We all live uneventful ordinary lives; and this perfectly okay. We navigate our days through familiar rhythms—commutes to work, does daily responsibilities, and are happy with the comforting predictability of routine. Jesus spent decades in Nazareth as a carpenter's son. Peter, Andrew, James, and John rose each morning to mend their nets and cast them into the Sea of Galilee, as fishermen had done for generations. There is profound beauty in the ordinary, in lives woven from the threads of daily work and quiet faithfulness.
Yet here lies the essential paradox of Christian existence: as one must be simultaneously rooted in the ordinary be also must be perpetually prepared to abandon it. The day those Galilean fishermen encountered Jesus marked not merely a career change but a fundamental reorientation of their lives (Matthew 4: 12-23). They returned home that evening not as fishermen but as fishers of people—to the bewilderment, perhaps even embarrassment, of their families and communities. What appeared to onlookers as the ruin of a perfectly good livelihood was, in truth, a response to a call that demanded they exchange security for discipleship.
This call-and-response pattern forms the very architecture of Christian identity. To be Christian is not to have arrived at a static state of grace but to remain perpetually equipped, perpetually listening, perpetually prepared to respond. The Gospel narratives unfold through this rhythm again and again. When Jesus learnt that John had been arrested, he did not retreat into safety but stepped forward into his public ministry. The Good Samaritan, encountering a wounded stranger on the Jericho road, responded to an immediate and uncomfortable call to compassion. Zacchaeus, summoned unexpectedly from his sycamore tree, opened not only his home but also his entire life to transformation. Mary at the wedding in Cana interceded for strangers' dignity, responding to a need before it became a crisis.
The parable of the wise and foolish maidens illuminates this truth with particular clarity. The difference between wisdom and foolishness rested not in their intentions—all ten maidens intended to meet the bridegroom—but in their preparedness. "Therefore keep watch," Jesus warns, "because you do not know the day or the hour." The lamp is useless without oil; intention is meaningless without readiness. Christianity, then, is the oil we carry—the cultivated capacity to respond when the call arrives, whether it comes at midday or midnight.
This readiness finds its ultimate definition in Matthew 25, where Christ himself identifies with the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned. The righteous, we are told, did not even recognise their own acts of service: "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you?" Their responsiveness had become so woven into their character that they acted without calculating reward or recognition. Meanwhile, those who failed to respond pleaded their ignorance: "Lord, when did we see you in need?" But the King's reply is devastating: "Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." The call had been sounded all along, in every face of human suffering, yet they were not equipped to hear it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer embodied this costly readiness. Comfortably situated at Union Theological Seminary in New York, engaged to be married, he held the future many would envy. Yet when Nazi Germany descended into darkness, Bonhoeffer recognised a call that demanded he return to share in his people's trials. "I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people," he wrote. This is the essence of Christian alertness—the ability to perceive the call and the courage to answer it, even unto death. Bonhoeffer would spend two years in prison for joining the plot against Hitler and would be executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp on 9 April 1945, mere weeks before the war's end.
In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer distinguished between cheap grace and costly grace. Cheap grace, he argued, is the deadly enemy of the Church—grace without discipleship, forgiveness without repentance, communion without confession. It is grace as doctrine, as principle, as system, but not grace as life. Costly grace, conversely, is the Gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which one must knock. It is costly because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ, because it costs us our lives. Yet it is grace because it gives us the only true life.
Being awake, being ready, being equipped to answer the call—this is costly grace made incarnate. It costs us our kingdoms. We pray fervently, "Thy kingdom come," yet clutch desperately at our own small dominions, unwilling to pray, "Let my kingdom go." We are too often preoccupied with what Bonhoeffer would call the non-essential: comfort, security, reputation, the preservation of our familiar routines. Yet the quality of a Christian life is measured not by what we've accumulated but by our readiness to relinquish it all in response to a higher call.
The tragedy is not that calls go unissued—they sound constantly, in the faces of the marginalised, in moments of moral crisis, in opportunities for costly compassion; the tragedy is that we are unprepared to hear them, our lamps empty of oil, our hearts too encumbered with the non-essential to recognise the essential when it arrives.
Christianity, then, is not a Sunday profession but a perpetual posture of readiness. It is the fisherman who can leave his nets, the scholar who can abandon his security, the comfortable who can embrace discomfort, the living who can embrace sacrifice. It is the cultivation of a soul so attuned to grace that it recognises the call in every cry of human need and is equipped, at any cost, to respond.
For in the end, we will not be asked about our doctrinal precision or our liturgical correctness. We will be asked: When the call came—in the hungry, in the stranger, in the imprisoned—were you ready? Did you answer? The rest is all non-essential.
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