Palm Sunday, Cheap Grace, and the March for Our Lives

Growing up in the Presbyterian Church, I had never heard of Passion Sunday. For me, it was Palm Sunday, all palms, all celebration. It was the warm up for the big celebration the coming Sunday. As a child, the celebration of Palm Sunday faded directly into new spring clothes, girls and women in new spring hats, Easter egg hunts, special music at church, and Easter baskets filled with goodies. I was aware of the events between Palm Sunday and Easter. I may even have attended a Maundy Thursday service at some point as a child. But for me, Holy Week was celebration leading to celebration, joy leading to joy.

I suppose that Passion Sunday got paired with the palms to help with this, to deal with the common problem of getting to Easter without suffering, without pain, without a cross. This childhood pattern of mine in some ways epitomized the "cheap grace" Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke against in his famous book, The Cost of Discipleship. Wrote Bonhoeffer, "Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate."

I found myself reflecting on cheap grace and costly grace yesterday evening. I was going through the pictures I took at the March For Our Lives in DC earlier in the day and looking at others' pictures and posts on social media. I thought of those young people, some children, others barely out of childhood, participating in something that requires them to keep reliving those horrid moments they surely would love to forget. I watched a replay of the speech by Emma Gonzalez, including its long, painful silence. As I watched, I also watched the stream of comments that were regularly interspersed with the most hateful remarks directed at her and the other youth with her.

I thought about a broken world than can only be healed by a cross, a broken world that needs the deaths of scores of children before it can begin to act. I thought about costly grace that does not shy away from pain and difficulty. I thought about all those thousands gathered yesterday in our own version of a Palm Sunday procession where signs replaced cloaks and palms.

The youth on the stage seemed to get the idea of costly grace, perhaps because this has already cost them so dearly. For them yesterday was not a magical moment that fixed anything. It was merely a step in a difficult and painful discipleship sort of walk.

I wondered about me and all those others there, about how many of us were ready for a costly discipleship, about how many of us might go home feeling good about the day, and wanting that to somehow make it all better. I wonder if I and others were more interested in cheap grace "we bestow on ourselves," proud of having participated but now ready to move on, not so interested in costly discipleship.

On one of those social media posts from yesterday's marches, I saw people carrying a sign that has often been used as a benediction in church worship services.

Go out into the world in peace; have courage; hold on to what is good; return to no one evil for evil; strengthen the fainthearted; support the weak, and help the suffering; honor all people; love and serve the Lord, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Yes... this.