“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” Matthew 5:14-16
“Men are not to see the disciples but their good works, says Jesus. And these works are none other than those which the Lord Jesus Himself has created in them by calling them to be the light of the world under the shadow of His cross. The good works are poverty, peregrination, meekness, peaceableness, and finally persecution and rejection. All these good works are a bearing of the cross of Jesus Christ.
The cross is a strange light which alone illuminates these good works of the disciples. Jesus does not say that men will see God; they will see the good works and glorify God for them. The cross and the works of the cross, the poverty and renunciation of the blessed in the beatitudes, these are the things which will become visible. Neither the cross, nor their membership in such a community betoken any merit of their own—the praise is due to God alone.
If the good works were a galaxy of human virtues, we should then have to glorify the disciples, not God. But there is nothing for us to glorify in the disciple who bears the cross, or in the community whose light so shines because it stands visibly on the hill—only the Father which is in heaven can be praised for the good works. It is by seeing the cross and the community beneath it that men come to believe in God. But that is the light of the Resurrection.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) in Cost of Discipleship (New York: SCM, 1959) 133-134.
The good works of the cross cause people to glorify God in heaven.
Bonhoeffer’s list moves me: poverty, that is voluntary sacrifice in order to minister to others which is the posture Christ took toward us; peregrination, that is, a willingness to travel all over in service to Christ and His kingdom; meekness, that is, the humble, gracious, unassuming, courteous, and gentle life; peaceableness, that is, calm, composed, contented, and forgiving demeanor toward others; persecution, that is, a willingness to be abused, afflicted, and oppressed; and, rejection, that is, a willingness to suffer abandonment, exile, and revilement for the sake of Christ.
All these are possible only when we die to ourselves. Then the light of the Resurrection shines through us.