John 8:21-38

09/27/09
John 8:21-38
Hudson UMC

If we read the Old Testament very carefully, we will see a bunch of stories about people who heard the word of God, saw Him perform great and mighty miracles in their midst, and responded in faith. It is very easy for us, especially when we read the stories we learned in Sunday School growing up, to imagine, with the exception of the uncomfortable passages that talk about battles and wiping out other nations, that living in Israel during Old Testament times would have been non-stop excitement. Burning bushes, plagues of frogs, parting seas, fire from heaven, and all the rest. I have heard several people ask from time to time why it seems that God was so much more active in the Old Testament than he is today.

The fact of the matter is that the Old Testament times were rough. In fact, though we only have the Old Testament because the people were faithful enough to write down God’s words to them, it seems that pre-Christian Israel is more marked by unfaithfulness. When we look at how God has interacted with His people over the centuries, it is a story of conflict, a story of difficult transformation. The people completely misunderstand God over and over again and have to be corrected, sometimes forcefully, by God to mold the people and their culture so that they could correctly receive God’s further revelation.

The reason I bring this up is because this conflict has never gone away. During Jesus’ time, the conflict between human beings and God did not go away, but intensified. Everywhere He went, he was persecuted. There were those who followed Him, it is true, but they left as soon as He said something crazy like, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Not to mention that, the Scribes, Pharisees, and Saducees were constantly trying to stop His ministry, and ended up having Him crucified. When we look back through history, we always see the work of God fought against and hindered by those in authority, especially those in religious authority, but we never see it more than in the very ministry of Jesus Himself.

The first part of our passage this morning deals with a conflict over who Jesus is. Despite the fact that Jesus has told the people over and over who He is, they still do not understand, or perhaps, they refuse to understand. In spite of all the evidence that He has given that He is the Son of the Father who so loved the world, and has come to give eternal life to human beings, they still can say nothing more than, “Who are you?” Jesus, who cannot make things any clearer, just says, in exasperation, “Why do I speak to you at all?”

In verse thirty, we read that, “As he was saying these things, many believed in him.” We might think, when we read this, that the conflict between humanity and God, the conflict between the people and Jesus, has been swept away, but we realize that they still resist God and they still are seeking to kill Him.

Now, I mentioned a minute ago that Israel has always been in conflict with God, and indeed, their conflict with God reveals to us how all of humanity is in conflict with God. Our humanity has been alienated from God by sin and we do not see things, we do not perceive the world, the same way that God does. Our entire worldview needs to be redeemed. Because human beings are alienated from God, we misunderstand God. Now, this is not for lack of trying on God’s part. After all, when we read the Bible we see God coming to His people to meet and speak with them on their own level, bringing Himself down so that we might be molded and shaped and be able to better understand Him. However, we often focus on different things than God does, we often think that God is talking about oranges, when He is really talking about apples. The reason why this matters is because, as long as we insist on being in charge of our lives, as long as we refuse to let our hearts, our actions, and even our minds, be transformed by God, we will never really understand Him.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the second part of our passage, when Jesus speaks to the people about freedom. Jesus said, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” They responded, “We are descendents of Abraham and we have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free?” Now, in the Jewish mind at the time, the only way they could think about freedom was in contrast to political or personal slavery. Only if they were enslaved to a particular human master or if their nation was being dominated by another, would they ever begin to think they might not be free.

Now, of course, this is not the freedom that Jesus is talking about. He is talking about freedom from sin, freedom from a destructive lifestyle, freedom from decadent relationships, freedom to love God and to love our neighbor. He is talking about making us free from the twisted ways of the world, who think they are serving God but are really serving themselves. Christ is offering to make the people free to be more who they were meant to be than ever before. The freedom that the Son of God offers to us is the freedom to be more fully human than we could ever be without Him. It is a freedom from worry, from despair, from fear, and a freedom for love, joy, and peace. The freedom that Christ is offering is absolutely real, more real even than personal or political freedom but, since this isn’t the kind of freedom the people think about and care about, it is hard for them to see their need for this kind of freedom. It is hard for them to see that they are indeed deeply enslaved to all kinds of things.

But you know, even if we were to look at things from their point of view; even if we were to consider freedom only in the way the people did, they are wrong when they say, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone.” Back even in the book of Genesis, what do we read, but that the people of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, were slaves in Egypt. Not only were they enslaved, that slavery lasted for four hundred years. The fact that they were slaves in Egypt and that God miraculously delivered them with a mighty hand was considered to be the single most formative event in their entire history as a people. Not only is it not true that they had never been slaves, they would not be who they were unless they had been slaves. But that’s not all. Much later down the line, the people of Israel were so disobedient, so far from following the Lord, that God allowed them to be captured by Babylon. For seventy years, the entire nation was removed from the land that God had promised them, and they were ruled both before and after that by foreigners for long periods of time.

What makes the claim that the descendants of Abraham have never been enslaved the most ridiculous is that even at that time, at that very moment, Israel was not self-governing, but ruled by the Romans. The people claimed that they were free, but in reality, they were in bondage. It is almost as if their bondage was so great and so all-encompassing, that they didn’t even know it was there. It is very sad. How terrible a thing must it be to be so completely enslaved that you think you are free when you are really in terrible bondage.

We could sit here and feel pity for the ancient Israelites. How misguided, how blind to the world around them must they be to not even see that they are not free? And yet, we should not do that for two major reasons. First, because we do not grow in the Lord by looking down on others, but more importantly, because we are in the very same position.

Just as the ancient Jews had a false understanding of freedom, we in the West, particularly in our culture of American individualism, also tend to have false views of freedom. One of the most famous philosophers who wrote about the nature of freedom was John Stuart Mill. He had this to say. “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it.” Now, despite the fact that this is how most people in America view freedom, this definition is full of problems. It makes it seem that freedom is a pure act of the will, that we are individuals who walk around with absolutely no constraints and we can choose between any options without any restriction. However, this is not really the case.

First, we find ourselves held captive to impersonal forces. Our miserable economy illustrates this quite well. According to how we often view freedom, we are, in theory, able to quit our jobs if we want to, and on one level, we can. We are physically and philosophically able to fill out a letter of resignation. However, our economy has enslaved us because, for many people, quitting their job is not really an option that they can choose. They need their income to survive, they need health insurance, which they will lose if they are unemployed. The economy has further enslaved us by making it increasingly difficult to find a new job, once we have left our old one. For those who lose their jobs during such a time as this, as I know has happened, even within this congregation, it was not something that was freely chosen, but thrust upon them. Though we can quit our jobs, it is often not a real option that we can choose.

On top of that, the laws of our community and nation govern us. There are certain ways that we might think that we can pursue “our own good in our own way” that are illegal. Once again, as this economy has taught us, there are certain ways of pursuing our own good that ought to be illegal, and they soon will be. We are often hemmed in by a multitude of impersonal forces.

However, our freedom is limited by personal forces as well. Indeed, even Mill’s definition admits that this is true. Our freedom to pursue our own good in our own way is limited because we are not to hinder other people from pursuing their own good in their own way. We are incredibly limited by those we are in relationship with. To give a silly example, I love Reese’s Puffs cereal. Often, when I am in the grocery store, I will see that cereal and remember how tasty it is and want to buy it, but I am not really free to do so. Why? Because, if Alli is there, she will point out that it is not a responsible choice and that we can’t get it. If I am alone and buy it anyway, I will have to deal with it once I get home. As much as I like that cereal, I am not really free to buy it.

We are, in a certain sense, enslaved to our friends. All of us, at one point in our life or another, have had friends that were not the best influence in the world. Maybe you have some of these even now. Because of how we tend to value friendship, we (myself included) are often hesitant to do things that will make them unhappy. If avoiding evil, doing good, and using the means of grace will hurt our friendships, we will probably not do it, unless we have been set free in Christ. Countless people, throughout the ages, and even still today, have not become real Christians because of what their friends would think.

I don’t want to make it seem that every way of having our freedom limited is bad. After all, some friendships help us love God and one another by limiting us. If doing evil, avoiding good, and neglecting the means of grace will hurt our friendships, we are less likely to do that. That is why it is so important to have committed Christian friends. They are, in so many ways, the best way to keep us on the right path.

Paul talks about us being “slaves of Christ.” Being a follower of Christ means that some options are no longer open to us; we are not truly free to choose anything we want. But what are the options we lose as Christians? We lose the option of hatred, of lying, of malice, of talking behind people’s backs, of worry, of fear, of division, of jealousy, and of sin in general. I don’t know about you, but I am glad to be rid of those options. I would love nothing more than for those options to be completely eradicated from my life. And that is precisely what Jesus is promising us. “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” When we read this, it sounds like Jesus is just saying that the freedom that He gives is really real. Now, He is saying that, and the freedom we have in Christ is more real than we know; it is more real than the world around us, more real than the things we hold dear. However, He is not just talking about us being free in our American, individualistic sense, but free in our very being, in the very core of who we are. We are not just free to do, but free to be. In Christ, we are made utterly free; free to be who God has called us to be, free to love, free to be united to others in fellowship, and free to help others become free in Christ.

And so, let us give our praise and thanksgiving to our God who, despite the fact that we, day after day after day, refuse to see the chains that bind us to our sin and alienation, not to mention the more subjective and personal forces that ruin our relationships, has not left us to our fate, has not withheld our only cure from us. Our culture wants to get us to live in a selfish freedom that we achieve by self-help books and motivational speakers. Our God realizes that our position is far more precarious. Absolutely nothing short of the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension of the second Person of the Trinity and the radical indwelling in our very selves of the Third Person of the Trinity, can possibly break the chains of sin and death that bind us. We want a solution that we can squeeze into our busy schedules when the only solution there really is cost God everything.

Jesus speaks to us today what He spoke to the people all those long years ago. “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free…Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin…So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” So, since we have the very promise of God in the words of Christ, and since this offer for real freedom is backed up by the sincerity of Christ who did not stop short of death to deliver His promises, let us continue in Christ’s word, that we may know the truth and that the truth may set us free. God has done the work; we are asked to stop our backbreaking labor to be “good enough” and let Him transform us. Real freedom, freedom from sin and freedom for love has been offered to us; let us accept with joy, as individuals and as a church. Let us pray.

AMEN