‘For freedom Christ has set us free.
Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.’ So says St Paul
in today’s reading from his epistle to the Galatians 5:1,13-25.
But am I
truly free? Are you truly free? I’m pretty sure I have never really been
free to do exactly what I want.
I remember
an evening at this time of year playing with my brother, when I must have been around
6 and Tom 2 years younger. My mother called us into the house to go to bed –
but I didn’t want to. I was enjoying myself, and it was still light. I ran away across the fields with Tom in tow, and she
hitched up her skirts and chased after us. Tom suffered a nasty wound when he
snagged himself on a barbed wire fence as we went through a gap. When she
caught up with us, she slapped me roundly on the leg for being such a naughty
boy and causing my brother to be hurt - the only time I ever remember her doing
so. And she was right – I needed to learn the lesson that there would be
consequences if I did exactly what I wanted, regardless of others.
And even
now, as an old man, I am still not totally free. If I break the criminal law of
the land - if I drive dangerously - and I’m caught, I will be tried and punished for it.
Today I want
to explore what Paul’s talk of freedom and slavery is all about.
It was Paul’s theological conviction that Christ by God’s
grace sets us free from the Jewish Law to follow a more important law, the law
of love, which is to love God and to love our neighbour as ourself.
The Jewish
Law is called the ‘halakah’ in Hebrew, meaning ‘the way to behave’. Jesus famously
summarised it as ‘You shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind; and you shall
love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matthew 22:35-40) – though he was not the first to do so.
Since the
time of Moses, the Jewish Law had become a vast compendium of commands and
prohibitions, drawn from the Torah, the first 5 books of our OT. It went far
beyond the 10 commandments – it prescribed how to apply 613 ‘mitzvot’ or commandments
to different circumstances. Pious Jews of the time, especially the Pharisees of
whom Paul was one, did their very best to follow every jot and tittle, since
they believed this is what God required of them.
Much of this
was good - it encouraged people to good, ethical behaviour. But attempts to follow
it slavishly resulted in behaviour which was perversely damaging – contrary to
the law of love. Remember how Jewish religious leaders attacked Jesus for
healing on the Sabbath, when work was prohibited. This attitude led Jesus to
declare ‘The Sabbath is made for man, not man
for the Sabbath’ (Mark 2:28). Jesus respected the spirit of the Jewish Law, and he said
he came to fulfil it, but he tempered it with the law of love.
Paul reminds
the Galatians that even if Christ calls them to freedom, they must not think
that they are free to do absolutely anything. They are still bound by Christ’s
law of love. ‘Do not use your freedom as an
opportunity for self-indulgence’, he says, ‘but through love become slaves to one another. For the
whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbour
as yourself”.’
Paul
continues, ‘If … you bite and devour one another,
take care that you are not consumed by one another’. Here he is
restating that ancient ethical maxim, the Golden Rule, “Do as you would be done
by”. This is not a specifically Christian idea, but one found in almost all religions
and secular philosophies, in ancient times as much as today. It is after all the
basis for peaceable coexistence and human flourishing in any society.
But Paul goes further than this: ‘Live by the Spirit’, he says, ‘do not gratify the desires of the flesh’.
For Paul it
is the Spirit, sent by God at Jesus’s request, which enables us as Christians
to live up to the law of love. He understands the tensions in our human nature
between our baser instincts – this is what he means by ‘the flesh’ – and our
better natures which strive for all that is right and good and true.
The works of
the flesh are the consequences of giving in to our baser instincts. Paul gives
us a long list, including not only sexual unfaithfulness, but also hatred and
jealousy, anger and envy - all of them behaviours which damage relationships
with other people. They are behaviours contrary to the law of love. They cut
people off from God’s kingdom.
I fear we
see such behaviours all too often from fundamentalist religious leaders, and
populist political leaders – and their bad examples spread like an epidemic
among their followers. We must resist infection by them.
Paul
contrasts these behaviours with the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace –
patience, kindness, generosity – faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These
are the qualities that the Spirit calls us to display as Christians who follow
Christ’s law of love.
Each one of us is like the soldier in the trenches in
Woodbine Willie’s 1st World War poem.
I'm a man, and man's a mixture,
Right up from 'is very birth,
There's part of 'im comes from 'eaven,
And part of 'im comes from earth.
There's summat as draws 'im upwards,
And summat as drags 'im duhn,
And the consekence is that 'e wobbles
Twixt muck and a golden crown.
We wobble. We wobble because all too often our baser instincts overcome our best intentions. But God
offers us forgiveness if we respond to Christ, repent and try to do better.
And by God’s
grace we have received the Spirit which Christ asked the Father to send us. If
we live by that Spirit, if we allow ourselves to be guided by that Spirit, we will
not be slaves to our baser instincts, we will not be down in the muck. We will be
free, free to live by Christ’s law of love, free to enjoy the fruits of the
Spirit, and free to inherit a golden crown in the kingdom of God.
I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word
O
God, the light of the minds that know you,
the
life of the souls that love you,
the
strength of the thoughts that see you:
help
us to know you that we may truly love you,
and
so to love you that we may fully serve you,
whose
service is perfect freedom,
through
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
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