The Deeper Lie of 'Arbeit Macht Frei'

I'm watching the replay of EWTN's coverage of Pope Benedict's trip to Auschwitz.

It was both interesting and moving to me that this German pontiff visited the notorious Nazi death camp, meeting some of the survivors. I was especially interested in his visit to the cell in which Father Maximillian Kolbe, an evangelist, died, volunteering to die in the place of a Polish soldier who had been sentenced to die of starvation. When Kolbe did not die after two weeks of being denied food, he was killed by lethal injection. (I shared one account about Kolbe here.)

I was struck by another thought as I watched the Pope's car pass under the famous entry to the Auschvitz camp where, rendered in wrought iron in the German are the words, Arbeit Macht Frei (Work will make you free).

I reflected for the first time, that this phrase was a lie in at least two ways. The first way is obvious, of course, is that most who were brought into this place of horrors did not gain freedom. The sign that "welcomed" prisoners to Auschwitz was a bitter irony. I've thought about this many times.

But here is the deeper reality I'd never thought about in connection with those words: Work never brings freedom. Jesus said that the "truth will set you free." Jesus here wasn't talking about facticity here. He was talking about the truth of Himself. "I am the way, the truth, and the life," Jesus said, "No one comes to the Father, but by Me." In John, chapter 8, Jesus contrasts Himself to the "father of lies," the devil.

The point? Freedom from sin, death, and purposeless living come from the only sure foundation on which--on Whom--we can build our lives, Jesus Christ. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." We are only made free by entrusting our lives to Jesus Christ, the Truth on which all of life and love is built!

Work cannot set us free. But Christ can.