The Cost and the Joy

Today's Reading

Read Philippians 3:7-11: "But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him... that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead."

Then read Hebrews 12:1-2: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God."

Reflection

We have spent fourteen days with one of the most demanding voices in the history of Christian thought. Bonhoeffer's message is not comfortable. He speaks of death, of the cross, of suffering as the badge of discipleship, of a grace that costs everything. If we have heard him rightly, we should feel the weight of what he is asking.

But if we stop at the weight, we have missed his deepest point. Bonhoeffer's final word is not about cost. It is about Christ.

"This is the end of the Nachfolge — to be conformed to the image of Christ," he writes at the close of The Cost of Discipleship. "Christ's image, to which we are to be conformed, is the Incarnate, Crucified, and Glorified One." Note the final word: Glorified. The journey does not end at the cross. It passes through the cross to glory. The suffering is real, but it is temporary. The joy is real, and it is eternal.

Paul understood this. "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." This is not the language of grim duty. It is the language of a man who has found something so valuable that everything else looks like rubbish by comparison. Paul's losses were real — imprisonment, beatings, shipwrecks, the enmity of his own people. But the gain — knowing Christ — was so overwhelmingly superior that the calculation was not even close.

Hebrews 12 reveals the same pattern in Jesus Himself: "who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame." Jesus endured the greatest suffering in human history, and He did it for joy. The cross was not the end of the story. It was the means by which joy — cosmic, unshakeable, eternal joy — was secured for Christ and for all who follow Him.

Bonhoeffer himself embodied this. On the morning of his execution, April 9, 1945, the camp doctor at Flossenburg later wrote: "I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer... kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer." His last recorded words, spoken to a fellow prisoner, were: "This is the end — for me the beginning of life."

Going Deeper

The cost of discipleship and the joy of discipleship are not opposites. They are two aspects of a single reality. You cannot have the joy without the cost, because the joy is found in Christ — and the path to Christ runs through the cross. But neither should you dwell on the cost without the joy, because that reduces discipleship to mere endurance and misses the treasure at the heart of it all.

Bonhoeffer did not follow Jesus because he had to. He followed because he had found the one thing worth giving everything for. "The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success as its standard," he wrote. Success, comfort, security — these are the world's measures. The disciple measures by a different standard: faithfulness to the One who loved us and gave Himself for us.

As this plan ends, the question is not whether you have mastered Bonhoeffer's theology. The question is whether you are ready to follow the Christ he followed — the Incarnate, Crucified, and Glorified One — wherever He leads, at whatever cost, for whatever joy awaits.