Freedom

Freedom!

Galatians 3:23-29

            What constitutes freedom for you?  How would you define freedom as it applies to you personally? When someone says the word “freedom,” what picture comes to your mind?

·        Financial freedom?  Having enough money to do anything you want without having to worry about how to pay for it?

·        The old joke?  Life begins when the kids leave home and the dog dies?

·        Retirement?  No need to get up at some specific time in the morning?  The freedom to set your own schedule?  No boss to please?

·        Good health and the time and wherewithal to enjoy it?

·        Other criteria I haven’t thought of?

            We all want to be free.  Whatever our definition of freedom—and there are probably as many definitions as there are people—we all want to be independent, with the right to make our own decisions and set our own agenda.  We want to be indebted only to the people we want to be beholden to, and not have to appease those we don’t want anything to do with.

            Paul, writing to the Galatians, discussed this matter of freedom.  “Now before faith came,” he says, “we were held captive under the law, imprisoned….”  Being held captive is the opposite of freedom.  We can’t make our own decisions.  We can’t do what we want.  We are confined by something (in this case, “the law”) which ties us down.

For most of us, being in school was not freedom.  We had to be where we were supposed to be.  We had to do what we were told.  We had to do work that might not have appealed to us, and take classes that we saw no practical use for. 

            Paul wasn’t thinking of some organized institution where young people spend their days. He uses the word “guardian.”  What he had in mind was a pedagogue, or tutor. The guardian or pedagogue was a slave in the Greek household.  His job was not simply to teach the young child (usually a male), but to guide him, to protect him from negative influences, to keep him on the straight and narrow until he matured, so that he knew right from wrong and consistently chose the right.  The guardian represented the opposite of freedom.  The child was not free to do what he wanted, but rather was controlled by the pedagogue.

            Paul says that’s the way the law worked.  It established boundaries within which people had to live.  They were required to abide by the strictures of the law.  For all the talk in Psalm 119 and other places in the Hebrew Scriptures about the glory of Torah, by the first century B.C.E. the law had become restrictive.  Freedom was curtailed by the law’s boundaries.

            Paul says Jesus came to change that.  With the coming of Jesus Christ “we are no longer under a guardian,” he says.  “For in Christ Jesus you are [children] of God through faith.”  Faith has replaced the law, and freedom has replaced restriction.  We understand what’s right and try to do it, guided by the Holy Spirit.  The boundaries of the law have been removed.  “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”

            This putting on Christ is not just a matter of changing clothes, but of changing our nature.  We become new creations—God’s creatures.  The boundaries between people are gone.  Paul says there are no artificial divisions between groups of people:  no Jew and Greek, no slave and free, no male and female; and we should add no black and white, no southerner and northerner, no Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Episcopalian—you can add your own categories.  We have been changed.  We are different—something new.  We are all members of the household of God, free from any boundaries or restrictions.  We are free to be God’s children, with no boundaries between us.