Monday 30th September 2024 Reverend John Matthews

St Mark 8:31-38

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.  But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?  Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 

Reflection

In his book ‘The Cost of Discipleship’, published in German in 1937, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote “whenever Christ calls us, his call leads us to death.” Eight years later those words became a reality for him when he was hanged by the Nazis, following their discovery of his association with those who had tried to kill Hitler in July 1944. 

Bonhoeffer was nearly 27 when Hitler came to power in 1933. The Lutheran Church, into which he had been ordained two years earlier, had a strong tradition of supporting the government but, whilst the vast majority of Christians did support Hitler, Bonhoeffer opposed him from the start, and was instrumental in founding the Confessing Church. 

His activities were increasingly restricted and to rescue him from danger some of his friends worked long and hard to get him to the safety of the USA in 1939. But almost as soon as he arrived he realised that he had done the wrong thing. He wrote “I will have no right to participate in the restoration of Christian life in Germany after the war unless I share the trials of this time with my people.” So he returned to Germany, knowing the risks involved. He was arrested and imprisoned in April 1943, before being executed two years later.

We live in very different times from Bonhoeffer and our lives are not in danger for being Christians, but in the light of Jesus’ words quoted above, and Bonhoeffer’s comment on them, which was lived out in his life and death, we might ask which forms of evil we need to oppose and what there is in our lives which needs to die, if we would be true disciples of Jesus. 

And let us not forget that in many countries today our brothers and sisters in Christ are being persecuted for their faith, many suffering imprisonment and even death. Is it not incumbent on us to pray for them and to support them in practical ways?