The 360 degree turnaround

Listening to: Mozart: Piano Trios

1. The turn away from people to Christ

"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes and even life itself, cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26) [...]

Jesus' call itself already breaks the ties with the naturally given surroundings in which a person lives. It is not the disciple who breaks them; Christ himself broke them as soon as he called. Christ has untied the person's immediate connections with the world and bound the person immediately to himself.

2. Christ the mediator between person and person

It s true, there is something which comes between persons called by Christ and the given circumstances of their natural lives [...] it is Christ himself. In becoming human, he put himself between me and the given circumstances of the world. I cannot go back. He is in the middle. He has deprived those whom he has called of every immediate connection to those given realities. He wants to be the medium; everything should happen only through him. He stands not only between me and God, he also stands between me and the world, between me and other people and things. He is the mediator, not only between God and human persons, but also between person and person, and between person and reality.

3. The turn back to the world through Christ

There is no genuine love for the world except the love with which God has loved the world in Jesus Christ. "Do not love the world" (1 John 2:15) [for the sake of self, apart from gratitude to God]. But "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life" (John 3:16) [for the sake of God (and others), with gratitude to God].

4. Abraham as the role model

Abraham had to learn that the promise did not depend on Isaac, but only on God [...] He brings his son to be sacrificed [...] for the sake of the mediator. At the same time, everything that he had given up is restored to him. Abraham receives his son back. God shows him a better sacrifice which is to take Isaac's place. It is a turnaround of 360 degrees. Abraham received Isaac back, but in a different way than before. He has him through the mediator and for the sake of the mediator. As the one who was prepared to hear and obey God's command literally, he is permitted to have Isaac as though he did not have him; he is permitted to have him through Jesus Christ. No one else knows about it. Abraham comes down from the mountain with Isaac, just as he went up, but everything has changed. Christ had come between the father and the son. Abraham had left everything and followed Christ, and while he was following Christ, he was permitted to go back to live in the same world he had lived in before. Externally everything remained the same. But the old has passed away; see, everything has become new.

(pp.92-98, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship)

I thought this idea of Christ as mediator between people to be really amazing. Not 100% sure that it is the best way to understand things, but its very powerful.

BTW it seems that Bonhoeffer nicked the idea of the 360 degree circle from Barth:

When such a church embarks upon moral exhortation, its exhortation can be naught else but a criticism of all human behavior, a criticism which moves through every one of the 360 degrees of the circle of our ambiguous life

(p. 428, The Epistle to the Romans)