Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?
When we come up for communion and the priest says, “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven” or “The Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation,” we answer, “Amen.” At a baptism, when the priest asks, “Do you desire to be baptized?”an adult candidate for baptism answers, “I do.”
Amen. I do. They’re simple statements—words that stay on our lips for less than a second. But how often do we say them with true understanding? Do we really understand our “Amen” when we accept Christ’s Body and Blood? Do we really know what we’re getting ourselves into when we say, “I do,” to Baptism? Or are we more like James & John in today’s Gospel, when they ask for something—agree to something—and are met with Jesus saying, “You do not know what you are asking.” Do we know what we’re getting ourselves into?
In reading today’s gospel, I think it’s important to note that James and John’s request isn’t ill-intentioned. Sure, the other 10 Apostles aren’t exactly pleased with the brothers’ boldness. But in Mark’s version of the story, James & John aren’t portrayed as hatching some devious scheme to get a leg up on the rest of the disciples. On the contrary, they’re asking for something really, really good. They’re asking to be near Jesus—to be as close to him as possible when all things are set right and his kingdom is established. They’re asking for the gift of his presence and favor. They’re asking for what Christians would come to understand as grace.
Mark underlines this for his readers by referencing Baptism and Eucharist—the primary ways God communicates that grace to us. Jesus says, “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” When the earliest Christians heard this story, read aloud in the middle of worship, they would have heard unmistakable links between Jesus’ words and the Sacraments which they were gathered to celebrate. And they would have heard a clear parallel between James & John’s response—“We are able.”—and the response they themselves gave when accepting these Holy Mysteries. James & John are asking Jesus for grace—the same gift which Mark’s community received—the same gift which we ourselves receive and affirm when we say “Amen” or “I do” to the means of grace that Jesus Christ has left to his Church.
But James & John don’t understand what they’re getting themselves into. They are missing the point that Jesus has just made yet again for the third time in Mark’s gospel: that gift—that grace—is a costly one. They’re missing that Jesus’ reign as king can only come through his humiliation as the Suffering Servant described by Isaiah. They’re missing that sitting with Jesus at the banquet can only come through answering the summons to follow him—to be his disciples and learn obedience through suffering with him. They’re missing that saying Amen to the promised reward is saying Amen to the whole thing; the whole kit and kaboodle; the whole gift of the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s passion, death & resurrection.
If the cup of salvation is to be the cup of blessing for James & John, it must also be the bitter cup that filled Jesus with dread in Gethsemane. If the baptism of Christ is to be a washing clean or the warm embrace of the household of God, it must also be a burial with Christ in his tomb. James & John have asked for a grace that is good and sweet and holy. But in their ignorance, they are asking for grace without the cost of real discipleship—without the summons to die and be buried with Christ. They’re asking for “cheap grace,” as German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer would call it centuries later.
In the 1930s, Bonhoeffer was pivotal in forming a movement called the Confessing Church. As the Nazi party rose to dominance in Germany, the members of the Confessing Church opposed Hitler’s attempts to co-opt Christianity and turn it into a puppet of fascism. Bonhoeffer and others decried the Nazi’s religion as worldly power and status and pride and self-will and hate, simply masquerading under the label of “Christian.” Eventually, this would get Bonhoeffer killed —executed in a concentration camp at the age of 39. But before that, in 1937, he wrote a stirring critique of what he called the theology of cheap grace.
Cheap grace, at its core, is grace without the demands of discipleship. The gospel of cheap grace promises the comfort of religious community and Christian identity without any of the boundaries or limits that Jesus makes clear come with following him—no repentance, no obedience, no sacrifice, no suffering. All are welcome, without having to change—without having to give anything up or take anything on. It’s a Gospel that was and continues to be popular, especially in the West. But Bonhoeffer opposed it so vigorously, even to the point of martyrdom, because he saw firsthand where it ultimately leads.
Cheap grace may start as an impulse to make Christianity gentler and less daunting—an impulse to remove barriers and broaden the Way of Christ. But taken to its logical conclusion, cheap grace amputates the cross—self-denial, suffering, and dying—from the gospel of new life in Christ. Emptied of the demands salvation makes on us, grace is reduced to consolation and community without any expectations of conversion of life. And Christianity becomes veneer under which all are welcome to remain exactly as they are…even Nazis in Germany or (closer to home) White Christian Nationalists.
Cheap grace may be preached with benign, even welcoming or inclusive intentions. But it empties the gift of grace of its weight as a summons—a summons to give up everything to follow Jesus and learn obedience from him—even when that means sharing his cross and his grave. Cheap grace allows and even encourages us to come up and say “Amen” and “I do” without having any idea what it really means when we do.
For Bonhoeffer, the only antidote to this is what Jesus presents to us today—recovering a sense of God’s costly grace. A gospel of costly grace celebrates the gift that God offers freely to all who ask, while ever remembering (and reminding each other) what exactly it is we’re really asking for—what is involved when we reach out our hands and say “Amen” to that gift.
It is good to desire the grace that Christ offers: to draw near to the Risen Christ and share in the Passover Feast. But Jesus reminds us that this grace is a costly one. Jesus reminds us that in order to share in his glory, we must also learn humility from his obedient suffering. In order to rise to new life with him, we must also be buried with him in his baptism. In order to drink from his cup of salvation, we must also drink with him from the bitter cup of the world’s sorrows & sins that he bears. Costly grace summons us to be utterly transformed through the life of discipleship: standing in solidarity with the world in its pain like Christ, surrendering status and power and self-will like Christ, learning obedience through suffering like Christ.
This is what we sign up for, when we stretch out our hands and say “Amen” to the Gifts of God. We’re saying “yes” to a life of costly grace. This costly grace is an awesome gift in the full sense of the word: weighty and worthy of awe. It is costly because it asks us to follow Christ to the grave and lay down our lives. But it is grace because when we lay our lives down, we are given the only true life—the life of God’s Son Jesus Christ.
So when, like James and John, we say “I do” to the baptism of Jesus—when we say “Amen” to the cup that he drinks—may we do so with eyes wide open, knowing full well what it is we ask for—what we’re getting ourselves into: a grace that will cost us everything but, in the end, give us more than we could ever imagine.