The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Author:Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Religion
ISBN: 9780684815008
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 1995-09-01T22:00:00+00:00

8. The Brother

Matt. v. 21-6

BUT I say unto you”— Jesus sums up the whole purport of the law. All He has said so far makes it impossible to regard Him here as a revolutionary, or as a rabbi pitting one opinion against another. On the contrary, Jesus is simply picking up the argument where He left off, and affirming His agreement with the law of the Mosaic covenant. But—and this is where He is at one with the law of God—He makes it perfectly clear that He, the Son of God, is the Author and Giver of the law. Only those who apprehend the law as the law of Christ are in a position to fulfil it. The heresy of the Pharisees must be excluded at all costs. Only by knowing Christ as the Giver and Fulfiller of the law can we attain to a true knowledge of the law. Christ has laid His hand on the law, and by claiming it for His own, He brings it to fruition. But while He is in perfect agreement with the law as such, He declares war on all false interpretations of it, and by honouring it He delivers Himself from its false devotees.

The first law which Jesus commends to His disciples is the one which forbids murder and entrusts their brother’s welfare to their keeping. The brother’s life is a divine ordinance, and God alone has power over life and death. There is no place for the murderer among the people of God. The judgement he passes on others falls on the murderer himself. In this context “brother” means more than “fellow Christian”: for the follower of Jesus there can be no limit as to who is his neighbour, except as his Lord decides. He is forbidden to commit murder under pain of divine judgement. For him the brother’s life is a boundary which he dare not pass. Even anger is enough to overstep the mark, still more the casual angry word (Raca), and most of all the deliberate insult of our brother (“Thou fool”).

Anger is always an attack on the brother’s life, for it refuses to let him live and aims at his destruction. Jesus will not accept the common distinction between righteous indignation and unjustifiable anger.1 The disciple must be entirely innocent of anger, because anger is an offence against both God and his neighbour. Every idle word we utter betrays our lack of respect for our neighbour, and shows that we place ourselves on a pinnacle above him and value our own lives higher than his. The angry word is a blow struck at our brother, a stab at his heart; it seeks to hit, to hurt and to destroy. A deliberate insult is even worse, for we are then openly disgracing our brother in the eyes of the world, and causing others to despise him. With our hearts burning with hatred, we seek to annihilate his moral and material existence. We are passing judgement on him, and that is murder.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.