Quote of the Day

If, as we read our Bibles, we heard Jesus speaking to us in this way to-day we should probably try to argue ourselves out of it like this:  'It is true that the demand of Jesus is definite enough, but I have to remember that he never expects us to take his commands legalistically.  What he really wants me to have is faith. …..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 answer - the answer of single-minded obedience, and it was 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 occupations, to stay with our families, and serve him there in a spirit of true inward detachment.'  If Jesus challenged us with the command:  'Get our 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 form all anxiety.'  Perhaps Jesus would say to us:  'Whoever 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 firs; 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?  When orders are issued in other spheres of life there is no doubt whatever of their meaning.  If a father sends his child to bed, the boy knows at once what he has to do.  But suppose he has picked up a smattering of pseudo-theology.  IN that case he would argue more or less like this:  'Father tells me to go to bed, but he really means that I am tired, and he does not want me to be tired.  I can overcome my tiredness just as well if I go out and play.  Therefore though father tells me to go to bed, he really means: 'Go out and play.' If a child tried such arguments on his father or a citizen on his government, they would both meet with a kind of language they could not fail to understand - in short they would be punished.  Are we to treat the commandment of Jesus differently from other orders and exchange single-minded obedience for downright disobedience?  How could that be possible!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer