Today St. Paul addresses one of the most important and most misunderstood concepts in our world: freedom. He says, “For freedom Christ set us free.” This word, this idea is key for us to understand the salvation that Christ won for us. But what does it mean? What is freedom? We know that it’s at the heart of the human drama, all the way back to the beginning. The original sin committed by Adam and Eve, was embracing a false idea of freedom. Their temptation was to view the freedom they did indeed have as license to determine truth and reality for themselves. “You will be like God, knowing good and evil,” Satan promised them. They thought they could decide reality for themselves, decide morality for themselves, decide what was good and evil for themselves. Sound familiar? It’s the philosophy of our age: nothing is certain, everything is relative, good and evil are whatever you want them to be, reality is whatever you prefer it to be. As it turns out, this is the oldest lie in the universe: the lie that freedom means determining what’s real and what isn’t, what’s good and what isn’t. Today, that lie is rampant. And we’re all infected with this idea whether we like it or not; it’s in the air we breathe. But this is the ancient lie of the deceiver. And it leads us into slavery and a mediocre life.
The truth is: reality is not a threat to our freedom: the truth could never enslave us. The truth is bigger than us: it was there before us, it’ll be there after us: and it’s only by living in the truth and embracing reality, that we can live life to the full. Living life well takes work, it takes discipline, it takes a willingness to accept reality, accept the building blocks of truth that God gives us. We humans bristle sometimes at obeying rules that come down to us from above. But the truth, which God reveals to us, is what can give us real meaningful freedom: the Ten Commandments, the teachings of the Church, the virtues, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, all these things that can seem so dry: they are the building blocks that allow us to live free. Unlike other living creatures, we’re not governed solely by instinct, or by the urges of the flesh. We have a mind and a will. We can plan. We can formulate a decision and freely choose a course.
St. Paul describes the two options that lie before us in the face of this great freedom that God has given us: two ways to use our freedom. Option 1 is self-indulgence, and it’s the easy way out. Option 2 takes work and perseverance, and it’s never easy, but it’s the path to true peace and happiness: it’s the way of service and sacrifice. Living a so-called freedom of self-indulgence, doing whatever you feel like, whenever you feel like, with whomever you feel like, is actually a form of slavery: we willingly enslave ourselves to our own fickle impulses. It’s slavery, because no matter what we give it, the flesh always wants more. And so we fall into cycles of gluttony, lust, envy, greed: we get that dull feeling behind our eyes. But living our freedom for service and self-sacrifice: it’s tough, but it’s totally worth it. It’s true freedom, true peace. But we need grace, we need help to live this way in the face of our weaknesses and our sinfulness. Our comforts and even our sins can become defense mechanisms for us, distractions that we start to rely on to get us through the tough times. It’s only natural: that little bit of comfort and pleasure: it’s right here, it’s easy, it’s quick. It takes real faith and hope to live a life of disciplined service, to leave our defense mechanisms behind, to train ourselves in virtue, day in and day out, in other words to become more like Christ. The great irony is this: the more we become like him, the more we bind ourselves to him, the more we serve him, the freer we become. “For freedom Christ set us free.” May Christ lead us to this true and lasting spirit of freedom and peace.