By Fr George Adimike
The liturgical year of the Church, designed as a formative course in Christian discipleship, heightens and intensifies lessons on true discipleship during Lent, especially during Holy Week.
Throughout the year, a Christian receives formation through the mysteries of faith. Lent, and its culmination, Holy Week, offer a specialised and concentrated training to align our wills intimately to the will of God, similar to the liturgy of self-submission on the Mount of Olives. It leads us to the union of wills through the path of the Cross and the realisation that true worship integrates prayer, penance and charity.
In prayer, we communicate with words; in penance, we communicate with the body; and in charity, we communicate through good works. As such, during this season of grace and renewal, Christians mature in integrating the three pathways to God: prayer, penance, and charity in cooperation with grace.
At the threshold of the Christian holiest days, every Christian is invited to focus on grace. The mystery of this sacred week underscores the inevitability of grace for salvation. Since grace is costly, the faithful relive the mystery of their salvation through Holy Week by active participation. Holy Week, the last week of the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ, is laden with grace and offers a profound spiritual experience for the faithful. As a profound spiritual experience, it commemorates the core mysteries of salvation―excruciating suffering, violent death, and glorious resurrection of Christ. It awakens the faithful to the deeper meaning of our Easter faith and to intentionally embrace God’s salvation, which expresses His radical love. It is a time to appreciate this immense love through personal repentance and renewal. Indeed, Christians are invited to a living encounter with the Risen Lord in appreciation of the great price for our salvation.
The Paschal events of Holy Week make evident that salvation, though free, is very costly. It required the excruciating pain and violent death of the youthful Nazarene, Jesus the Christ of God. The betrayal, suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ give this week its meaning and significance. This is costly grace, freely given, but it demands active devotion. The events of Holy Week, culminating in Christ’s resurrection, are unique points on the path to Paschal grace. Through Christ’s paschal grace, salvation is freely offered to all who will receive it. Reception is not passive but requires active participation.
The objective redemption of all creation becomes a subjective gift only through active reception and participation. This begins with faith in Christ and leads to discipleship. Without conscious cooperation, grace remains ineffective. Though showers of grace rain endlessly, one may not be drenched by this divine rain. From Passion Sunday, when he entered his Paschal mystery, to the Resurrection on Easter, the mysteries of the week offer steps and stations on the path to our salvation.
While grace is a free, gratuitous gift of God—the divine presence that enables Christians to live their divine filiation—its counterfeit is cheap grace. Many doctrines on grace amount to counterfeit due to such distortions: true grace inspires a response, while cheap grace suggests passivity. Romans 6:1 and 2 Corinthians 9:8 directly rebut this misunderstanding. Salvation is free but not cheap, as it costs the precious blood of the Son of God. Cheap (fake) grace treats grace as a license to follow personal impulses without consequences. It distorts forgiveness in light of God’s salvation, presenting it as requiring no human cooperation. As certain brands and expressions of Christianity emerge, faith is often portrayed as a religion of ‘luxury or nothing.’ This kind of religion depends on a fake grace that strips the Cross of its meaning. With roots in ancient Gnostic teachings (antinomianism), the theology of grace opposed to law found resonance among some Reformation groups. Teachings such as faith alone or grace alone echo this hyper-grace, or cheap grace, promoting salvation without sanctification.
At the core of the teaching of this grace alone is the false doctrine that we are saved by faith alone and that works have no place in salvation. In an effort to underscore salvation as a free gift and in opposition to work-righteousness, the protagonists of this erroneous doctrine hold that conduct is works and is therefore of no importance to salvation. Under the deceptive guise that the issue of sin is already settled once and for all at Calvary Mountain, on the cross, moral conduct is taught to be outside of the scheme of God’s salvation, and cannot impact a believer’s salvific fate with God. It is a corrective doctrine that errs far beyond the error it seeks to correct. Formed by the doctrine that grace is acquired once, after which it cannot be lost or increased, the promoters of this theological understanding of the faith focus only on accepting Jesus as a personal Lord and Saviour.
While Christianity is about the encounter of Christ and its attendant justification by that faith, this kind of doctrine robs the faith of its consequential and logical expression in love. It errs by delinking it from discipleship ― ecstasy without exodus, encounter without discipleship. The effect of such a doctrine is a religion that excludes sacrifice, a religion of luxury or nothing.
The Christianity of luxury or nothing has characterised the text, context, and expression of the faith for a large section of adherents, not only robbing it of its transformative power but also distorting its core. To a great extent, it appears to be a religion established to validate the stirrings of inner desires and the expression of their passions, mostly untrained, irascible or concupiscible appetites. Though grace is essential in Christian life, without grace there is no Christianity, yet the corruption of grace is fake grace. Fake grace is about Christianity that bifurcates truth and love, preaches wealth without work, and indulges in pleasure without responsibility. It is a Christianity that prioritises encounter without discipleship – grace devoid of law, faith that excludes good works, salvation without repentance, a prosperity gospel that idolises worldliness in the neglect of participation, which often involves conversion, suffering and persecution; it is a Christianity of luxury or nothing.
Fake grace preaches salvation and ignores sanctification. If we do not closely examine the harm this doctrine brings to true faith, Christianity struggles against illogical distortions. These distortions stretch her proper understanding. Fake grace thrives among lazy believers. These believers see faith as a scheme to meet their needs without sacrifice. It becomes a tool to tap the spiritual realm without any real self-alignment.
Let us, through the celebrations of this sacred week, intentionally ascend the mountaintop for a transfiguration experience, a Christofiguration that transforms souls into Christ. Therefore, the mystery of the Holy Week challenges us to shift from a profit-seeking, prosperity-focused, commercialised faith toward a transformative, Christ-centred faith and ethical life. Let this celebration transform us into agents of real renewal for the life of the world. Christianity, rooted in the Paschal mystery, invites us to true grace, which demands discipleship, as fake grace promotes complacency.
Fr George Adimike
findfadachigozie@gmail.com
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