Jottings for May from Fr Edward
I am going to consider someone who responded wholeheartedly to the Easter message.
The 80th anniversary of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer fell on the 7 April. He was a Lutheran Pastor and theologian who was implicated in the resistance to the Nazi tyranny in Germany. He was imprisoned and cruelly murdered at Flossenburg concentration camp in the closing days of World War Two. He is commemorated with a statue above the west door of Westminster Abbey as one of the ten modern martyrs of the 20th century.
Bonhoeffer remained true to his principles. Whether you have faith or not, I think the lives of people like him invite us to do the same.
Bonhoeffer like all Christians uses the word grace – which is God’s free and unmerited reconciling of us to him through the death and resurrection of Jesus. We experience total acceptance by God. God’s will for us to lead an authentic life becomes a reality.
However, Bonhoeffer saw just how easy it is to leave it all to grace and simply change nothing. He called this grace without discipleship - grace without commitment - cheap grace.
He wrote ‘Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a [person] 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 [person their] life, and it is grace because it gives a [person] the only true life.’
Costing our life in this context is commitment. This is something that Franciscans like me see in St Francis, committed to creation, justice and peace, someone who literally tried every minute of every day to live Jesus’s command to love God and love his neighbour as himself.
We are easily comfortable. It’s easy to do nothing. As one of Bonhoeffers’ friends put it in describing him ‘Not that he believed that everybody must act as he did, but from where he was standing, he could see no possibility of retreat into any sinless, righteous, pious refuge. The sin of respectable people reveals itself in flight from responsibility. He saw that sin falling upon him and he took his stand.’
What stand for creation, justice and peace will you, will I, will we take in the coming months?