THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE
Gerard Kelly
The second of three meditations

LOOKING AT THE SEVEN STORIES THAT MAKE UP THE SWEEP OF THE BIBLICAL
NARRATIVE, WE SEE FREEDOM AT EVERY STAGE.

In CREATION God declares his human creatures free, and asks that they love
and serve him through freedom in relationship. It is in the place of trust and
dependance that the true meaning of freedom is found. This is the foundation
of the Bible’s story, and the very root of the freedoms we so desperately seek
today. “Freedom is not a quality of man,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “Nor is it an
ability, a capacity, a kind of being that somehow flares up in him. Anyone
investigating man to discover freedom finds nothing of it. Why? because freedom is
not a quality which can be revealed – it is not a possession, a presence, an object, nor is
it a form of existence – but a relationship and nothing else. In truth, freedom is a
relationship between two persons. Being free means “being free for the other,” because
the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free.”

In VOCATION God invites specific human beings – first personified in Abraham
and Sarah – to walk with him in freedom. The model is covenantal, not
contractual. God in his freedom loves us and asks us in our freedom to love
him in return. Honoured as the ancestors of one third of the world’s
population – Christians, Muslims and Jews – Abraham and Sarah show us
what it means for us to hear from our maker the call to freedom. Their desire
to be free and their willingness to move in search of that freedom is the
prototype of much that we take for granted in world cultures – and arguably
the seed of the Western dream.

In LIBERATION the God of the Exodus demonstrates his personal, passionate,
unwavering commitment to human freedom. God shows himself to be the one
who brings us out from slavery. Since freedom ,as Genesis has told us, is a
prerequisite of covenant love, it follows that for Israel to be a people after
God’s heart they must be free. It is from their freedom that God will ask them
to obey and love him: covenant and slavery are mutually exclusive. ”The God
of our story is not woodenly acting out a pre-determined script,” Philip
Greenslade suggests, “He is living out a passion for His people and for the world’s redemption. … This is a God who is passionately aroused by injustice,
and plunges into emotional involvement with His people. …God hears and
feels, sees and knows, remembers and acts to save His people.”

In FORMATION we see how God, from tabernacle to temple and priests to
prophets, calls his people to follow him with all their hearts. It is love, not law
that will form them as his people, because love is a free response to covenant.
Worship is central to the human journey because it is the place in which the
heart, in free surrender, allows God access. We become who we are meant to
be by honouring God for who he is.

In LIMITATION the God of the exile frees his people even from the prison of
their own religious expectations. Jerusalem is too small for him – he wants the
whole world free. It is in exile that the promise of a Messiah truly forms – a
people stripped of their small sanctuary begin to dream of a “kingdom”as
wide as the world. Exodus and Exile are the two wheels on which the story of
Israel carries us to the story of Jesus – God uses both to teach us the true
meaning of freedom. As poet Maya Angelou has written, “The caged bird
sings with a fearful trill, of things unknown but longed for still, and his tune is
heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom.”

In INCARNATION God himself takes on the nature of humanity to delver us
once and for all from our alienation. Jesus embodies in his birth, life, death
and resurrection What it means to be truly human, to be truly free, and in our
freedom, to love and obey our maker. That which the creator looked for from
the very start is now delivered and fulfilled, so that the Apostle John can say,
“if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” Jean-Paul Sartre described
freedom as “what we do with what is done to us” – the perfect description of
the sacrificial life and death of Jesus.

Finally, in RESTORATION God shows us through the gift of his Spirit that we,
too, can live this life of free obedience. The reign of God becomes the rain of
God as the Spirt falls on human beings, and Peter is able to say that “This is
that” – all that God has promised is fulfilled as his Spirit fills human lives?
Why? Because the promise always was that we we would do what is right not
because the law demanded it but because our hearts desired it. This is the
ultimate goal of every civilised society, that its members love and care for one
another not because they must but because they may. “It is no good giving me
a play like Hamlet or King Lear and telling me to write a play like that,”
Archbishop William Temple said, “Shakespeare could do it, I can’t. And it is
no good showing me a life like the life of Jesus and telling me to live a life like
that. Jesus could do it, I can’t. But if the genius of Shakespeare could come and live in me, then I could write plays like this. And if the Spirit could come into
me, then I could live a life like His.”

These seven stories then, show us just how deeply human freedom runs
through the biblical narrative – and how relevant the bible’s story is to our
longings for freedom today. In a culture in which liberty is understood as
freedom from restriction, the biblical worldview offers us a different path: that
of freedom for responsibility.

Where freedom to pursue monetary gain without restraint leads to corruption
in human cultures; where freedom to buy and sell without restriction leads to
the buying and selling of people; where freedom to produce and consume
without limit leads to the destruction of our planet; where freedom to seek
power at any price leads to the devaluing of human lives; where freedom is
pursued without the mediating agency of relationship, diminishing the
human Spirit, how deeply do we need to find this different path?

If you intend and seek nothing but the will of God and the love of your
neighbour, The Imitation of Christ tells us, ‘You will be truly free’.