One must consider that most people only gain wisdom through their own experiences. This explains, firstly, the astonishing inability of most people to engage in any preventive action – they believe that they will always be able to avoid danger until it is too late. Secondly, it explains the numbness to the suffering of others; as the fear of imminent danger increases, compassion awakens.
Christ avoided suffering for as long as He could until His time came; then He freely embraced it, took hold of it, and overcame it. Christ experienced all the suffering of all people as His own suffering – and He accepted it willingly. Certainly, we are not like Christ and are not called to save the world through our own actions and suffering; we should not burden ourselves with something impossible and torment ourselves over whether we can bear it; we are not lords, but rather instruments in the hands of the Lord of history, and we can truly experience the suffering of others only to a quite limited extent. None of us is Christ, but if we wish to be Christians, it means that we should partake in Christ's generosity through responsible action that freely seizes the right moment and confronts danger, as well as through genuine participation, which does not stem from fear, but from the liberating and saving love of Christ for all who suffer. Inactive waiting and dull watching are not a Christian attitude. Christians are not called to action and shared suffering only by experiences of their own body, but rather by the experiences of the brethren for whom Christ suffered.
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer /1906–1945/,
excerpt from the text Reflections on the Threshold of 1943, written on the tenth anniversary of Hitler's rise to power;
quoted from the book Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Resistance and Submission, Letters from Prison. Kalich 2023)
