The Cost of Discipleship 7

 What did Bonhoeffer see as the consequences of ‘cheap grace’? 

 “We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving. We poured forth unending streams of grace. But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.” 

 “Where were those truths which impelled the early Church to institute the catechumenate, which enabled a strict watch to be kept over the frontier between the Church and the world? What had happened to all those warnings of Luther’s against preaching the gospel in such a manner as to make men rest secure in their ungodly living? Was there ever a more terrible or disastrous instance of the Christianizing of the world than this?” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, [1937] 1958, page 58).

 Bonhoeffer claims that Cheap Grace produces Christians in name only, nominal Christians only because their names are on the church’s rolls, lazy Christians who have no compulsion to live a Christian life any other time than Sunday morning. We are familiar with this problem today. Some ‘Christian’ leaders want to force other people to follow their laws, making people who make no claim to be Christian pretend that they are, and thus pretend that that makes us a Christian nation. Other ‘Christian’ leaders are focused on getting revenge, not exactly an approved Christian goal. Still others are focused on demonizing strangers, immigrants, and anyone who does not look like nor act like them.  

 In 1937 it was clear where fascism, the gutting of a democratic government, and especially the deception of the Evangelical Church was leading the German nation right down into the sewer of racism, anti-Semitism, idolatrous patriotism, and the dehumanization of immigrants and foreigners. The German nation, the German church, and the German people in the next 8 years suffered tremendously for these sins. 

 Why didn’t they understand the difference between cheap grace and costly grace? Why had the Evangelical Church not taught them “Costly Grace”? Because the Evangelical Church in Germany sold-out to Hitler and the right-wing Nazi Party. Why? Because, above all else, they craved power.  

  Costly Grace is Biblical Grace. First, grace is costly because it pained God to make grace available to us sinners. God sent his Son, born of Mary, but Jesus felt so far away from God at one point that he cried out, ““My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27: 46). Costly? You bet. 

 Grace is costly because Jesus himself paid the penalty for our sins. Jesus’ last words on the cross were, “It is finished!” (John 19: 30). What was finished? The whole master plan to bring forgiveness of sins and abundant life to mankind. That work of grace required a death before there could be a resurrection life. Costly? The ultimate sacrifice. 

 Second, it is Costly Grace because the one who accepts God’s invitation to come and be forgiven and accepts the call that God gives, that one must also die…die to self. When Matthew (Levi) was called, he did not make a statement of faith. He simply got up from what he was doing (collecting taxes) and started walking, following Jesus. When Peter was called, he did not make a confession of faith. He simply put down his fishing gear, washed his hands, and started walking, following Jesus. Costly? Try it.

 Gone were the plans the disciples had for their own lives. What died was their false sense of control, the illusion that their life was theirs to live. The old self withered. Growing but not yet mature was the new self. The call of Jesus bids a man to come and die, and then to receive new life in Christ. This new life requires discipline, that is why those who follow Jesus are called disciples; they willingly put themselves under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit. 

 In today’s world, we value freedom, the kind of freedom where we imagine that we can do whatever we want to do. That turns out to be a slick deception cherished by our culture. For one thing, there are other people around, and they must be taken into account. As the old legal saying goes, “Your freedom to swing your arm ends at my nose.” Christians are not called to be individuals, but to be members of the Community of the King. Christians are not called to be ‘all that they can be’, but rather they are called to be all that God calls them to be.  

 As Bob Dylan, who now has his own biopic movie, once sang,

“You gotta serve somebody.  

Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord. 

But you’re going to have to serve somebody.”