Hidden So the Word Could Run

In the year 1521, the most wanted man in Germany vanished. His name was Martin Luther, a monk and professor who had dared to question the most powerful church on earth, and now an emperor had declared him an outlaw. To shelter such a man was a crime. To kill him would be no crime at all. He had stood before the Diet of Worms and refused to take back his words, and for that he was condemned. Then, on the road home, he disappeared.

His enemies wondered if he was dead. He was not. Friends of his own prince had staged an ambush, sweeping him off the road and up to a lonely fortress on a wooded hill. The Wartburg. There he was hidden away, told to grow out his hair and beard, told to put off his monk's robe and dress as a knight. He took a new name, Junker Jorg. Squire George. A famous voice, silenced and shut behind stone walls.

Imagine that hiddenness. A man built for the lecture hall and the pulpit, suddenly buried in silence, cut off from the work and the people he loved. The danger was real. A single careless word from a servant could bring soldiers to the gate. Most men in that place would have counted the days. They would have paced the cold rooms and waited for the storm to pass.

Luther did something else. In that locked-away tower, with a Greek New Testament open before him, he began to translate. Word by word, line by line, he carried the Scriptures out of scholars' Greek and into the German of his own people. And he was not content with stiff, churchly language. He wanted the words a mother would use with her child. The words a worker would shout in the marketplace. He wanted the plain speech of ordinary homes, so that a plowboy could hear the gospel and understand it.

The pace was extraordinary. In a matter of months, the draft of the New Testament was done. He had gone into the Wartburg to be hidden from the world. He came out having opened the world's Word to a whole nation.

In September of 1522 the printers released it. The September Testament, they called it. It was not the first German Bible ever made. And Luther never claimed to have done it alone. The years that followed were full of revision, consultation, and patient labour with colleagues over the Old Testament too. The Word came through many hands. Printers, editors, language helpers, supporters, readers. But Luther's translation struck like nothing before it, for its force, its clarity, and its nearness to the way people actually spoke. The printing presses carried it everywhere. A banned man in a tower had set the Scriptures running through Germany faster than any soldier could chase them.

There is a legend that he flung an inkpot at the devil in that room, and visitors are still shown the mark on the wall. Perhaps. The truer marvel needs no legend. The marvel is what one hidden man did with his silence. He could have called the Wartburg a prison. Instead he made it a workshop. The danger that drove him into hiding became the very stillness in which he gave a people their Bible.

The walls meant to bury him became the place his greatest labour was born. And the proof of that hidden season was not the castle, nor the disguise, nor the false name on the door. The proof was a book in the hands of plain people, who for the first time could hear God speak in the language of their own homes. He was hidden so that the Word could run.