To faith belong the readiness to suffer but also the courage to do battle. Granted, we have no lack of people who tell us: Faith should be both protest and resistance against the power of this world. But if we look more closely, what such groups really want is, for the most part, an activator, a loudspeaker, for their slogans, for the slogans of their party. But it is a totally different matter when the Church opposes the real powers of this age; when the Church condemns the disintegration of marriage, the destruction of the family, the killing of unborn children, the distortion of the Faith. Then, suddenly, a Jesus is held up to her who was apparently all mercy, who condoned everything and never harmed anyone. The saying was coined: “One cannot be a Christian at the cost of one’s humanity”, and people understood it primarily in reference to themselves. Being a Christian may perhaps be a pleasant luxury, but it must not cost anything. The real Jesus was very different. Certainly he uttered words of great and healing mildness and compassion. But he also uttered these quite different words: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Mt 10:34). He opposed the convenient lie, the easy-going injustice. He exalted the superiority of truth over that merely comfortable getting-along-together that leads ultimately to the power of injustice, to the dominion of the lie. For such words, which are written large and shining in history, which established the opposition of truth to the indolence and degradation of humanity, for such words Jesus went to the Cross: a Jesus who merely condoned would not have been crucified.
From: Zeitfragen und christlicher Glaube, pp. 69–70
