As
Hitler took over power in Germany, and fascist military regimes were spreading
arrogance and cruelty far and wide, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others recognised
a huge and urgent kairos, a wake-up
call for the Christian Church. In 1937 Bonhoeffer
wrote about cheap grace (Billige Gnade). Cheap Grace, he said, is grace without discipleship. Fr
Laurence Freeman describes cheap grace as the kind we bestow on ourselves… in our
religious frame of mind. It's the kind we get
when we use the church to satisfy ourselves. It's grace without really following, without
being a disciple. It's the cheap grace
of the Christian who says I prefer to stay as I am. I'm okay, leave me alone, don't ask me to grow
or change. That's not the way of a disciple. Costly grace, on the other
hand, wrote Bonhoeffer, confronts us as a
gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken
spirit and the contrite heart. It
is costly because it compels us to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him;
it is grace because Jesus says: "My yoke is easy and my burden is
light."
Let’s look again at what we mean by
grace. In the Greek scriptures, charis… in Hebrew, chesed… two profoundly important words in understanding our faith. Grace is the goodness we receive which we
didn’t expect and neither earned nor deserved.
Grace is “love… nevertheless”. Love
despite, perhaps. But grace comes with a
corollary – if you are the recipient of grace, your life turns towards it, you
change. Of his fullness have we all received, writes John, grace upon grace. He goes on: The Law
was given through Moses… That is the law which defines what you deserve or
do not deserve. …grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.[1] That is the “law” which says that love
prevails because God is love and no one is lost.
Costly grace, then, is God’s grace received
and known in humble gratitude and wonder.
This grace displaces the ego, the self, because we are less and less
captivated by the self, charmed by it, or protective of ourselves. The church at its best is a channel of the costly
grace which changes us into disciples – it means learners, listeners. Bonhoeffer’s concern was that the church of
his day, by and large, was existing for its own sake, compromising with fascism
and its horrors, occupied mainly with survival, and therefore purveying cheap
grace.
We are in another kairos – and one of the signs of this is our loss of
confidence. What were familiar landmarks
in faith seem to disappear. The church
seems scarcely to know what to say. But
then, more and more people no longer wonder or care what the church has to
say. Secularism prevails, some of it
sensible, much of it pernicious. This is
a kairos which calls us to be still,
steady, and be formed and re-formed by God in Christ. Believers are now able to rediscover
inwardness and its strength, along with discerning again what to let go of –
which is quite a lot -- and what to embrace.
This teaching, grown-up faith, I would say, is always going to surprise
us. We are being ministered to in a time
of need by costly grace and wisdom.
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