“I Don’t Want to Be Upset”

 

A deacon friend confided to me not long ago that, following a particularly prophetic homily, he was accosted on the church steps by an aggrieved parishioner. The man’s grievance was as candid as it was revealing: he “didn’t want to be upset” at Mass.

I don’t want to be upset.

I have turned that sentence over in my mind many times since. For it is not, finally, a complaint about a single homily. It is an entire ecclesiology compressed into six words—a vision of the Christian assembly as a place of undisturbed repose, the sanctuary as a kind of spiritual spa, and the preacher as a genial attendant whose task is to send the client home more comfortable than he arrived. The man did not object to being taught. He objected to being challenged—confronted with the truths he ought to hear from the Gospel rather than soothed by the pieties he preferred to hear.

There is an old and instructive precedent for this instinct. Thomas Jefferson, that luminous child of the Enlightenment, once took a razor—an actual blade—to the pages of the Gospels. Everything that offended his rationalist sensibilities he simply excised: the miracles, the mystery, the resurrection, the hard and unaccommodating sayings of the Lord. What remained, pasted into his famous little volume, was a Jesus reduced to an admirable ethical teacher, a sage safely contained within the borders of what Jefferson already found reasonable. It was a domesticated Christ, a Lord who would never disturb the dinner conversation at Monticello.

We are tempted to smile at Jefferson’s audacity. We would do better to examine our conscience. For what he accomplished with a blade, we accomplish more bloodlessly and more piously from the pulpit—excising by omission whatever might unsettle, preaching a private lectionary of the heart that quietly passes over the hard readings. The result is the same emasculated gospel; ours simply enjoys the advantage of never having to admit what it has cut.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave this counterfeit its enduring name. Against the costly grace of the Gospel—the grace that costs a man his life precisely because it summons him to follow the Crucified—he set what he called cheap grace: grace as a principle rather than a Person, forgiveness without repentance, absolution without confession, discipleship without the cross. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow upon ourselves. It is the anesthetic we have learned to mistake for the balm of Gilead. And it is, Bonhoeffer insisted, the deadliest enemy the Church has ever faced—more corrosive than any persecution from without, because it hollows the Body from within.

We forget that the Lord himself foresaw all of this. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34); not peace, but division (Luke 12:51). This is no warrant for cruelty, nor license for the preacher’s self-indulgent severity. It is something far more searching. The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword (Hebrews 4:12), and it will not leave us as it found us. It pierces. It divides the truth from its comfortable counterfeits, and it lays bare the hypocrisy that so easily passes for Christianity today—a Christianity, in the end, without a cross. And a faith without the cross is not merely deficient. It is a contradiction in terms.

When I was a pastor, I used to tell my people—candidly—that as much as I treasured the gift of being liked, being liked was never the foundational rationale of my ministry. It is a seductive thing, that gift: the applause of the affirmed, the warm handshake at the door, the coveted reputation as a “positive” preacher. These are honeyed, and not easily refused. But the office to which I was ordained was never the management of good feeling. It was to preach the Good News that, paradoxically, must sometimes wound in order to heal; to rouse a slumbering people from the pious comas of stasis into which a comfortable Christianity so readily lulls us. Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi—as we pray, so we believe, and so we live. A preaching that only ever consoles will, in time, form a people who believe nothing costly and live for nothing beyond their own tranquility.

But the real scandal is not the complaint lodged on the church steps. It is the call, or the email, that can follow from those charged with good order, relaying the “complaints” of parishioners a homily has left uneasy. I do not doubt that such caution usually proceeds from genuine pastoral concern rather than from cowardice. And yet, when—in any diocese—the instinct to keep the peace comes to outweigh the duty to defend a costly word, the logic of cheap grace has put on administrative vestments, and that unofficial creed—don’t rock the boat—is too easily mistaken for prudence. It is a temptation of the office itself, my own once included, and no one entrusted with it is wholly immune.

Notice, too, which words are permitted to unsettle and which are not. A homily against abortion or euthanasia, however forcefully delivered, will scarcely stir a slumbering conscience in a comfortable pew, still less occasion a letter to or from the chancery; in many of our congregations it draws instead a quiet nod of approval, the applause of the already convinced. But let that same preacher speak of the inherent dignity of the immigrant and the refugee, of the reverence we owe to God’s creation, of the hard demands of justice and peace, of the evil of extrajudicial killing and the sanctity of every life the state has judged expendable—and watch how swiftly the telephone rings. This is the tell. It betrays that our discomfort is not, in the end, with being challenged by the Gospel at all, but with being challenged precisely where we would rather not be. We have learned to receive as “prophetic” only that half of the Church’s witness which flatters the convictions we already hold, and to resent as “political” the half that indicts them. But the consistent ethic of life is seamless, woven of a single cloth; and a gospel torn in two to suit our partisan comfort is no less emasculated than Jefferson’s.

We are not without terrible evidence of where this road ends. History is strewn with the wreckage of a Christianity stripped of its prophetic voice, and there is no more harrowing instance than the nationalist church erected in Nazi Germany. The Deutsche Christen—the so-called “German Christians”—fused altar to flag and cross to swastika, baptizing the regime’s ideology and lending it the sanction of religion. Theirs was a church perfectly inoffensive to power, precisely because it had surrendered every scintilla of prophetic witness. It existed to serve the state, and so it enabled the state’s horrors.

It was against exactly this apostasy that the Confessing Church arose. Gathered in the Barmen district of Wuppertal, Germany, in May of 1934, its pastors and theologians—Karl Barth chief among them—issued the declaration that would become their charter. Its logic was as simple as it was defiant: the Church has one source and one Lord, Jesus Christ, the one Word of God whom she must hear and obey in life and in death; and she may therefore acknowledge no other power—no Volk, no state, no Führer—as a second revelation binding upon her conscience. Barmen was not a flawless witness. It defended the Church’s freedom under Christ far more clearly than it defended the regime’s victims, and of the persecution of the Jews it said, to its lasting shame, nothing. But it drew the line where a line most needed drawing, and among those who staked their lives upon it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged at Flossenbürg in the war’s final days. His theology of costly grace was no seminar abstraction. It was written in his blood.

Nor need we cross the Atlantic, or recede very far into the past, to find our witness. Within living memory and within our own hemisphere, Archbishop Óscar Romero ascended the pulpit of San Salvador and preached a Gospel that refused to avert its eyes from the disappeared, the tortured, and the poor. His homilies carried out over the diocesan radio, YSAX, into the countryside and the campos—until the transmitter was bombed and silenced, for a prophetic word is always intolerable to those it indicts. Romero grasped the matter with perfect clarity: a gospel that unsettles no one, a word of God that disturbs no conscience, is no Gospel at all. On the 24th of March, 1980, he was shot dead at the altar, in the very act of offering the Sacrifice, his own blood commingling with the chalice. He had preached costly grace, and he paid its full and final price.

It takes courage to preach prophetically. And courage, let us be honest, is a virtue in short supply in an age when so many are bought and sold—metaphorically, and sometimes otherwise. The prophet has never been a welcome figure; we stone them in their lifetime and, a generation later, raise tombs in their honor. But the alternative to the costly word is not safety. It is the slow suffocation of the Gospel beneath the cushions of our own comfort.

Cheap grace abounds. May we be given the courage to preach the costly kind.

Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.