Overwhelmed by freedom
In our series on Overwhelmed by the gospel, we are today looking at being overwhelmed by freedom. I want to look at the relationship between truth and freedom, and then freedom and love. In John 8, Jesus says that once we know the truth, the truth will set us free. This pairing of truth and freedom can be found from the very start of the Biblical story. A lot of people look at the story of Adam and Eve and focus on their inherent sinfulness – the ‘sinful human nature’. But my main takeaway from that story is a bit different.
To me, that story says that human beings get on alright until somebody lies to them. They’re enjoying the freedom with each other, in creation and with God. And then something enters the environment and gives a distorted picture of life, and this alters their ideas, which in turn influences their values, which leads to the very first act of excessive consumption. This harms their relationships with each other, with their environment and with God.
Their overconsumption leads to them no longer being able to live where they were and they have to migrate to a different place. I’m not really going to have to think very hard about how this could be relevant to our modern world! So if the cause of our unfreedom is a lie, what’s the solution? The solution is the truth. As Jesus said, once you know the truth, the truth will set you free.
A lot of Jesus ministry involves him responding to distorted ideas or outright lies with greater truth. The Pharisees say, “Moses said we could cast our wives aside if we write up a certificate”. But Jesus says that God has something much more faithful and committed in mind. The Pharisees say, “Moses said we can stone this woman because we caught her in adultery.” Jesus says, “Yes, stones are definitely the solution here.” No he doesn’t. He says that such self-righteousness is premised on lying to ourselves about sin, and scapegoating others for failures that rest on all of us.
The Pharisees think that it’s a sin to heal on the sabbath, but Jesus thinks that healing and giving life are wonderful things to do on the sabbath. You notice how in all these examples, the truer statement is also the one that is most life-giving, most loving, most relational, and most compassionate. Truth and freedom and love should all be mutually validating.
So when we seek to grow in freedom, a good place to start is to highlight lies that surround us, and to call them out as such, proclaiming a truer picture as our capacities allow. And what’s truer should be what is loving and freeing and compassionate. This is the sort of practice that I think Paul might be getting at when he writes in 2 Corinthians that: ‘We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.’ It’s phrased in the bull-in-a-china-shop type of way that Paul tends to phrase things. But the development of such a critical mind-set is, I think, so important.
When you can walk out your front door and see the streets and walls of Manchester plastered in adverts, all willing to proclaim any lie at all, as long it gets you to buy stuff. When the popular media is a voice box for a political and economic establishment that is completely uninterested in either the truth or your freedom. And when the cost of these lies is slavery, suffering and destruction. When all of these things are the case, it becomes clear why we need to exercise our critical faculties.
Those who hoard wealth and power in this world have a vested interest in subjugation and slavery, they have vested interest in lying, and it is a matter of spiritual and intellectual self-defence to be anticipating manipulation. When the government says that we should sell weapons to human rights abusing nations because it’s good for the UK economy, we should take that thought captive and evaluate it by the spirit of love, peace, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness. When they say that we should indefinitely detain in prisons, the poor migrant in our country, we should take that thought captive, and analyse it by the spirit of God. To see any voice or institution as being above such evaluation is a kind of idolatry. And we all fall prey to it.
But every time we do this – every time we identify a lie and proclaim a truth, we grow in freedom. Once we know truth, we don’t settle for what the lie said was freedom. And the evidence for that fact is reverberating around the world right now. From Bolivia to Sudan, Thailand to the US, Hong Kong to Rojava, across Eastern Europe to the UK, and on and on. People are calling out the lies and persecution, proclaiming truth and freedom, and then hitting the streets to demand it.
Today, as I write this, Myanmar is engaged in a conflict between the military and the people, in which only one side has weapons. But the people are on the street making their demands all the same. That might seem like a paradox. People are dying and being put in prison. How do we make sense of that? They want more freedom, and so do something which they might know will result in them losing even the level of freedom they already had. My own sense is that our desire for freedom is grounded in love. And love is always ultimately more concerned for others than ourselves.
People rightly want more freedom for themselves, and so it drives them to do something that costs them. Why? Because they are driven by a love which says that if this is important for me, it’s also important for her, for him and for us. It’s only a paradox when we believe the lie that people who are truly free will live for themselves alone. It’s only a paradox if we don’t think of the very act of resistance as a proclamation of the freedom we already possess. To live in keeping with a Kingdom of God that is better than the kingdom we find ourselves in. But those who are freed from lies and reminded of the truth know themselves to be beings who live for others, even at cost to themselves.
I know people have found COVID a particularly difficult time. But time and time again we see that such moments as this provide the opportunity for massive transformation. Now is the time to call into question all of the claims that dominate our environment which tell us that what we need in response to COVID is more of the very policies, practices and systems that are destroying our world. Even in our little church we can do better than that. We know greater truths, we can imagine greater freedom, and we can live for it.
Josh Findlay
