renew your wonders: 29 March 2023

If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples,

and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

In order to avail ourselves of the truth Jesus teaches we must remain in his word and allow it to shape our life as disciples. It is by remaining, by committed practice and repetition that we come to know the his truth on an experiential level, one which opens expansive vistas of freedom before us. We are reminded of the parable of the seed that grow best in good soil, the seed which is the word of God. To grow well it needs to get beneath the surface and be relatively safe and uninterrupted there as it puts out roots.

They answered him, "We are descendants of Abraham

and have never been enslaved to anyone.

How can you say, 'You will become free'?"

The seed the Word himself was sowing did not find an easy path beneath the soil in the hearts of these crowds, even though they were Jews who, at least in some measure, "believed in him". In their pride they were unwilling to recognize the ways, even the obvious ways, in which they were not free. Even ignoring the deeper spiritual freedom about which Jesus spoke it was laughable for Jews to saw that they had "never been enslaved to anyone". What else could that be but willful blindness to that fact that Israel had been conquered by one hostile power after another, and was at that time under the power of Rome? Yet perhaps their denial revealed their fear of the deeper slavery to which Jesus referred, as though it was something unacknowledged but obviously lurking just below the surface. They didn't want to come and allow Jesus, the light of the world, to expose this dark visage lest they have to confront it.

Jesus answered them, "Amen, amen, I say to you,

everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.

Here we have a lesson that the world refuses to learn, and even we ourselves probably don't fully accept. We tend to imagine sin as freedom and law as constraint. We tend to think that if we do not have the option to sin we are less free. But sin never delivers on the freedom it promises. It never helps. It only steals our freedom, makes us less able to act as we choose thereafter. In modern times we tend to refer to this as addiction. We are very aware of some specific forms addictions can take, such as to drugs or alcohol. But we do not always acknowledge, and do not want to acknowledge the ways in which sin manifests as compulsive behaviors in our own lives. If anyone would suggest that we have such addictions we would probably push back just as strongly as did the crowd.

A slave does not remain in a household forever,

but a son always remains.

So if the Son frees you, then you will truly be free.

Only the Son can give us a relationship that is based on the true freedom of love. The true antidote to slavery is not, as we might imagine, gainful employment by which we can earn our keep and pay our own way. Such a relationship is still not free in the sense God desires for us. He desires us rather to have the freedom of daughters and sons who are allowed to remain forever in the household, not because of their work, but because they are beloved. In order to experience this freedom we must be willing to trade our slavery to sin and even our servitude to performance and work. We must be willing to accept that which is unearned precisely so that it can be a free gift. It is in this way that we can share in the Sons own freedom, when it becomes his gift to us.

But now you are trying to kill me,

a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God;

Abraham did not do this.

When an intervention is staged against our addictions in order to help us to become free it is often then that the true darkness of our slavery becomes apparent. The ways in which we fight against true freedom seem no longer merely psychological but rather as though stemming from spiritual darkness. As a parallel, we might imagine Bilbo struggling to give up the One Ring. We say that God is our Father, yet we do not always love Jesus when he comes to expose the darkness within us in order to give us freedom. Does this lack of light and complicity in darkness mean that we have failed? No. Or at least not yet. We have heard the word speaking, but we need to let him remain in us and do his work. It is he himself, ultimately, who alone can set us free. And it is precisely this that he expends his every effort to accomplish.

He ordered the furnace to be heated seven times more than usual

and had some of the strongest men in his army

bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego

and cast them into the white-hot furnace.

True freedom looks quite different from the imagined freedom celebrated by our society. The three young men in today's first reading were bound and thrown into a fiery furnace, and yet somehow, mysteriously they were the most free of all the people in Babylon at that moment.

""Did we not cast three men bound into the fire?""

""Assuredly, O king,"" they answered.

""But,"" he replied, ""I see four men unfettered and unhurt,

walking in the fire, and the fourth looks like a son of God.""

This freedom that is not bound by sin or circumstance is available to us as well, if only we will allow Jesus and his word to remain in us.