Hate Your Family | Dietrich Bonhoeffer
”If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26-27).
For the Christian the only God-given realities are those he receives from Christ. What is not given through the incarnate Son is not given us by God. What has not been given me for Christ’s sake, does not come from God.
When we offer thanks for the gifts of creation we must do it through Jesus Christ, and when we pray for the preservation of this life by the grace of God, we must make our prayer for Christ’s sake. Anything I cannot thank God for for the sake of Christ, I may not thank God for at all; to do so would be sin.
The path, too, to the “God-given reality” of my fellow-man or woman with whom I have to love leads through Christ, or it is a blind alley. We are separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf of otherness and strangeness which resists all our attempts to overcome it by means of natural association or emotional or spiritual union.
There is no way from one person to another. However loving or sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology, however frank and open in our behavior, we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there are no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbors through Him.
That is why intercession is the most promising way to reach our neighbors, and corporate prayer, offered in the name of Christ, the purist form of fellowship.
From The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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