The Cost of Discipleship
AM Psalm 72 • PM Psalm 119:73-96
Lev. 19:1-18 • 1 Thess. 5:12-28 • Matt.6:19-24
Many of the gospel readings for the weeks after Easter this year come from the Sermon on the Mount. We’ve heard those texts over and over, and for me the part that really stuck was what are known as the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-11). At first they sound soothing (what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”), but on closer reflection they are making extraordinary claims on the followers of Jesus.
In the mid-1930s Bonhoeffer shared with his students some lectures on the subject of discipleship (“Nachfolge” in German) which were inspired by the Sermon on the Mount. They were living and working together in a covert seminary of the Confessing Church which was led by Evangelical (Lutheran) pastors who had not pledged allegiance to Hitler. In 1937 the lectures were published as Nachfolge, a shocking book title in Germany then because it was the same word being used to describe the relationship between Hitler and his followers.* Just as Paul once wrote that “Jesus is Lord” (and, by implication, “Caesar is not”), Bonhoeffer boldly asserted that Jesus, not Hitler, is worthy of following. This Christian discipleship cost Bonhoeffer his life.
By the time we get to the portion of the Sermon on the Mount assigned for today, we have already received a sobering introduction to what Bonhoeffer called “costly grace,” and today’s selection includes these familiar lines: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth...but store up for yourselves treasure in heaven....For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” And “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Wealth.”
A German scholar later wrote that “Christians seemed primed to dismiss the Beatitudes as impossible ideals. Everywhere he turned, Bonhoeffer seemed to encounter in the churches an ill-defined refusal to bear Christ’s cross.” But before we in 2010 get too critical of those German Christians we might take a closer look at ourselves.
Written by Bob McMath
As an undergraduate in the 1960s, I struggled with the writings of two 20th century Christian martyrs, Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr.
* This point is spelled out by Ferdinand Schlingensiepen in his masterful biography, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance (2010). Early editions of Nachfolge in English carried the title The Cost of Discipleship. Bonhoeffer modeled seminary life at Finkenwalde on the Anglican monastic communities he had visited in 1935 while serving as pastor to German-speaking churches in England. To learn more about life at Finkenwalde, see Bonhoeffer’s little book, Life Together, originally published as Gemeinsames Leben (1938).