Excerpt

An excerpt from The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p 80-81:

...If Jesus said to someone: "Leave all else behind and follow me; resign your profession, quit your family, your people, and the home of your fathers," then he knew that to this call there was only one call-- the answer of single-minded obedience, and that it is only to this obedience that the promise of fellowship with Jesus is given. But we should probably argue thus: "Of course we are meant to take the call of Jesus with 'absolute seriousness,' but after all the true way of obedience would be to continue all the more in our present occupation, to stay with our families, and serve him there in a spirit of true inward detachment." If Jesus challenged us with the command: "Get out of it," we should take him to mean: "Stay where you are but cultivate that inward detachment." Again, if he were to say to us: "Be not anxious," we should take him to mean: "Of course it is not wrong for us to be anxious: we must work and provide for ourselves and our dependents. If we did not we should be shirking our responsibilities. But all the time we ought to be inwardly free from all anxiety." Perhaps Jesus would say to us: "Whosoever smiteth thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." We should then suppose him to mean: "The way really to love your enemy is to fight him hard and hit him back." Jesus might say: "seek ye first the kingdom of God," and we should interpret it thus:"Of course we should have to seek all sorts of other things first; how could we otherwise exist? What he really means is the final preparedness to stake all on the kingdom of God." All along the line we are trying to evade the obligation of single-minded, literal obedience.
How is such absurdity possible? What has happened that the word of Jesus can be thus degraded by this trifling, and thus left open to the mockery of the world?

Well said indeed.

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