“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” it says in Galatians 5:1. What does that really mean? We all have a sense of what liberty means and the fictitious trope of our western culture seems to uphold this holy grail as needing to successfully hit a series of benchmarks, which bring enlightenment as we progress through the three-score-and-ten decades of earthly life, onwards to an inevitable death.
We leave childhood, where many of us were ironically carefree and then, and perhaps this is simplistic, we’re expected to go to a great university, get a highly respected job and become a highly respected person. Having a great marriage with a great big house and a great car is another pointer on that freedom scale, and great bundles of joy (children) alongside; and then there’s the travelling to foreign places allegedly needed to find contentment, and often depicted by media images of bronzed young men and women lying in swimwear on yachts, smiling at the sunset with glasses of white wine. They emanate strength and contentment as they smile winningly at you from tropical climes, and you glare back from your computer desk, nursing pulsating sinusitis with one hand and holding your third strong coffee with the other – far too much of course, and the caffeine is making you spaced out, grinding your teeth.
How did Jesus set us free for freedom, as Galatians says he did? How does it play out if you don’t ‘feel’ free and you struggle with physical and mental health, day by day, month by month, year by year, endlessly? With no answers from any preacher man, except you need fudging faith?
As I write this, a fly is buzzing around the room and it’s really irritating me. I want to grab that fly, even though it’s meant to be a beautiful part of creation, and smash* it against the wall to drown out the noise. I wonder if that’s a cloddish way to illustrate the noises of enslavement – ill health, life struggles, horrible dramas, griefs – that intrude rudely, just like that fly, into our freedom space. Distracting us from the noises of liberation proclaimed by Christ.
And I wonder if that’s what Jesus was really saying through this Bible verse. The second part of that Galatians verse reads, “Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” Christ is wanting us to push away whatever burdens us, whatever enslaves us and position ourselves, somehow, within the underlying freedom won by the Godman who stood himself in mourning, in a nail-mangled body – bludgeoned, bruised and bloodied for you and me.
*No, I didn’t kill the fly.
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