On Costly Grace
Sermon by Jamie Howison on John 17:20-26
To explore the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer more closely, we’d recommend this podcast featuring Christopher Holmes, originally released in 2009.
We have come to the seventh and final Sunday in the season of Eastertide… and doesn’t Easter Day now seem as if it was a long time ago? This is a fifty-day season, which means that not only is it longer than Lent—a not insignificant thing to note—but also that it carries us right up to the Feast of Pentecost, which we will observe next Sunday.
We have before us two texts, but I want to set aside the Acts reading and spring off of the text from John. On the seventh Sunday in Eastertide the Gospel reading is drawn from the 17th chapter of John in each of the three years of the lectionary. This is what is often called Jesus’ “high priestly prayer,” which fills the entire chapter and comes on the heels of fully four chapters of material from the upper room scene in John. That’s a good deal more text than is found in the other three Gospels; compare Mark, for instance, who includes only nine verses of material set in that space. But as I’ve said before, John is writing considerably later than the other three, and takes great liberty in using such scenes to tell the reader what he has come to know about Jesus.
In this portion of Jesus’ great prayer, the focus is on the faith movement that he knows will spring from the work and faith of his disciples. “I ask not only on behalf of these,” Jesus begins, and by “these” he means these disciples. “But [I ask] also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one.” The prayer is ultimately that they may all be indwelt by the Father and Son, and express their unity in a love empowered by the Spirit which will enable them to spread the good news far and wide. There is, in a sense, already a resolution offered in this prayer, that this great love is unfolding into the world and will spread like wildfire.
Which it in fact did over the next three hundred years, ultimately being spread even to the very emperor of Rome. You might be tempted to stop right there in this sermon, sing an alleluia and carry on straight to the sharing of bread and wine.
And yet, for all of the abundance of great good news, there is much that has also been marked by sorrow, brokenness, disunity, and loss.
I got to thinking about this during the week prior to this past one, when I was out for a conversation with one of the younger folks connected to this community. He has a searching and probing mind and is always ready to dig deeper into areas and ideas that are new to him. Somehow along the way our conversation made its way to the figure of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that great theologian and witness to our faith who was ultimately executed by the Third Reich in the closing months of the Second World War.
Bonhoeffer was born in Germany in 1906, had an earned doctorate at the age of 21, and then sailed to New York to teach and study at Union Theological Seminary, where he found himself worshiping at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem; one of the great Black church communities that is still very active right up to today. Unimpressed by what he saw as the rather thin academic character of American Seminaries, he was profoundly influenced by the faith and life of that Black church, which had a lasting impact on his own life and thought.
On returning to Germany he was ordained, but soon enough the Third Reich had assumed power, and in 1934 he was one of the signatories to the Barmen Declaration, which was drafted by Karl Barth and adopted by what is known as the Confessing Church. This declaration unflinchingly insisted that Christ, not the Führer, was the true head of the church, and called upon all clergy to follow a path of resistance. Sadly, by some estimates only some 20% of German clergy followed the challenges of the Barmen Declaration, with the vast majority capitulating to the Nazi regime, even collaborating with its systematic program of wiping out the Jews in Europe.
In response to such capitulation, Bonhoeffer wrote his famous book The Cost of Discipleship, which was published in German in 1937 under the title Following, and only brought into English in 1948, three years after the author’s death. In that volume he picked up on a concept he’d learned from The Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church: cheap grace. “Cheap Grace,” Bonhoeffer wrote,
Cheap grace is 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.
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace.
Costly Grace is what Bonhoeffer discovered one had to live out in face of the sort of horrors he was witnessing under the Third Reich. I will quote him at length, again drawn from The Cost of Discipleship:
Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly 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. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.
It was living under such costly grace that led Bonhoeffer to temporarily set aside his core pacifist convictions and take part in a plot to assassinate Hitler. In a Christmas letter written in 1942 and later published under the title, “After Ten Years,” Bonhoeffer wrote: “The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts.” He knew that for a time he must set down what he believed were the core claims of the Sermon on the Mount, in order to follow God’s more urgent call to preserve life for all victimized by that war, notably, but not exclusively, the Jews of Europe.
This, you see, was a brilliant man, a clear thinker, and a faithful believer who wanted nothing more than to be true to the God he had come to both love and revere. And it cost him—costly grace—rather than just soothed or comforted him. And he’d have had it no other way.
I think, too, of a conversation I had one lovely summer afternoon some twenty years with a woman named Val MacBeth, whose husband Sid I had buried a few months earlier. At the time I was parish priest at the Church of St Stephen and St Bede in Silver Heights, and Val and Sid were elderly members of the parish on my regular visitation roster. I’d seen the two of them often enough over the years, always arriving with communion ware and Book of Common Prayer in hand to celebrate the sacrament with them at their dining room table. Sid was a curious man; always dressed perfectly, always concerned about the shape of his lawn and flower beds or about the way that the snow had been shovelled from the driveway and sidewalk, always deeply appreciative of the way I presided at communion in the “old way,” from the “proper” Book of Common Prayer. That day Val asked me if I knew why Sid has been so buttoned down and careful about things like straight ties, weedless flower beds, and his crack-free driveway.
“It was the only way he could cope with the world,” she told me, and then explained that after his death an autopsy had been done on his brain to determine the extent of damage down by a shell in battle in the Second World War. “They found a deep, wide crevice in his brain,” she explained. “All those things he did to keep life in order were a part of living with that deep wound. Everyone who saw action in that war was a victim, Jamie.” And then she talked about her own experiences as a nurse in the war, and how she’d been one of the small team of medical people who had accompanied the allied forces at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. “I saw those poor people hanging like skeletons to the fences as we opened the gates,” she told me. “I saw what had been done to them. I saw the Beast of Belson”—a man named Josef Kramer, who as commandant of the camp had been notoriously cruel—“I saw the Beast of Belson and what he had done to those people. After you see something like that,” she said, “it is hard to believe in anything anymore.”
Bonhoeffer’s beliefs and convictions along with that poor woman’s pained memories are oddly redemptive, I think. Not that I’d turn them into plaster saints to memorialize with all of the hard edges sanded off, but I see them and so many others who have walked hard paths and made costly decisions standing at the heart of what Jesus is ultimately praying for here in the Gospel. “The glory that you have given me [Father],” Jesus prays, “I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me.” Jesus’ glory, you see, is also not cheap, for it is born on a cross and ultimately shared through people as plain and as fallible as you and me and Bonhoeffer and Val MacBeth and all the other disciples and saints who have tried to walk faithfully and steadfastly before us, even in a world that so often shows more fragmentation than it does fullness.
I will close with something I think would very much resonate with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and which certainly resonates with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. “Christ comes to us,” Robert Capon once wrote,
Christ comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. He saves us in our disasters, not from them. He emphatically does not promise to meet only the odd winner of the self-improvement lottery. He meets us all in our endless and inescapable losing. (Robert Farrar Capon, The Astonished Heart)
And oddly, that is the best good news to proclaim, on this, the final Sunday in Eastertide.
