8th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 2 March 2025

The German writer, Deitrich Bonheoffer gave us the distinction between what he called, on the one hand, ‘cheap grace’ and, on the other, ‘costly grace.’ Writing in Germany in the 1930s he lamented the way in which the Christian Churches had so accommodated themselves to the prevailing currents as to have lost their genuine sense of discipleship of the Risen Lord. And this could equally be a possibility in our own time in which we can be swayed by political forces that use the term Christian to describe their aspirations, but which, in their conduct, are in no way Christian.

Of course, this is always a tendency for us. we struggle to hear the Word of God with clarity because of the chatter in which we are immersed. We begin to become seduced by many other words and narratives. The Canadian philosopher of religion, Charles Taylor, especially, has highlighted the way in which meaning today is derived almost entirely from personal experience.^[1] It is how I feel that determines the rightness of something. Unless I feel something has value, it has none. This we might label ‘the tyranny of affect’. It means that the realm of our feelings assumes dominance over all other perspectives, including our values, and it is particularly endemic in the way that most of us think and speak today. The danger in this is to reduce Christan faith to a gospel of niceness which no longer disturbs, a gospel of inclusion that no longer invites. The radical nature of the Gospel becomes lost.

The gospel today appears to challenge us to adopt a non-judgmental stance towards others. Jesus is clear, ours is not to accuse. But the invitation of the Gospel to recognize that we are all frail before the possibility extended to us in the Kingdom of God does not mean that we should be manipulated into a frame of thinking that the Christian community is without form, without distinctions, without borders. Hospitality can never be exercised in the loss of identity. The renunciation of accusation does not then mean that we abandon our critical faculty about what is right, and about what is wrong.

We have received a word. It is a Word not our own, but a Word that has been pronounced to us, the Word of revelation, the Word of God. It is not a Word simply derivative of personal experience and determined by how we feel.

We should be under no illusion. To listen deeply to the Spirit of God, to be accountable to a vision of life that we have received from a reality outside ourselves, to be drawn into a field of meaning that we ourselves have not determined, is to set ourselves up for estrangement in a climate that determines the rightness of something from how I feel about it, and which cannot entertain the objectivity of meaning beyond reference to my own personal experience of something. Our voice will not win us friends; it will draw suspicion. It may even result in our condemnation. For the currents of thought with which we are faced are not without virulence; contrary opinions are summarily dismissed as bigoted, as an affront to compassion and tolerance and inclusion, and, therefore, as offensive – as if the Christian word must be relegated to the limp category of ‘nice.

At our baptism, we were immersed into the mystery of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We were not baptizzed into something that felt good. We were not baptizzed into something that we control, something from which we can pick and choose to make our own. We were not baptizzed into a narrative without definition, and which is inclusive of every position without boundaries. We were not baptizzed into a therapeutic mythology in which love is reduced to being nice to everyone, and in which the tortuous project of compassion is reduced to acceptance of everything. We were baptizzed into a story of renunciation, a story of sacrificial love, a story of resistance. We were baptizzed into a life that resists everything that would truncate us of our humanity and draw us from the truth of ourselves. The times calls us to make a choice in respect to our baptism – and yes, to accept the price, or otherwise.

Our times are challenging. But they are also full of possibility. They must be if we truly believe in the power of the Spirit of God. The Spirit calls us to be those who remember, fully remember, those who savour the memory of Christ Jesus, the memory of the rich Tradition which is ours, the lived experience of 2000 years of experience of this person Jesus of Nazareth. And at the same time the Spirit calls us to be those of vision, and new possibility.

Then the vine onto which we have been grafted will bear fruit that will most truly nourish because it has not lost its distinct flavour.

^[1] See Charles Taylor’s two magisterial works, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989), and A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007).