2nd November 2025
Last week, I was in Wittenberg for the LCMS’ International Church Relations Conference. I have been to Wittenberg before. Most of our worship services were in St Mary’s (the town church) but one service was held at All Saint’s Church (the castle church). This was the University of Wittenberg’s church and because Luther was faculty at the university, he is buried there.
On an earlier trip to Wittenberg, I remember seeing a painting in the Lutherhaus of the occasion when Emperor Charles V, having defeated the Lutheran princes in the Schmalkaldic War, entered Wittenberg and was brought to Luther’s grave in the church. Luther had died just over a year before. The story goes – unverified but popularly told – that Charles V was urged to remove the heretic from his grave and treat him as he deserved – to definitely hang and burn him – to which Charles is said to have replied, “Leave him alone. He has already met his Judge. I wage war on the living, not the dead”. I think we all would think such a comment a noble one.
On Reformation Day (31st Oct) last week I walked the two main streets and town square of Wittenberg and enjoyed the market ambience, stalls, crowds, music, and I didn’t see any reference to Martin Luther. (Ok, I didn’t see everything!) But I did see numerous ghouls, ghosts, zombie-sque folk of all ages in marvellous make-up and fancy costumes for Halloween (or All Hallows’ Eve).
There are nearly 5 centuries in Wittenberg in the paragraphs you’ve just read. Death is still around. It happens still. Death can be used to terrorise the living and even by desecrating the dead and it can be challenged maybe even mocked by the living with costume and make-up perhaps in order to face one’s greatest fear. What is perhaps different is the sense of judgement or the answer to questions such as ‘Why am I here in this world?’.
Everyone knows – or should know – that you can’t scare people into following Jesus – or ‘use’ death as some sort of weapon to beat compliance into us. Yet death exists and everyone has to come to terms with it – physically, emotionally, psychologically, intellectually – and yes, I add – spiritually. The existence of death generates existential questions, hopes and fears, and what some have called the ‘dark night of the soul’. However the questions come, however we judge ourselves, balance our lives in the big scheme of things, people wonder, question, seek answers. And there are all sorts of answers around in the face of death!
I would categorise all human answers as having a basis in themselves. It is my life. It is my death. I determine what happens next. That’s wishful thinking at best and delusional at worst because all you are left with is yourself.
What Martin Luther brought back to the church of his day was a message that took the focus away from us and what we think, say, and do to what God in Jesus Christ thinks, says and does! And the cross and empty tomb proclaim God’s defeat of the power of death to have the last word, to cocoon us in fear, and to leave us in darkness. By the light of Jesus’ empty tomb, death is seen as the end point of human rebellion against God but the risen Jesus with those scars still visible breaks death’s hold so that we can live – today, no matter the century, and afterwards should we die. And that message does shape how we live each day!
GS