Cheap Grace
A friend of mine has just returned from South Africa. She didn't go for casual sightseeing or to purchase quaint art pieces. She went there to meet with the women of South Africa who are living justice, living reconciliation, living love in harsh, sometimes cruel circumstances. They do not have cheap faith or expect to receive cheap grace.
The Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonheoffer coined the term "cheap grace" for what he saw in his native Nazi Germany. He described it as grace sold on the market as if it were just sloppily-made, tawdry trinkets. This grace cost nothing but was assumed, like charity, to cover a multitude of sins.
Bonheoffer wrote
Grace is represented as the Church's inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessing with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits…. In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. . . Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. (1)
Cheap grace is a cop out. Cheap grace asks nothing but gives us the sense we are investing. The sense is all it is. It is as ephemeral as a breeze.
What then is the opposite, costly grace? To describe costly grace, Bonheoffer retells some familiar parables:
[It 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. It is … the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.
Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. (2)
It isn't that this grace has a price tag or a demand that we earn it. It is simply that this grace propels us to living and acting as if we value it and value the strength, love, and wisdom it gives us for living. This grace gives birth to action, and the action gives birth to grace. Grace and our right actions are mutually sustaining.
The women of South Africa have been abused and victimized. They respond by living justice. These are women who have risen far beyond their victim status by valuing themselves and for living God's will for them. By living reconciliation, they have ceased being victims and have become survivors. Through asking, through knocking, through grace and community, these women see that they have moved beyond being survivors to being victors over oppression. Surely this is what is meant as the kingdom of God.
Today's gospel tells us a story of people living in cheap grace. They have come to the doorway – a very narrow doorway – and fully expect to be ushered into the feast. They know the drill. They've been around, they think they know the rules of the game. They've eaten with the home owner before and seen him in their streets. Because of their acquaintance alone, they expect to be ushered inside. Cheap grace.
Like the South African women and the people of Nazi Germany, we know that grace has only the value we see in it and rewards us with that value. Like them, we must decide every day if we will choose costly grace or cheap grace. We don't have to think very hard about what cheap grace requires of us. We're tempted to nestle in right there, put our feet up, and get lost in the TV. We're tempted to sit on the front porch and wait for the home owner to usher us in.
That's when we see people coming from east and west, from north and south, and, as suspicious as we are, we think they have come to steal our seats right from under us! In our surprise and jealously, we forget that the invitation has been extended to us as well. We are offered costly grace. It results from thoughtful, prayerful, intentional practices. Have we sold ourselves short and gone for cheap grace?
Costly grace has certain hallmarks.
These actions, the actions of costly grace, reflect our baptismal covenants. They are the key to that narrow door. They are the key to a new freedom. The amazing thing isn't that we work hard and are rewarded with grace, it is that, like the women of South Africa, by valuing the right kind of grace we are rewarded with lives of joy.
"Strive to enter through the narrow door."
Notes:
(1) Dietrich Bonheoffer, The Cost of Discipleship, New York: Macmillan 1963, pages 42-45. First German edition published in 1937.
(2) Bonheoffer, page 45