One Wednesday a month, my daughters’ school hosts this thing called “All Pro Dads”. When we get together, we talk about something that I would call a “virtue”. In the past we have talked about compassion, resilience, consistency, and other things. Today we talked about “Determination”. As we talked about this virtue, I started to think about it in terms of our Christian walk.
In some ways, I fear that sometimes we lose track of “determination” in the Church. We recognize Christ’s determination to save us, especially in verses such as in Luke 9 when He “sets His face toward Jerusalem” in order to go to the Cross. We even recognize the determination of His first disciples as they undertook the difficulty of things like being sent out, two by two, to bring word of His Kingdom to the cities of Judea. But sometimes, I’m afraid that we might lose some sense of determination – this drive to do the right things, to follow Christ’s instructions, to walk in justice and mercy.
Of course, another part of me screams out from the background of my mind – “Determination?!?!? to do good works?!?!? What are you? A secret works-righteousness Pharisee posing as a Lutheran pastor?” Well, that is entirely possible – I’m a sinner like the rest of you, and given my job, Pharisee-ism is a temptation that I have to fight back from time to time.
But I also read things like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “The Call of Discipleship” where he calls us to consider if we are engaging in “cheap grace.” For Bonhoeffer, this concept means to simply take grace because it is the “easy route.” To say “thank you very much Jesus for the forgiveness, and now I’m going to go back to those same sins.” It is something worth wrestling with, and when I wrestle with it, I find in myself a lack of this concept of “determination”. Am I really determined to bring about God’s Kingdom? Am I determined to hold fast to Christ’s teachings? Certainly not all of the time. Certainly not enough. I’m not only a Pharisee, I am a Pharisee who loves cheap grace.
Yet this is what the Gospel is for. I am who the Gospel is for. So are you. The Gospel is for those of us who wrestle with sin and find ourselves losing, crying out “uncle!” as our self-reflection indicts us in our sins. Grace should never be “cheap” as Bonhoeffer put it, but thank God it is free. It is free because of the determination of God who determined that we should be saved by His Son being put to death on a Cross – a determination that was shown in not even letting the grace hold Him down. It is because of His determination that I can even dream about being determined myself.