True Freedom.

John 8:31-59.   (July 26, 2015)

I.

The Lord’s encounter with the authorities at the Sukkoth festival in Jerusalem continues.  At the end of the previous section we heard that many believed in him.  Now Jesus encourages them to continue in his word, which is to say that they should keep not only following his teachings but remember that he is the Word of God by whom the whole universe was created.  Keeping his word must also mean remaining in partnership and harmony with creation itself.  This is the way to be disciples.  God’s Word is not contrary to or distinct from nature; when we follow God’s Word we are putting ourselves in tune with everything that is.  This is true freedom, he says.  To know the truth, that is, to know and participate in what is real, is to be truly free.

But his listeners are taken aback by this… they don’t get it.  Jesus’ inference is that they were not free before, so they question him on this.  “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone.  What do you mean my saying, ‘You will be made free’?”    

This is a question many of us may ask as well.  We have the idea that we are free.  As Americans especially we celebrate our freedoms.  Freedom is a core ideological principle for us.  We could say with Jesus’ hearers as well that we are not anyone’s slaves.  Why would Jesus imply that we were slaves before we chose to follow him?  Indeed, we were free enough to make a decision to be Christians, weren’t we?

Jesus continues with his characteristic bluntness.  He is not about telling people what they want to hear.  “If you commit sin you’re not free,” he says.  Simple as that.  “Your freedom is a lie as long as you remain separated from God.”  

Remember that this day began in the Temple with that incident with the woman caught in adultery, and Jesus defused that situation by inviting anyone who was sinless to administer her death sentence.  No one threw a single stone at her, which was an indication that they all knew they were not sinless.  Now here he is saying that if you’re not sinless you’re not free.  To be truly free is to be sinless.

We think freedom is doing what we want.  But Jesus says this is not the case.  If we do what we want we are only acting out of our slavery to our own ego-centric desires, most of which have been thoroughly conditioned and determined, channeled, focused, and oriented, by the collection of blind egos we call society and its rulers.  Basing our behavior on this is inherently sinful because it is outside of and against God’s will.  

When we do what we want (or what we think we want) we are seeing ourselves as independent agents operating over-against other separate entities.  We treat the world as if it were something we are distinct from and may act upon objectively.  We see ourselves in competition with others.  We see the world as a collection of inanimate objects we may dispose of as we please.

This way of seeing things is sinful and false, and everything we do according to this mindset is also sinful and false.  It is not freedom.  It is the most severe form of bondage imaginable made even more powerful by the fact that we don’t see it.  We think we’re free.

II.

Jesus goes on to say that because we’re actually enslaved to sin, which is to say that we are addicted to the delusion of our self-centered independence and freedom, we do not have a legitimate place in God’s household, which is God’s creation and Kingdom.  

In a sense, we are like the older son in Jesus’ great parable from Luke 15 about the two sons.  He freely lives in the father’s house, but in his mind he is a slave.  In his mind he is earning the father’s favor through hard work, when in truth everything that belongs to the father belongs as well to him.  But he can’t see this.  He thinks he has freely chosen to be good, responsible, loyal, and hardworking, and that he will get something for it.  In reality he is a slave to his own self-serving, self-important, self-righteous ideas.  It is the younger son, the one who wastes the father’s resources and who, after hitting the bottom, returns in deep humility, only seeking work as a slave, who ironically comes to know the true freedom of the father’s love.         

The people claim to be free on the basis of having Abraham as their ancestor.  That’s kind of an avoidance of the issue in which freedom is reduced to an abstraction that has nothing to do with reality.  How does claiming Abraham as an ancestor make someone actually free?  It doesn’t.  

Jesus retorts that we can tell who are the spiritual descendants of Abraham by what they are actually doing in the world right now.  If these people really were spiritual descendants of Abraham they would not be trying to kill the One who comes to fulfill God’s promises to Abraham, Jesus.  If we are truly free we don’t use our freedom to try and kill people who threaten us.

We see this all the time today as well.  People claim to be Christians in the same way Jesus’ questioners claimed to be descendants of Abraham.  But they don’t appear to understand, let alone do, what Jesus commands any more than people back then actually lived the life of trust in God that Abraham exemplified.  Too many who claim to follow Jesus are actually trying to “kill” him in the sense of ignore, silence, reject and suppress his actual teachings and example.

Trusting in Jesus — or Abraham for that matter — is not theoretical and imaginary.  It is not a matter of opinion or genealogy or ideological loyalty or membership in a group or a label we apply to ourselves.  It is a matter of whether we are actually following Jesus by doing the kinds of things he does, or whether we are following another power, exemplified in Jesus’ naming of the devil, the father of lies and murder.  Is our life about love and acceptance and forgiveness and welcoming and peacemaking and nonviolence and lifting up the poor, as is Jesus’ life?  Or is it about fear, security, judgment, condemnation, exclusion, murder, and falsehood?

III.

Jesus says that what actually matters is our relationship to God.  Jesus, exasperated, exclaims: “Because I tell the truth, you don’t believe me.”  That’s because Jesus’ truth doesn’t match their experience of the world as a fearsome, nasty, threatening, exclusionary place.  To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, they “can’t handle the truth!”  But for the opposite reason: the truth Jesus knows is too good, too beautiful, too generous, and too forgiving for them.  

“Which of you convicts me of sin?”  Jesus asks.  People know that his deeds are remarkable and good.  He heals, he provides bread, he makes wine; what’s not to like?  The people who do accuse Jesus of sinning are the authorities who see their own power at risk in Jesus’ breaking of their self-serving laws.  For them, sin equals transgression of their regulations.  For Jesus, though, sin is separation from God.  It is by this reasoning that the authorities are the real sinners since their whole regime is based on threats, coercion, intimidation, condemnation, and punishment.    

Jesus goes on.  “If I tell the truth, why don’t you believe me?  Whoever is from God hears the words of God.  The reason you don’t hear them is that you are not from God.”

In other words, he says that in their current, ego-centric, blind, sleepwalking, false existence, people do not know themselves to be “from God.”  If they were they would resonate with and understand what he is saying.

But Jesus also knows that there is another sense in which they are indeed “from God” because God through the Word made everything and the Word echoes in and through everything, including the material from which the bodies of these people was made.  He knows that God is there in every body, heart, and soul if we will but stop wasting so much of our energy in maintaining and propping up an imaginary false self which we mistake for who we really are and which therefore separates us from God.

He knows this because he is himself that Word through which all things were made and he is therefore himself within everyone.  He is the Son of Man; he is the truly Human One; he shares with us in a common humanity; he is the doorway for each of us to the union with God for which we were created.

They don’t understand or trust him because they are not living out of their own innate divinity but they have rejected that truth and choose to see themselves falsely as small, isolated, individual, limited, helpless, temporary, fragile beings, justified in feeling fearful, angry, and ashamed about everything.

IV.

Jesus then reminds them that what he is saying is not even about him.  “I do not seek my own glory,” he says.  “If I glorify myself my glory is nothing,” he says.  In other words, the historical, mortal Jesus of Nazareth, whose father was Joseph the Carpenter, is not the point.  His opponents can’t see beyond this individual, and neither can many of us.  

But when Jesus says, “It is my Father who glorifies me,” he means that God flows through him into the world in such a way that he now is God’s living, saving Presence.  

Then he says, “Whoever keeps my word will never see death.”  He is God’s living Word, the Source and inspiration for all that is; everything that exists is the condensation or precipitation or crystallization of God’s breath in speaking the universe into existence.  Therefore, keeping Jesus’ word is not just about obeying his commandments; rather, it has to do with finding that living Word within you, finding the true you deep beneath the false you you have diligently and busily constructed your whole life long, locating your most profound and authentic self which God spoke into being at the beginning; it is nothing less than recovering and restoring God’s Presence and life and being within you, and thereby participating in that which holds everything together.

When we are one with everything we cannot see death, for even what we call and fear as death is revealed as just one element of this whole field of being, necessary to the integrity of the whole.  When Jesus will say in chapter 11, “everyone who lives and believes in me will never die”, this is what he means.  Not that this particular, temporary arrangement of matter and energy, our mortal bodies, won’t eventually cease, of course.  But that he reveals to us that who we truly are is way bigger, deeper, higher than that.

So when the Lord finally proclaims “Before Abraham was, I am,” not only he claiming practically flat-out to be God, he is also inviting us who keep his word and follow him to participate with him in that same audacious claim. If we are “in Christ,” which Paul affirms all over the place, and if Christ is all in all, then we are “in” everything.

V.

This means that by keeping Christ’s word I identify with and participate in and in some sense “am” each person, each individual, each tree, each animal, each cloud, and each rock, that God blew into being in the beginning by that Word.  The deepest “I am” in me, in each and all of us, is Jesus Christ, and therefore God.  So when Jesus tells me to take up my cross and follow him he means that in him I am nailed to the cross, giving my life for the life of the world, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the Lamb of God.  In him it is my old, broken, limited, dark, sour and narrow self that is wrecked and my true self that is liberated from my empty tomb to realize the light it always was.

Not only is Jesus claiming to be God; he is claiming that in him each one of us is God as well.  Once again we are reminded of the affirmation by some early saints that “God became human so that humans might become God.”

No wonder that after he says this Jesus has to hide!  The people who knew themselves to be too sinful to stone the woman that very morning, have now lost their reticence about stoning lawbreakers.  They pick up rocks and are about to throw them at Jesus!

Jesus somehow escapes.  And that kind of becomes the story of our existence.  Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, is hiding among us, and within us.  Hiding from our violence, our falsehood, our ignorance, our fear.  If we do find him… if we do hear him clearly, too often we kill him.  Which is what happens when the authorities finally do trap him.

But the good news is that he doesn’t and cannot stay dead.  He always remains there at the very core and foundation of who we are in our deepest place.  When we allow our old selves to die with him, we see that his eternal life opens up to us and he invites us to come with him and live forever.  And that is true freedom.