Katherine Firth
Saturday, 15 March 2025
90 years ago, Dietrich Bonhoeffer claimed that the most urgent question for society boiled down to the question: ‘who is my neighbour’? Who is like me, who do I defend, who do I care for, who will I fight for? And who is not like me, who can I leave by the side of the road, who can I exclude from my church, who will I fight against?
And Bonhoeffer’s answer was, everyone is our neighbour. It is against Christ’s message and his life example to make distinctions between kinds of human. It doesn’t matter how a person arrives in a country, or if we agree with them, or if we understand them, or even if they are wrong. They are still our neighbour.
Neighbourly behaviour doesn’t mean the world goes into free for all. It means basic care and respect for all humans, and then getting on with the distinctions of civil society. The Good Samaritan (Luke 10.35–37), the Thief on the Cross (Luke 23.33), the Woman Caught in Adultery (John 8.1–11), the Syrophoenician Woman (Mark 7.24–29), these are all our neighbour. When Jesus, dying in agony on a cross, turns to his neighbour – a rightly convicted criminal – and welcomes him into his father’s house, Jesus is not saying it’s fine to break the eighth commandment or civil law; he is saying that this man is his neighbour and will be his neighbour for eternity. And on earth, he extended this attitude to the man hanging on both his right and his left. The men had free will, but Jesus, in this life, offers neighbourliness to both men.
In other words, Bonhoeffer believes in a basic foundation of human rights which is extended to all people all of the time. Not except for certain kinds of criminal, or the other side of our war, or people we don’t trust. Over the last 25 years, globally, we have been chipping away at who gets treated with human rights, and who is an exception. In Australia, we’ve seen this happen on both a big and a small scale. Indefinite detention for people who attempted to arrive in Australia by boat. Or civilians intentionally harmed by Australia special forces in Afghanistan. But also children and elderly people and people with disabilities who should have been protected by Christian care agencies and were instead abused. People who were judged not quite human enough to be protected by human rights and human dignity.
Bonhoeffer’s family was full of lawyers, and much of their resistance was in finding out about Nazi violations of international law, and documenting these violations. Of course in order to do so, they broke laws themselves. They sent money to escaped Jews in Switzerland, violating currency laws, and that is how Bonhoeffer was caught and the reason he was sent to Tegel Prison. His brother in law, Hans von Dohnányi, went even further, attempting on at least two occasions to assassinate Hitler (with some disguised cognac bottles and a rigged sample uniform). He was not involved directly in the 20 July 1944 plot with the exploding briefcases in the Wolf’s Lair only because he was already in prison. The family debated this question. Bonhoeffer was a pacifist. Von Dohnányi knew it was wrong to assassinate people. They accepted that they would be punished for their crimes, and for their sins. But they would not commit the greater crime and greater sin of accepting that some people were not their neighbour, or not caring for the ‘least of these’. Who are the ‘least’ of these? Jesus tells us it is those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, in prison (Matt 20.40–45). Why are they hungry? Why are they in prison? That’s a question for another day. Today, we give them their daily bread and bind up their wounds.
The people go to God in their distress, Bonhoeffer wrote from prison in 1944,
Pleading for help, begging for happiness and bread,
For salvation from sickness, trespasses and death.
Everyone does this, Christians and Heathens.
The people go to God in their distress,
Find Him poor, vilified, without shelter or bread,
See him devoured by sin, frailty and death,
Christians stand with God in his suffering.
God goes to all the people in their distress,
Satisfies body and soul with his bread.
For Christians and Heathens, he dies the death on a cross
And forgives both.
(Journeying with Bonhoeffer, p. 77)
In translating this poem, I saw Bonhoeffer’s themes in his great book Discipleship (1937) brought into focus. ‘Who is my neighbour?’ “Being a neighbour is not a qualification of someone else; it is their claim on me, nothing else. At every moment, in every situation I am the one required to act, to be obedient. There is literally no time left to ask about someone else’s qualification. I must act and must obey; I must be a neighbour to the other person.” (Discipleship, p. 76) We worry (or in Bonhoeffer’s words, are ‘anxious’) about whether or not other people deserve us to be neighbours. That is not our job. Our job is to be a neighbour.
What is their job? Other people’s job is to consider whether or not they will heed the call of discipleship, which Bonhoeffer is clear is not for everyone. But that’s between them and God. Between us and them is only neighbourliness and care.
What would the world look like today if we were good neighbours? How would we act to other people who live near us, and those who live in another part of town, another state, or in a neighbouring country? What would being a good neighbour look like to the islands of the Pacific? What would being a good neighbour look like to the social housing blocks at the edge of our suburb? What would being a good neighbour look like to the Christians who have different doctrinal beliefs (who may in fact be wrong)? What would being a good neighbour look like for our international allies, and our international enemies? Can your enemies be neighbours? Jesus’ life and teaching shows us your enemies, even your colonisers, can be your neighbour and treated as human beings. Do we treat those we oppose and those we have colonised as full human beings?
What is it to be treated as less than human? It is to be deprived of the basics of life, food, water, health care. It is to be deprived of respect and justice. It is to be deprived of the opportunity to be in community, to learn, and to thrive in society. All of these things are basic jobs of being a good neighbour. We find them in the teaching and life of Jesus, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights , and in the life and works of Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom is especially poignant because in his last years and days, he experienced what it means to be treated as less than human. He was tried by an illegal court and sentenced to an unfair death. He was stripped of his clothes, tortured, and died as slowly and painfully as could be contrived. And yet, to the end, he treated those around him as his neighbours.
On 9 April this year, it will be the 80th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death. And yet his message to us is becoming more relevant, not less, as time goes by.
Katherine Firth is Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University and Head of Lisa Bellear House at the University of Melbourne. With Andreas Loewe, she is the author of Journeying with Bonhoeffer: Six Steps on the Path to Discipleship: https://cathedralshopmelbourne.com/products/bonhoeffer-andreasloewe.
Image Credit: Bundesarchiv Bild 183-R0211-316, Dietrich Bonhoeffer mit Schülern. Wiki Commons
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