them as we serve Christ…or kill them off: allowing the spirit of the age to infect us: division, rage, violence, dismissiveness, greed, envy, intolerance.
In the end, people of Christian faith believe in something more, something beyond, something eternal, something higher that calls them to live differently. We are free to choose, but when we chose to serve Christ and His Kingdom we find that His service is perfect freedom.
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