These parents who move so quickly to forgiveness do not want a grace that demands they do something different. They want a cheap grace so they can claim to deal with the sin without having to let that grace get inside them and inside their child to change the child.

Bonhoeffer shudders about cheap grace because that understanding allows the world to go on in the same old way it has always gone. It removes from the cross of Christ the call for those who follow it to live a life different from the world around it and to live in obedience to Jesus.

Cheap grace is the preaching and discussion of forgiveness without expecting repentance, without believing that repentance means change, without expecting that restitution will be made where restitution is possible. It lacks the understanding that forgiveness when it is received, anticipates paying the consequences for the sin.

The young person who had been suspended from the Y for fighting apologized to the person attacked, apologized to the Y staff, and stayed out of the Y for the assigned six weeks. That was the process of forgiveness. He was forgiven. The Y received him back as a member in good standing. But the consequences were necessary for the Y and for the young person to participate in the changes brought by forgiveness.

Bonhoeffer suggests that grace is a much more costly process than we want it to be. It is costly because it invites us to leave the way we have been living and to follow a new and different way. It is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it does ask us to give up as important all those things which we have held on to so long as our shield and defenders. Our personal teddy bears. Our family traditions. Our schools: all those rankings of colleges and football teams, our gender and our race, our nationality. But it is grace because it gives us the only true life which is lasting as disciples of the living Lord. It is costly because it does condemn sins but it is grace because it sets us free from the burdens of trying to make ourselves good. But it does not set us free from the pull of Christ into a new direction and a new intention for our lives.

Costly grace is real forgiveness. Real forgiveness does not say that what one did or did not do does not matter. Costly grace says what we do matters immensely. Sin is so important that God had to come in Jesus to confront and break the hold sin has upon our lives.

In our own human relationships, wherever there is forgiveness there is always, on one side, the suffering of atonement on the part of the one who forgives. If you call me a dirty name, and you want forgiveness, I have to swallow my pride, I have to suffer the embarrassment of not doing anything about the insult, I have to contain my anger which may do me physical harm, send my blood pressure up, grind my teeth. There is an act of atonement by the one forgiving. There is also a suffering of repentance on the part of the one asking to be forgiven. Even if it is just taking a little thing like eating your piece of the cake, I have to humble myself, bear the pain of humility, contrition, admittance to wrong, to ask your forgiveness, promise not to take it again, and I'll even go get you a new cake at the store if you want me to, and you have to suffer the pain of being willing to accept my apology and being willing to work with me again.