On Freedom in Christ
The subject of “freedom” is keenly argued and abused today, across political, social, even theological spectra. One person’s use is likely to convey the opposite of another’s. Sometimes the word is itself a codeword for something very different from the dictionary meaning, a “dog whistle.” People of integrity need to develop a special awareness of word traps set by the unscrupulous. We also need to convey clearly and honestly the meaning(s) we ourselves have in mind when using any form of the word.
Word traps are reminiscent of the ways in which the Temple authorities repeatedly tried to trap Jesus into a fatal error. The long-misunderstood incident about paying taxes to the emperor is a wonderful example. Asked if that was legal, after being shown the Roman coin, Jesus replied, “give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Luke 20:25) If you know Jesus, you know that everything belongs to God (and therefore nothing to the emperor), He made his point and dodged the “legal” trap at the same time! We can have a hearty chuckle at the authorities’ expense, who had not a clue!
The lesson of this story for us today is that we must come to know Jesus well to understand and teach God’s plan for His beloved humanity. And we must speak it clearly to those with ears to hear. So, too, with freedom. CFF (Community of Free Franciscans) is a little site dedicated with love to all who might, knowingly or not, be Franciscans, and may wish to discern how Francis (and Clare) of Assisi might speak today to spiritual seekers. Francis and Clare belong to all of humanity and we ought to understand what their lives and teaching for today.
They both brought freshness and freedom to the world. Seeking wisdom about freedom, we do well to begin with Scripture, and more specifically with Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, “the gospel of freedom.” In this letter, Paul is passionate about conveying Christian freedom to the churches in Galatia, which he believes are under threat from non-Christians, barely twenty or so years after Jesus’ death!
In the letter, Paul’s insistent and indefatigable position is that the people are freed from from slavery to the law by the sending of God’s son. It is not the law that determines one’s standing before God, but instead one’s faith in Christ, working through love, led by the Spirit and, in any event, never can supercede God’s covenant. The law is man-made, not God-made (Paul denies God’s involvement on Mount Sinai). The law imprisons people in its harshness, which results in increases in sin through human inability to be perfect under it.
The new and complete law is fulfilled in the simple words “love they neighbor,” which means “the total realization of God’s will in line with the eschatological fullness of time in the coming of Christ.” (Barclay) Not only is it God’s will, but God’s essence: “God is love.” (1 John 4:8) It is “for [this] freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (Gal. 5:1) No longer does man’s law supercede God’s: “We must obey God rather than men.” (Acts 5:29) Galatians is, of course, home to one of Paul’s best-loved and expansive proclamations: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28). Notice that this is not a statement of equality, but rather a statement of unity without bounds! All of the walls and barriers that separate one from another are tumbled and “not a stone is left on stone.” In THIS life! Francis (and Clare of Assisi) grasped liberation in the here-and-now, uncontent to wait for the hereafter. They chose a life of “radical simplicity,” the Gospel and nothing more.
Franciscan monk Richard Rohr gives us a peek at the immensity of Christian freedom in his classic book Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi. “Their first citizenship was always to live in this world with joy, detachment, and freedom. When you agree to live simply, you put yourself outside of others’ ability to buy you off, reward you falsely, or control you by money, status, salary, punishment, and loss or gain of anything. This is the most radical level of freedom. The freedom of not climbing. Time is not money anymore. Time is life itself. Dying to the old and unneeded is an essential part of love at any depth.”
This freedom is also poverty: “not just a life of simplicity, humility, restraint, or even lack. Poverty is when we recognize that myself — by itself — is powerless and ineffective… Francis and Clare rejoiced in their ordinariness and seeming unworthiness, the core freedom of the Gospel itself.”
Rohr contrasts the way of Francis with church and religious life, which “has been a belonging system that gave good people a workable self-image,..But it is not close to the radical and risky, and often dark, search for God and faith that characterizes Francis and so many saints and mystics…They draw humanity forward just by walking the full journey themselves…Francis will always be a threat to any who wish to preserve and idealize a nostalgic past, a separate superiority, or any self-serving status quo. Author Christopher Wiman punctuates the point: “Faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart.”
It comes as a shocking surprise to most that every single major lectionary omits ALL of Paul’s core teachings in Galatians (Chapters 3 and 4) except eleven verses: 3:23–29 (“There is no longer Jew or Greek…..”) and 4:4–7 (redemption by adoption). One might well ask what the church doesn’t want the people to know about freedom in this most important writing on the subject! We need to teach and live freedom if we are to change the world.
Ultimately, profound personal transformation becomes necessary in order to know and live in the radical freedom of Francis and Clare. Rohr says: “Mature believers eventually move toward a transpersonal notion of God as presence itself, consciousness itself, pure Being, the very Ground of Being, the force field of the Holy Spirit, God with us, and God in all things.” Then we can say, with Paul, “I live no longer, not I, but Christ lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20) That is freedom indeed.
