Costly Hope

During advent, we talk about peace, joy, love, and hope. Hope is on my mind today, so I thought I would dwell on it for a few minutes.

In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer distinguished between cheap grace and costly grace, noting that cheap grace seems to be far too prevalent in the church (also, check out Jones' Embodying Forgiveness for a very in depth look at Bonhoeffer's view of grace). I think the same could be said for hope; we seem to look all too often for a hope that is cheap, rather than a costly hope. A costly hope is richer, deeper, but more painful to come to, so we opt for cheap hope. Let's look at this closer...

Cheap hope is an all-smiles form of faith that forces us to become shiny happy people holding hands all the time. We become people who speak of God's will and glory in ways that make the Lord look sick and/or cruel. We accept pain, suffering and death passively. We give up with large grins and wait patiently for heaven while the world around us crumbles. And when it really hits the fan and we are completely broken, we punish ourselves for not having enough faith, or give up completely on God because our poor theology has completely failed us.

We need to discover and grab hold of costly hope. It is hope for the realist, who sees and comprehends the dismal state of affairs around him or her, is absolutely broken by it, yet strives to press on and work towards the distant kingdom which is but a hope. It's a Hebrews 11 kind of hoping in which the end is often left unrealized and the one who had hoped is forced to come to terms with the fact that things just aren't going to be fair in this life when we try to gauge it on our measure of fairness. Costly hope wrestles with God over this. It is not passive in its hoping, as much as it is stubborn, striving for the good in the face of insurmountable evil, praying for the kingdom even as the fallenness of our world becomes overwhelming, screaming at our Father to take action and working towards what is right, all the while realizing that he is choosing to work through us. Costly hope mirrors the work of Christ, who willingly laid down his life on the cross, yet even on the cross wrestled with God. He wanted the kingdom to come, but did not like how it had to happen.

Life comes through death. We put our hope in a crucified God. Yet we continue to long for a world in which death's power is taken away and the spirit of life rules all things. We fight for life and have a hope that costs more than any form of cheap hope the world can offer.

Peace,
Matt

Currently Reading: Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses by Bruce Feiler, and Help! I'm a Student Leader by Doug Fields. Oh, and I'm also reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

Currently Listening To: A live performance CD I recently found of famous people reading passages of Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United States. Certain parts of it bring tears to my eyes.