In today’s reading from Luke Jesus tells us:
“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
When I read this Gospel passage I can’t help but think to myself: “What happened to the kind, meek and mild Jesus, the Prince of Peace? This is not the Jesus that we are used to hearing about, the one we picture carrying a lamb on his shoulders, the one who says “let the little children come to me.” This Jesus even makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable, and dare I say, even offends my Episcopalian sensibilities. What is Jesus saying here? What are we to make of this?
“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
When I read this Gospel passage I can’t help but think to myself: “What happened to the kind, meek and mild Jesus, the Prince of Peace? This is not the Jesus that we are used to hearing about, the one we picture carrying a lamb on his shoulders, the one who says “let the little children come to me.” This Jesus even makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable, and dare I say, even offends my Episcopalian sensibilities. What is Jesus saying here? What are we to make of this?
Following Jesus is not easy! Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young Lutheran pastor who was a prisoner of the Nazi regime during World War II who was executed because he dared to speak against the evils of Nazism. In his book The Cost of Discipleship, he wrote that “cheap grace was grace without cost; it is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. Costly grace, on the other hand, in Bonhoeffer’s words 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.”
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