The Christ event appears as revelation of the holy in history. The holy appears in passion, death and resurrection. His appearance or his revelation was manifestation of holiness, but it appeared as criticism, scandal and crime. His life’s way is the way of the holy, and the truth. He was accused of being possessed, a lunatic and a scandal to the Jews and a threat to their religion. His way of life became a way of conflict and cross. The agony, the suffering and death were the consequence of his wrestle with the powers of the world. A godless world eliminated him. He asked his followers to deny worldly ways and oneself and to take up the cross and follow him. The way of the cross is a contradiction to the world, but it became a godly way. The way that was branded Quixotic was proclaimed holy and sublime.
The immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own ways that are comic, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire alone to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim him king. He left the title of king for the inscription written over the cross. While our tragedy is still playing itself out, corruption is injustice, silence is consent. At the end, all his disciples deserted him. On the cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of god. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life, but in the thick of foes.
Living for the kingdom of god is to be in the midst of enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the kingdom; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people, but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what the present day Christians are doing, who would ever have been spared! The grace of God has become so cheap. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.
Cheap grace is grace without discipline, grace without the cross, and grace without Jesus Christ. The gospel of poverty, denial and renunciation became a gospel of health and wealth, pomp and glory. A leadership of service and washing the other’s feet degenerate into hegemony of one voice. A god of multiplicity of languages becomes a sun god of totalitarian violence of light. The Esperanto of the univocally powerful kills all other languages and creates a monopoly of itself without the other. The only-language kills dialogue and understanding; there is no more communion.
The falsification is really brought about over the centuries, whereby Christianity is gradually becoming just the opposite of what it is there in New Testament. There must be an awakening which is inwardly deepening. Can Christ rise from Christendom to tear thee out of the tranquility in which thou naturally art? Only if leniency is substituted for rigorousness: It can happen only through the consciousness of sin; to want to enter by any other road is high treason against Christianity. If someone wants to become a Christian with infinite passion, he must be a fool like Francis, but we have become hypocritical and shrewd. The identification marks of the Risen Lord are his wounds; can the Christian have another identity?
(The writer is editor of Light of Truth)
