Freedom, a concept that has assailed
philosophers, theologians, and just everyday people in its various contexts of
understanding and engagement. In this post I want to riff on that concept as we
receive it in the dominical teaching of Jesus and the Apostolic teaching of Paul
(remember this is a blog post, and thus is off the top and reflective in
nature).
31 So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had
believed Him, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples
of Mine; 32 and you will know the truth, and the
truth will make you free.” 33 They answered Him, “We
are Abraham’s descendants and have never yet been enslaved to anyone; how is it
that You say, ‘You will become free’?”
34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to
you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of
sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the house
forever; the son does remain forever. 36 So if the
Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I
know that you are Abraham’s descendants; yet you seek to kill Me, because My
word has no place in you. 38 I speak the things
which I have seen with My Father; therefore you also do the things
which you heard from your father.”
39 They answered and said to Him, “Abraham is our
father.” Jesus *said to them, “If you are Abraham’s children, do the deeds of
Abraham. 40 But as it is, you are seeking to kill
Me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God; this Abraham did
not do. 41 You are doing the deeds of your
father.” They said to Him, “We were not born of fornication; we have one Father:
God.” 42 Jesus said to them, “If God were your
Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I
have not even come on My own initiative, but He sent
Me. 43 Why do you not understand what I am
saying? It is because you cannot hear My
word. 44 You are of your father the devil,
and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the
beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.
Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a
liar and the father of lies. 45 But because I speak
the truth, you do not believe Me.46 Which one of you
convicts Me of sin? If I speak truth, why do you not believe
Me?47 He who is of God hears the words of God; for
this reason you do not hear them, because you are not of God.”[1]
A few observations:
1) This is one reason I am Reformed, theologically. Jesus’ teaching and
thought is underwritten by a strong commitment to what some have called
total depravity, and he believes it extent and reach is so deep that it
blinds even religious people so deeply that it aligns them with the disobedience
and revelry of the devil to the point that this alignment becomes conflated with
doing the work of God (so the Pharisees and all religious people, including all
of us).
2) For these religious zealots they couldn’t understand how Jesus could
assert that they were enslaved; after all they were the religious elite, the
theological supermen, and they had the Torah, the Law of
Yahweh, which historically they believed in and of itself made them righteous
over against those who did not have Torah (the Gentiles) who were the sinners
enslaved by their passions and desires.
3) But Jesus understood something that the religious establishment of his day
did not; he understood that what God was looking at was the heart, and the need
for it to be circumcised, the need for it to replaced with his soft heart of
flesh (cf. Ez. 36:24ff; II Cor. 3:1ff). He understood that they were just as
enslaved as the Gentile sinners among them, and that they were enslaved to the
devil as much as anyone else.
Theological Reflection
This is the riff part I mentioned in my opening. Jesus thinks of ‘freedom’
not in the sense of deliberative libertarian free agency (which underwrites so
much of what it means to be a person in our individualistic Western contexts);
Jesus thinks of freedom as for God, as for his Father. There is only one
conception of freedom when we come to Jesus, it really has nothing to do with
the frequent conversations we encounter in regard to free-will. There is no such
thing as “free-will” except in God’s life of freedom; he is the only free-will
around. In order for us to be truly free, we need to find that freedom by being
in union with and participating in God’s triune life through Christ. This is
what Jesus understood (and what the Apostle Paul understood in Romans 6, which
we’ll have to address later); he wasn’t really all that concerned about
establishing a place for human beings in an individualistic sense, as if they
could be “human” in abstraction or annexed from the life of God. Indeed, Jesus’
life itself bears witness to this fact; in order to be truly human, according to
Jesus, means that God and humanity are hypostatically united; it means that
humanity is living in right relationship with God by grace. This is where and
how the Pharisees could be ‘free indeed’ and it is how we too can be free; free
for God, since he alone is freedom in himself, and he has graciously and freely
chosen to be with us and not against us, in Christ. Amen.
- Bobby Grow
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