BY PASTOR MIKE NEU
St John’s Lutheran Church
Reading Eric Metaxas’ biography of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer recently, I was struck by his description of the National Socialist (Nazi) movement in the 1930’s to create a national church that reflected, not the teachings of God, but of their own.
They moved to create a Bible rewritten to remove the “soft” teachings that reflected “Jewish” ideals, including many of the teachings of Jesus Christ through the Gospels.
The idea of “turning the other cheek” and forgiveness were an anathema to the projections of strength and dominant masculinity which the Nazi leaders wanted to emphasize. The Reichskirche (the state church) would rewrite the Bible, excising the Old Testament and ignoring the Gospel of our Lord in expediency to the desired teachings of a state determined to show no mercy.
In 2023, Russell Moore, former editor of Christianity Today, told, in a radio interview, of the many ministers who reported to him the complaints of their congregations about the “soft” teachings from the pulpit. The complaints stemmed from reading and preaching on the Gospel according to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.
Gospel of our Lord is not soft. Quite the opposite. The soft go with Satan, who encourages retaliation. The soft cannot show empathy for those who mourn, who are meek, who are poor. It is the easy way of Satan to look the other way.
Recall Christ’s lesson of the Good Samaritan. How easy it was for a priest and a temple worker to cross to the other side and avoid becoming involved with an injured man who lay on the side of the road. It took a Samaritan, who was considered a lesser, unclean being by the Jews of his time, to risk his own life to have the strength to show compassion.
The Samaritan cared for the injured stranger, left him for additional care with an innkeeper, paying him and promising to return and pay whatever additional costs were incurred in caring for this injured Jew. This is true strength, a strength in doing God’s work. Jesus tells the listeners at the end, “You go, and do likewise.”
If we are to be true Christians, we must show true strength, a strength that leads us to serve God as God commands, not following the easy path Satan tempts us down. Pray each day to be delivered from the temptations of evil and for the strength to follow God’s commandments as our Lord Jesus Christ defined them, the first being to love the Lord our God and the second to love each other as God loves us.
