The Cost of Discipleship | Not Cheap, But Crucified
What Sin Demands, Christ Endures
Have you ever noticed how we’re really good at making the cross polite?
We hang it around our necks in gold. We stitch it onto throw pillows in pastel thread. We etch it into stained glass, nice and soft, no blood, no screams, no death. The cross is a sticker you can put on the back of your car.
We’ve got Good Friday down to an aesthetic. A vibe. As if this day was about ambiance rather than agony.
But John’s Gospel won’t let us do that. Not today.
Because here, Jesus isn’t looking pretty. He’s bleeding. Dying. Abandoned. And this—the horror of it—is the cost. The real cost. Not just of discipleship, Bonhoeffer might say—but the cost of grace itself.
Bonhoeffer wrote from a prison cell. A fascist regime locked him up because he couldn’t stomach a Christianity that baptized nationalism and ignored a cross-shaped Lord. He wrote, “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves… the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession.”
You know cheap grace, don’t you?
It’s the grace we love because it doesn’t ask much. It’s “come as you are”—but never “go and sin no more.”
It’s comfort without the cross.
It’s Christ as a therapist, not a crucified King.
But grace that costs nothing means nothing.
Costly grace, Bonhoeffer says, is the grace that calls us to follow—really follow—Jesus. Not just admire him. Not quote him on social media. Follow him.
Follow him to places we don’t want to go.
Follow him to the poor and the powerless.
Follow him to the prison cell.
Follow him to the foot of the cross.
Follow him onto the cross.
And here’s the wildest part of all: Jesus doesn’t just talk about the cost. He pays it.
Nobody took his life from him. He laid it down.
He endured the betrayal. The trial. The mocking. The beating.
He carried the cross himself.
And John tells us, at the end, with his final breath: “It is finished.”
You hear that? He’s not defeated. He’s not a victim of circumstance. He’s not the tragic martyr of a failed cause. He finishes it. He pays the cost in full.
Not a down payment. Not a discount. Not a deferred loan.
The whole thing.
This is what grace looks like—bloody, bruised, and hanging on a tree.
Jesus doesn’t look away from the weight of our sin—he takes it, every bit of it, into himself. And he lets it do its worst. Not to excuse us, but to redeem us. Sin wasn’t swept under the rug—it was nailed to the cross. In the flesh. His flesh.
Because love—real love—doesn’t flinch from pain.
Love goes to hell and back.
You can try to tidy that up, make it doctrinal and tame. But the scandal of Good Friday is that this—this broken body—is what God’s love looks like.
This is God saying, “You don’t get to carry this alone. I’ll take it. Every sin. Every wound. Every last ounce of death.”
This is not a spiritual metaphor. This is not a theological concept. This is Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God, crucified under Pontius Pilate. Real wood. Real nails. Real blood. Real grace.
We’re so tempted to make Christianity about belief systems and values and bumper stickers.
But Jesus didn’t die to give us a worldview.
He died to save the world.
He didn’t call us to think our way to salvation.
He called us to die with him—to lose our lives, that we might find them.
So if we’re going to follow this Jesus, we better count the cost.
Because this kind of grace will wreck your life.
It’ll pull you away from the comfortable crowd.
It’ll make you love your enemies.
It’ll ask you to give up your rights for the sake of the hurting.
It’ll make you look foolish. Vulnerable. Weak.
Which is to say—it’ll make you look like Jesus.
So today, we kneel at the foot of the cross, not to admire but to confess.
We confess that we’ve cheapened grace.
We confess that we love comfort more than Christ.
We confess that we’re afraid to die—metaphorically, spiritually, literally.
But we also confess this:
That he finished it.
That it is done.
That the cost is paid.
And now, we’re free.
Not to go back to the life we had.
But to live the cruciform life he’s calling us into.
Because it cost him everything.
And now, by grace, it will cost us everything too.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.