Grace Is Free but Not Cheap
19th Sunday of the Year
Writing in 1937, a Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer issued an alarming critique of the Christianity being preached in those days from pulpits in Germany at the outset of the Nazi regime. In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer contrasts two ‘kinds’ of grace: cheap grace and costly grace.1 Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church, Bonhoeffer writes. We are fighting today for costly grace.
As he describes it, grace is cheap when it is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. In making no demands on its recipient, Cheap grace means the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
While grace is always the free, gratuitous, unmerited gift of God, Bonhoeffer reminds us that it, in fact, costs a great deal. Again, in his words: Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. In short, this grace is costly because it costs a man his life and, above all, because it cost God the life of his Son: ‘ye were bought at a price,’ and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.
For all these reasons Bonhoeffer considered the true grace of Christ—and the only grace that deserves to be preached—to be costly; and preaching it did indeed cost him as he was among the final victims put to death by the Nazis before the collapse of the Third Reich.
We may live at a different moment in history than this Christian martyr but our attitude toward the grace of Christ is often essentially the same as that against which he vigorously preached. We demand and expect grace on the cheap. When we hear the commands to sell your belongings and give alms, to store up no earthly treasure, to gird your loins and light your lamps in vigilance, to be on guard against the flesh’s basest vices, and that much will be required and still more will be demanded, how quickly do we find ourselves speaking in Peter’s words: Lord, is this… meant for us? Are you demanding these sacrifices of me? Is the cost of your grace that I give up these things in which I have preferred to take comfort? Or are these commands meant for everyone? Do they apply to me only in a general way according to which I might be able to negotiate the terms of just how much the grace of your discipleship will cost me?
We are no strangers to the bartering for cheap grace. But can we say more about the reason for our frugality? To my mind, today’s Scripture readings give us three reasons why we prefer cheap grace to costly, and they all have to do with fear: (1) the fear of limits; (2) the fear of captivity; and (3) the fear of perseverance.
First, fear is caused by the limits we set upon reality. Faith, as a remedy to fear, requires the destruction of all limits for this reason. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes faith through the example of Abraham, who the sacred liturgy rightly calls our father in faith. Abraham believed in the Lord’s promise, and the Lord was faithful and made Abraham’s descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sands on the seashore. Abraham’s faith yielded the fruit of the great ancestry that includes us today. But it was the faith of a man, who the Letter says, was himself as good as dead. Near the end of his life and without child, Abraham disregarded any limit his natural condition would impose and instead obeyed when he was called to go out and he went out, not knowing where he was to go. Abraham knew his own limits, but his knowledge of them did not lead him to search for an easier option—a cheaper grace—that would cost him only what he could reasonably be expected to pay within his limits. All that mattered is that the Lord had called him, and because the Lord had called him, he did not count the cost, but made the only acceptable response: to obey and follow.
Faith is incompatible with fear because faith cannot be held hostage by the limits we set for ourselves and are afraid of crossing. Limits come from what we see or foresee about our abilities, our condition, or our circumstances, but the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that faith… is the evidence of things not seen. To place a limit on faith is to limit faith to what is seen and thus destroy faith entirely. And without faith we abandon God and take shelter only in our own confidence—and that, rightly, should make us afraid.
Among the limits we foresee most strongly are those imposed upon us by our captors: by whatever or whoever oppresses us spiritually, physically, psychologically, or socially. No matter how visceral their hold on us may be, faith in Christ cannot co-exist with the limits by which they restrain us, for as Paul reminds us, For freedom Christ set us free (Gal. 5:1). And the anticipation of this freedom, even in the midst of great darkness, is a fruit of the gift of faith. The Book of Wisdom tells us that the night of the Passover was known beforehand to our fathers that, with sure knowledge of the oaths in which they put their faith, they might have courage. Those among God’s enslaved people who had faith already knew that regardless of the severity of their oppression the Lord would not fail to be faithful to his promise and bring them to salvation. And for this reason is the Letter to the Hebrews correct that faith is the substance of things hoped for. Our hope is to be free from the snares of our captors—from what holds us hostage from a life of full human flourishing in any respect—and faith substantiates our hope by assuring us of its attainment and allowing us to taste and to see its fulfillment in advance.
But we know that the taste and sight of freedom does not last long on this side of eternity, and if we have put out into the deep in faith and crossed over certain limits we quickly find ourselves wondering nervously how long it will last before we run out of steam and become captives of Egypt once again. Thus do we fear the long haul of perseverance: to stand at the ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks… at an hour you do not expect. Is that not more than for what we could hope? Would it not be better, more authentic, more honest, to simply refuse the gift, to decline the transaction, to turn down the grace that costs us well beyond what we can pay?
Life without the cost of grace might be easier, but it would not be better. Without grace we would owe nothing; but without grace we would not have Christ; and without Christ we would gain nothing and forfeit everything. Grace is costly, said Bonhoeffer because it cost a man his life, yet it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. On the final balance sheet, the cost of discipleship weighs nothing against the life it affords. For with Christ there is no limit he cannot breach, no chains he cannot break, no regime he could not topple. In Christ and in the grace he offers us, there is only life and life in abundance.
That is the offer set before us for us this morning to accept or refuse: life in exchange for life—our life in exchange for his. His grace costs nothing less than all that we are; and his grace gives us nothing less than all that he is. We do not need to look far to see the limits by which we fear the cost; yet also we do not need to look beyond his Presence in the Eucharist to know that he is faithful to his promise to give himself entirely without counting what it cost him.
May we not settle for less. May we not barter for cheap grace over costly. And may we know that for whatever the grace of Christ costs us it will not leave us impoverished but will fill us with life and life in abundance.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, rev. ed., trans. R.H. Fuller and Irmgard Booth (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 45ff.