Defining Suffering and the Cross

The cross is not adversity, nor the harshness of fate, but suffering coming solely from our commitment to Jesus Christ. The suffering of the cross is not fortuitous, but necessary. The cross is not the suffering tied to natural existence, but the suffering tied to being Christians. The cross is never simply a matter of suffering, but a matter of suffering and rejection, and even , strictly speaking, rejection for the sake of Jesus Christ, not for the sake of some other arbitrary behavior or confession. A form of Christian life that no longer took discipleship seriously, that made of the gospel merely a belief in cheap consolation, and for the rest did not really distinguish between natural existence and Christian existence--such a form of life had to understand the cross merely as ones daily trouble, as the distress and anxiety of our natural life. Here is is forgotten that the cross always simultaneously means rejection, and the disgrace of suffering is part of the cross. Being expelled, despised, abandoned by people in ones suffering, as we have find in the unending lament of the psalmists, is an essential feature of suffering of the cross, yet one no longer comprehensible to a form of Christian life unable to distinguish between bourgeois (middle class) and Christian existence. The cross means suffering with Christ, it means the suffering of Christ. Only that particular commitment to Christ occurring in discipleship stands seriously under the cross.

...the first suffering of Christ we must experience is the call sundering our ties to this world. This is the death of the old human being in the encounter with Jesus Christ. Whoever enters discipleship enters Jesus death, and puts his or her life into death; this has been so from the beginning. The cross is not the horrible end of a pious, happy life, but stands rather at the beginning of community with Jesus Christ. Every call of Christ leads to death. Whether like the first disciples we leave home and occupation in order to follow him, or whether with Luther we leave the monastery to enter a secular profession, in either case, the one death awaits a, namely death in Jesus Christ, the dying away of our old form of human being in Jesus call. ....because only as one who has died to his own will can he follow Jesus, because Jesus commandment always means that we must die with all our wishes and all our desires and because we cannot want our an death--for all these reasons, Jesus Christ in his word must be our death and our life. Christ's call, or baptism, means placing the Christian into daily struggle against sin and the devil. Hence every new day, with its temptations through flesh and the world, brings new sufferings of Jesus Christ upon his disciples. The wounds that are stuck here, and the scars every Christian receives from this struggle, are living signs of the community of the cross with Jesus.

-Bonhoeffer 

(Readings Matt 8:21-38 will help with understanding this passage)