From Humiliation to New Hope

The turn from humiliation to new hope came about through two things, first through the Bible, and then though the encounter with other people. In the Scottish labour camp, together with some other astonished prisoners, I was for the first time given a Bible by a well-meaning army chaplain. Some of us would rather have had a few cigarettes. I read it without much comprehension, until I stumbled on the psalms of lament.

 

Psalm 39 held me spellbound: `I was dumb with silence, I held my peace and my sorrow was stirred' (but Luther's German is much stronger - `I have to eat up my suffering within myself')... my lifetime is as nothing in thy sight... Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; hold not thou thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were...' They were the words of my own heart and they called my soul to God.

 

Then I came to the story of the passion, and when I read Jesus's death cry, 'My God, why have you forsaken me?', I knew with certainty: this is someone one who understands you. I began to understand the assailed Christ because I felt that he understood me: this was the divine brother in distress, who takes the prisoners resurrection. I began to summon up the courage to live again, seized by a great hope. I was even calm when other men were `repatriated' and I was not.

 

This early fellowship with Jesus, the brother in suffering and the redeemer from guilt, has never left me since. I never `decided for Christ' as is often demanded of us, but I am sure that then and there, in the dark pit of my soul, he found me. Christ's God-forsakenness showed me where God is, where he had been with me in my life, and where he would be in the future.

--- Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. 1997