Caged by Our Freedom
Why people long for freedom . . . until they have it
We’ve been troubled by literal cages for months now. Overcrowding; pictures of children sleeping on floors with aluminum blankets like steaks cooling on a cutting board. And then some public official tries to explain that soap and toothbrushes are a luxury, not inherent to one’s safety and security.
These images are bedeviling. In a distant sort of way.
A few weeks ago, the rumors were swirling that ICE would begin raids. I imagined officers with weapons coming into churches. Maybe mine. Or ambushing my friends on the way to the parking lot. Tearing people away from families and friends. From us. What would I do if that happened here, in our church?
Then I felt guilty wishing it would happen anywhere else.
I felt empty and conflicted. But I went back to Matthew 25:31–46 where Jesus spells it out for his followers one last time.
. . . for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.
Jesus says that every person we ignore, deprive, imprison, refuse may as well be him. And everyone we feed and clothe and welcome and care for is him, too.
There is literally nothing about packing cages full of people, depriving them of necessities, and treating them like dirt that is remotely like Jesus.
Another Story of Freedom
We all like a flashy freedom story. The first central story of the Bible, the Exodus is exactly that. God sends plagues, shouting “Let my people go!” Pharaoh chases the Israelites, the Red Sea parts, and the people are saved.
The story is big, bold, and exciting. It also reveals the dynamic, central character of God. So it isn’t really about Moses. This is about God and who God is to these people. For it is God who frees the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt.
It’s a great story. But my favorite is the second story. The one that describes what happens to the people after they are freed.
They forget how to trust.
They are free, but they long for the security of Egypt, its ready access to water, and fields full of food.
They want freedom more than anything. Until they get it. Now they want security more than anything.
They forget that they are following God and instead think they are following Moses. So they get mad at him; blame him for everything.
We’re thirsty — and it’s your fault. Ask God for clean water!
Moses tells God and God gives them water.
Then . . .
We’re hungry — and it’s your fault. Ask God for food!
Moses tells God and God gives them food.
Then . . .
We’re thirsty again. We’re going to kill you if you don’t get God to give us more water.
Moses tells God and God gives them water.
This story keeps startling me. Theirs isn’t a kindly request: it’s extortion. But then, I’m more startled by God’s willingness to go along with it.
The grumbling story is far more remarkable than the Exodus itself. Because in it, we see God give generously to such awful people.
These people don’t deserve freedom. And yet they receive it! So there’s something more important than that going on.
It’s a kept promise. God trusts us, even when we don’t trust anyone.
Finding Freedom
I wonder how many of us see freedom like those people wandering in the desert. Eyes blind to what freedom really looks like and desperate for the security of an authoritarian.
To the frustrated Israelites, freedom becomes a kind of torture. The question they ask Moses isn’t so much, “Hey, Leader, would you please ask God for some water?” The real question at the center of their soul is an accusation.
Why did you lead us out here to die?
For the wanderers grumbling in the wilderness, freedom isn’t an end to slavery, it’s the beginning of death. They come to see freedom as confusing and unregulated. It leads to wildness and conflict.
And for these people in particular, whose lives were heavily structured under constant threat of the whip, the promise of freedom came with a single demand: trust.
But trust gets lost in the midst of those wide-open skies and rolling desert hills. Without purpose, focus, and a singular authority telling them when to sleep and when to work, such freedom becomes its own cage.
Possession
There is a story about a man, shackled to a tomb, possessed by thousands of demons — then unbound. It’s clear the people didn’t even think the man counted as human anymore. Until Jesus changed that. A slave freed; his humanity restored.
This is so like what we are seeing; people seeking freedom are put in cages. For-profit prisons turned into detention centers. A U.S. Army Base, Fort Sill in Oklahoma, once used to detain the Japanese, would now serve to detain migrant children, its echoing memories of xenophobia still living in its walls.
But in my Indiana community and for this nearly-all-white church I serve, even describing a present moment as a crisis of freedom is dangerous. Like the dutiful white moderates, we are more afraid of waves we make than of the injustice we face.
Freedom becomes a many-splendored thing myopically rendered.
“My freedom vs. Your freedom,” we argue. “When they square off, only mine will matter.”
For many, freedom is protected. It isn’t free. It costs. Like love requires hate, generosity requires selfishness, going up requires kicking people down . . . a closed loop in a bizarro world of justifications. Whatever makes our absolute freedom essential over an outsider’s.
Just like the Roman soldiers who fear a peasant rabbi from nowhere commanding an army of weaponless fishermen. Clearly a threat to the whole order. Execution is inevitable. Kill him to save us. To save all of this.
And yet this freedom frightens me.
Not the freedom that comes at the sword. That isn’t true freedom — that’s slavery to violence.
I mean that true freedom scares me as much as I desire to have it.
Freedom comes by invitation rather than coercion. And yet in it, I also become responsible. Once the shackles break, I become someone else. I become someone who is free.
Then everything looks different: love, compassion, hope. Because it all gets tied to freedom. Not just mine, but also yours!
So when Jesus commands me to love my neighbor, I’m tasked with something more than a feeling. Love becomes an action: I must ensure that my neighbor has what I have.
The Story of a Man Possessed
A young man walks up to Jesus and asks “What do I have to do to get eternal life?”
“Have you kept the commandments?” Jesus asks.
“Yes.”
“Then there’s only one thing left,” Jesus says. “Sell all your possessions, give every cent you make from that to the poor, and follow me.”
And it’s no surprise that the young man runs away in fear.
For most white western Christians, this is the most terrifying story in the Bible. A different version of the story raises the threat level even more. In that version, the young man is a ruler, with land and servants and responsibilities. To sell it all might imperil numerous lives.
And yet in every version of this story, the response is the same. He runs away crying. And we don’t hear from him again.
Wealth’s danger
Most people refer to this story as the one about “the rich young man,” but I think this puts far too much emphasis on his money.
The problem isn’t only that he’s rich with money. It’s that he thinks he can horde piety and buy a VIP life. That he can inherit love. That his specialness gives him things that others don’t have. He believes that because he has lived the best life possible, he’ll get more than the rest in the end.
In short: he seeks freedom because it’s exclusive. Only the special few who do all things right can get in. Heaven’s not for those other suckers.
And Jesus keeps turning and twisting the man’s selfishness in on itself.
“You know the commandments:” Jesus says. “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.”
The point isn’t the “letter” of the law, but the “purpose” of the law. Don’t cheat people. Be honest and don’t capitalize on others.
And while the man is freaking out because “he had many possessions,” we’re invited to see Jesus’s invitation as a gift.
Too bad it isn’t one many of us want.
Jesus offers freedom.
This is a life raft he offers the man. Free of burdens and expenses, wandering the countryside and sharing the good news with strangers. Asking people to come with no possessions.
But in Jesus’s eyes, this man isn’t rich with goodness; he’s sick with consumption.
And so am I.
I’m white. I pass for middle-class, though I don’t own property. That’s a big dividing line.
But I’m privileged by race, income, education, and mobility.
And the part that scares the privileged, like me and that pious young man, is not only that we don’t deserve what we have, but that God wants something else from us.
Many of us struggle to read these stories of freedom because freedom looks like a loss to us.
But not to the one who is a slave or is caged by poverty or immigration status. Or to those of us caged in the prisons of our criminal punishment system or the prisons of our situation.
For the marginalized, freedom is the whole package. Cages and shackles bind both bodies and souls. They confine our hearts and strip our dignity. Freedom isn’t just opening the door, but inviting us to rejoin the human world; equal and complete. Whole!
Freedom means that more than possessing things, the only thing with any value is our common human dignity.
Possession is Control
When Jesus invites the young man to sell his possessions, he’s inviting him to take control of his circumstances by getting rid of what controls him. Only by that, would he truly be freed.
But not just losing control of the stuff he possessed. Or that possessed him.
Giving up that need to control what he thinks is good and right. What he is convinced is the stuff God wants from him.
Ultimately, to give up control of what counts as righteousness.
To be free.
To be free from the burdens of trying to be good. To always be right. Being everything he thinks God wants him to be.
True freedom is to walk among the people and see they are just like him. And like God. Images, reflected and refracted, the divine beauty bursting its seams.
Free to blaze and destroy the demons which possess us like firebugs.
But the dream drowns in his tears. Glistening eyes he has to hide, to run away.
The Real Offer
The psychology of freedom makes more sense than the reality of it. Like wanting what you don’t have and hating what you do have.
But that’s not really what’s on offer.
God offers freedom straight, not twisted. We assume there are a bunch of strings attached. Because we don’t actually believe anything is free.
And let’s be real. The poor pay more for it.
Freed slaves were promised forty acres and a mule for restitution. The government took that away. But don’t worry, the slave owners certainly got paid.
We don’t want freedom to come free. Even when it does. We have to claw the money back. Get it somehow. Make somebody pay for it.
Free can’t really be free, can it?
Real Freedom
When Jesus speaks of freedom, he means it. We twist it, fold it, slip it into a pocket or repackage it as something it’s not. Like patriotism or individualism.
We can’t see real freedom behind an American filter of independence and individuality.
I used to think Jesus walked around like Morpheus, offering red pills to everyone. Come see things as they really are. But in The Matrix, the worlds themselves were qualitatively different. The matrix and the real world were nothing alike.
The freedom Jesus describes looks exactly like this world — because it is the same world. What is different is our expectations. That’s the only difference: how we see each other; how we relate to one another.
For Jesus, trust in God means we also trust each other. Love is unmistakably love. And hope, not cynicism, is the vehicle for realism.
Trust frees us.
Trust is also how we learn.
Most of what we learn in school relies on trust. We trust our teachers to know what they are talking about. But little of what they teach is first-hand knowledge. Our teachers trust that their teachers, researchers, and other academics are doing their work to reveal the truth. Truth built upon truth. Revelations built by trusting another’s revelation.
All of our knowledge and opinions about the world are filtered through layers and layers of small moments of trust. None of us is testing relativity or theories of gravity before we play fetch with a dog. We trust. And the confidence built by the incalculable volume of trust we embody to function in the world (our neighbors following traffic laws, credit companies reporting transactions, engineering projects measuring and building safe structures for us to walk or drive on) reveals our innate need and desire for trust in one another.
We are social, communal, and desire more for our lives than safety and security. We also desire more than independence and absolute freedom.
We desire community, family, dependence.
These things are at the heart of freedom.
That’s why we get so confused. We think freedom, independence, and individualism are synonyms. But none of us is free if we all aren’t free.
Freedom is the gentle tug of both the individual and the community, the singular and the group. The need to trust and bearing no indebtedness to one another.
And despite what our culture teaches, trust in one another isn’t a sign of weakness, but our strength.
Too often we render freedom as the opposite of dependence. Because we don’t want to have to rely on one another. But this is literally how humanity functions every moment of every day. We are dependent on a world that is far more compassionate and trusting than one calculated to destroy us.
So we cast dependence and freedom as polar opposites. But we’re wrong. Dependence’s true opposite is isolation, a kind of mutation of freedom full of distorted relationship and sociopathy.
Freedom Embodies Dependence
Perhaps then, there is but one string attached to freedom. And it’s the one described in every historic faith around the globe. Known by Christians as The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do to you.
Or, as described in U.S. legal doctrine: Your liberty to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
We could then recognize freedom as essentially the tandem of individualism and community; the dance of lives who depend on one another.
Only then does freedom really come alive.
Freedom is protecting the rights of our children to play outside, our neighbors to grocery shop or friends to meet at a house of worship without being afraid. To guard our right to freedom of movement in our community as zealously as politicians guard the right to own guns.
Freedom is protecting our one true possession, our human dignity.
From ensuring everyone can have a wedding cake to receiving dignified care in the hospital. And not just access to get-the-car-on-the-road insurance, but providing everyone nothing less than make-sure-you-don’t-have-to-declare-bankruptcy care.
Freedom is raising your kids without fear. Sharing with the world how beautiful and talented they are and being heard. Because you know them best.
This is true freedom.
A kind of freedom to be without having to colonize a new world to find it. Freedom of trust and hope and love, compassionately shared with everyone.
No cages. No shackles. Just freedom.
True freedom is recognizable. And as apparent as the stars of the sky, flowers in the fields, and rivers flowing with fresh water. Perfectly dependent and utterly free.
