Over and Done - 4th Sunday of Lent

31 March 2019 – 4^th Sunday of Lent

Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

One of the biggest doctrinal misconceptions about the often misquoted Bible is the idea of “free” grace.  Rather than being understood as the most wondrous and priceless of all gifts, a gift we are not entitled to, Grace more often comes across as cheap and easily attained when any preacher, teacher, or individual interpreter alludes to “free grace” rather than to understand it as coming from the One who offers mercy “freely” to those who repent.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way: “Cheap grace means grace sold on the market … The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices.  Grace is represented as the Church's inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands without asking questions or fixing limits.  Grace without price; grace without cost!  The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing” (The Cost of Discipleship)

So while too many preachers have been quick to add “free” to the Bible (a profoundly careless, if lazy, interpretation), the essence of what is nevertheless freely offered to us by our benevolent Father has been cheapened to the point that repentance is no longer spoken of, sin is downplayed or relative, confession is a non-specific, communal, catch-all, recited prayer, the Church has been bullied into silence for fear of losing members or offending the culture, and the Cross is thrust into the abstract as having only the meaning we would choose to subjectively assign – having never seriously considered what the Cross means to The Holy Father.

This is not discipleship; it is consumerism – a buying and selling of goods according to what we are willing to pay.  Bonhoeffer called it “cheap grace” because it gives everything and yet asks nothing. 

“You were bought with a price”, St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians (1C6:20; 1C7:23), so our understanding of Grace must come from within that context so we can appreciate it for what it really is – a Gift rather than a transaction.  It was Grace which fed the Israelites in the wilderness with the manna as long as they were faithfully following The Lord through that wilderness, and it was Grace which received the Prodigal Son with open arms after he had come to his senses and confessed his failings.  He had hoped only for a place with the servants, and yet he was given everything in the fully restored relationship – no questions asked.  The son did not come with his own demands to negotiate a settlement; he submitted himself to his father’s terms and received more than a humbled heart would have expected.  As Jesus taught, “those who humble themselves will be exalted”.

Thus Grace itself, the unmerited and undeserved favor of The Father, was not free though it was freely given.  So it is important for us to understand the difference.  As it is so freely given from the Heart of The Father who bore the cost Himself, we must not get lost in a concept of “free” to the point of assuming it requires no response or comes with no cost. 

In our Wesleyan theology, there is the doctrine of prevenient grace.  It has been referred to as the front porch to the House of Grace.  It is the Act of The Father working in our lives before we are fully aware.  It is a stirring of the soul which comes to know something is missing from our lives and yet is fully present before us.  It is an awakening, a beckoning, an invitation.  It is a dawning awareness that what we only think is missing is only for lack of full awareness. 

We cannot earn this awakening because it belongs to The Father alone and is not for sale.  As such, it is His to give … and to give freely as He alone chooses; “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy” (Exodus 33:19).  It is His act and His nature to call out to His own creation – but we must be willing to answer.  We begin to perceive it as an irresistible compulsion to find real meaning, real purpose, and real life as we come upon the “front porch” and are led to know the door of justifying grace is before us, the door through which Life is found, the door we come to know will be answered if we will but knock.

Make no mistake; it is not as easy as it sounds.  The life we once knew before we came upon the “porch” is equally compelling because it is familiar, known, and seems safer than what is unknown beyond the “door” (“Better the devil you know than the God you don’t”).  Yet we must become aware of the reality of cost: what is past must be left in the past. 

It is no longer the life we can go on living on our own terms.  It is expressed in the lyrics from Jesus Christ Superstar, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”, “In these past few days when I’ve seen myself, I seem like someone else …”, Mary Magdalene singing of her confusion in her transformation after having encountered and connected with Jesus.  She knew she could not go back to her former life, and yet she was unsure of how to go forward.

Conventional wisdom holds that we can never go back.  We can never relive the past because it is, quite literally, gone.  Try though we might, we are older and wiser and will always see the past through the lens of our experiences.  It can never be the same again. 

In Christ, my dear friends, this is a very good thing and is perhaps The Gift of gifts.  Perhaps it is the Father showing us that all we can have and all we can hope is ahead of us.  We can never erase good memories, of course, but neither can we completely erase the bad ones.  We will still bear the scars of an ungodly past, and we will live to regret every single sin we ever committed.

But that’s the human mind.  Our Father, through His Mercy, chooses to let it go even if we cannot; “I will remember their sins no more”.  He spoke through His prophet to His people during their Exile, and He still speaks to us in our own.  Yet what scares us is that He bids us come and die; die to the past, die to our mistakes, die to our own ideals, die to our own desires. 

Only then can we truly come alive.  Only then can we really begin to live into the Life we are each called to – as individuals and as the Congregation, the very Body of Christ.  Only then can we come to really know our past, in our Father’s Eyes, is “Over and Done”.  It is forgiveness for those who truly and fully repent.  In the Father.  Through the Son.  By the power of the Holy Spirit.  It is Life Eternal.  Amen.