LIFE CAN BEGIN AGAIN

The hard question of whether and how we can be freed from our existential burdens and guilt from the past, and our dread and anxiety for the future, is addressed by Helmut Thielicke from sermons in St. Mark's Church in Stuttgart, Germany during the worst of the post­war years, 1946-1948. He says this was a boundary situation, in which the human flank was often more exposed to and less fortified against the Word of God than in more normal times. Is this our situation in America, more or less? How can new life together amidst janus faced fragmentation begin here, even as the old passes away? I don't think it can happen except through embodied tears of anger, grief, laughter, and joy. MG

"The Proclaimer of the Sermon on the Mount says to us in our guilt and grief: before you begin intelligently to strike out on a new path and make a fresh start on life, you must first realize that everything that lies behind you has been set straight, that someone else has taken on your burdens, and that now you can really begin your new life.

And yet there is something else that must be made clear at the outset. The radical, straight, earnest road to which we are directed, the entrance to which is a very narrow gate, is not so laid out that it will "lead" us into a new future. In nonfigurative language, the radicality of the demands is not intended to force a new situation in humanity and personal life by whipping up, as it were, an increased intensity of zeal and determination. No, what the Sermon on the Mount sets forth is not the kind of dream that Kant, and also the oversimplifying fanatics in their way, dreamed.

On the contrary, instead of fostering the illusion that we can bring about a new world situation and a new future by a radical exertion of the will, the Sermon on the Mount says to us: a future has been given to you, the air is full of promises, the ship of your life and history itself, is sailing toward a harbor where you are expected and your safety assured.

You are still pitching upon the hazardous waves, and hurricanes roar and strike terror in your hearts. But something has happened that will bring all your ways and wanderings to this goal, that will cause a future prepared for you in grace to come upon you. The future has already begun—but how different that sounds in the Sermon on the Mount; how marvelously dread has been changed into assurance! What is the future that is meant here?

Again this is what we shall try to find out...In any case, because this future has already begun we can live in it; we are no longer absorbed by the present moment and the old monotonous routine. In the name of that future we can afford to be radical and absolutely straight, without allowing ourselves to be pushed off on the diagonals of the parallelogram of power or to tack on a zigzag course. In other words: first comes the future and then the un­conditional demand, the straight line, the right course—and not the other way around.

Is it worth while to listen to this message? It does not say: you must begin a new life! As if we could do such a thing any­how, as if we were even willing to listen to such a thing! What it says is: something has happened in the province of life and you must allow it to give its signal to you. And then because that signal has been given, you can start afresh; life can begin again. There are, of course, some very definite directions for this new life. But first there are some things that are simply given to us.

To be able to begin afresh, to become a "traveler without luggage"—this itself is incredibly new; and if it is to be possible, it will require a miracle. And as a matter of fact, it is our purpose to tell about a miracle and to ask the question of how then one can live on the strength of that miracle."
Helmut Thielicke