Christ's own 'God-forsaken-ness' on the cross showed me where God is present where God had been present in those nights of deaths in the fire storms in Hamburg and where God would be present in my future whatever may come.
Jrgen MoltmannRead
Even the disciples of Jesus all fled from their master's cross. Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that true understanding of Christ involves confronting the suffering and sacrifice he represents, rather than fleeing from it.
By stating that even Jesus's disciples fled from his crucifixion, Moltmann emphasizes that many Christians fail to fully comprehend the depth and radical nature of Christ's message and sacrifice. He argues that a genuine relationship with Christ requires an acceptance of his suffering and an understanding of the implications this has for faith and existence, rather than seeking comfort or avoiding difficult truths.
In practice
During a Good Friday service while discussing the significance of Christ's sacrifice.
Christ's own 'God-forsaken-ness' on the cross showed me where God is present where God had been present in those nights of deaths in the fire storms in Hamburg and where God would be present in my future whatever may come.
As time goes on we become old, the future contracts, the past expands...But by future we don't just mean the years ahead; we always mean as well the plenitude of possibilities which challenge our creativity...In confrontation with the future we can become young if we accept the future's challenges.
Totally without hope, one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live.
The turn from this end [despair] to a new beginning came from three things. A blooming cherry tree, the unexpected kindness of Scottish workers and their families, and the Bible.
Imprisoned professors taught imprisoned students free theology.
It is only when human beings see themselves simply as human beings, no longer as gods, that they are in a position to perceive the wholly other nature of God.
The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's 'conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action'; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind.
And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.
Given the sin of impiety through which they [the Romans] sinned against the divine nature [by idolatry], the punishment that led them to sin against their own nature followed.... I say, therefore, that since they changed into lies [by idolatry] the truth about God, He brought them to ignominious passions, that is, to sins against nature; not that God led them to evil, but only that he abandoned them to evil.
Keep your soul fit to manifest the life of the Son of God. Never live on memories; let the word of God be always living and active in you.
In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.
... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the New World Order and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.
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