3rd Sunday of Lent, B March 7, 2021
Fr. Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
Freedom. The next step in our journey is to understand the fundamental value of freedom. It might seem a strange thing to talk about when our readings include a list of “you shall not”s and we see Jesus literally using a whip to interrupt other people’s business, yet that really is the core of what’s happening here.
Our first reading should have sounded pretty familiar to you; it’s the Ten Commandments. They are given to Moses on Mount Sinai after God used Moses to free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Many of us have seen dramatic depictions of those events in movies. It’s still somewhat part of the popular imagination to picture Moses standing before pharaoh and demanding “let my people go!”
Of course, that’s an incomplete picture – should we be surprised the world doesn’t get it quite right? They are some good films, sure, but a crucial detail is missing. Moses doesn’t just say “let my people go.” The freedom he demands is not generic. What God says through him is “Let my people go, that they may hold a feast for me in the wilderness.” There’s reason for wanting their freedom. A feast, which includes sacrifice. God demands the freedom for his people to worship him.
We know the rest of the story of the plagues, the escape, and the parting of the red sea. Finally, when Moses brings God’s people to the mountain, they get to worship God and he gives them the Ten Commandments. These are a distilled version of the freedom God wants for his people. To the modern mind, it is a contradiction to say that rules make someone free. But that is because we focus too narrowly on the “shall not”s, missing the wider picture.
That wider picture is the primal battle of good vs. evil that we’re a part of whether we like it or not. That wider picture is the reality that disobedience is what started that messy battle in the first place, that obedience is the only way to conquer evil. We may like to think of ourselves as autonomous gods, able to determine ourselves and the world around us, but that is an illusion that only works on people with enough wealth and power to avoid the harsher realities of life. Whether we like it or not, our freedom, our ability to choose is ultimately the ability to choose what we obey. Decisions don’t happen in a vacuum. Every decision is made in relation to something or someone. I decide to cooperate with this person, to rebel against that one. I decide to work with some law of nature, or I decide to try to resist it. “I do what I want” is really a decision to obey blind biological and psychological forces, some good, some bad. Freedom from something isn’t real freedom unless it is freedom for some purpose.
To cut to the chase, freedom exists for the sake of love. We have freedom so that we can choose to love. These commandments give us the basic outline, the boundary to make that love possible. If you want the freedom to love your neighbor, you can’t kill them, steal from them, lie to them, or treat them like objects for your pleasure. If you want the freedom to love your family, you can’t ignore the debt you owe to those who gave you life and you can’t just betray the unique bond with your spouse. If you want the freedom to even know what love is, you have to start by acknowledging it’s source: God. There is one God, who is love. Because he is God and he is love, we should speak of him and to him with reverence. Because he created us to love, we have to set aside time from work long enough to show our love to him and each other. If we refuse to do these things, we are not more free, but less. Obeying them does not rob us of freedom but equips us to genuinely love.
And don’t forget that all Ten of these commands are given as part of God’s demand that his people be allowed to worship him. God wanted this so badly that he upended an entire kingdom just so he could give them that chance. Jesus is doing the same thing in the Gospel. The cleansing of the temple is a favorite story of people who want to justify their anger. Indeed, there is such a thing as righteous anger – though most of us fall short on the righteous part and long on the anger. Why, though? Why was Jesus angry?
For context, these money changers were actually providing an important service. God himself required the Jews to offer animals in sacrifice. And they couldn’t be just any animal, but high quality animals. For Jews traveling hundreds of miles, bringing that animal along wasn’t feasible because it could get sick or injured. Also, using pagan money wasn’t allowed in the Temple. So, these merchants provided a way to change for useable money and a chance to buy the kinds of animals God asked for. It’s not what they were doing, but where they were doing it.
They were in the court of the gentiles, the place where non-Jews who wanted to worship God could go, since only circumcised Jews were allowed inside the main part. Instead of finding a prayerful place to encounter God, however, God-fearing Gentiles were forced to endure the hustle and bustle of a marketplace. Did Jesus violate the freedom of these merchants by driving them out? Or did he, rather, protect the freedom of all people, even gentiles, to approach God his father?
No one was freer than Jesus Christ, who is God after all and has the power to do whatever he wants. But he understands human nature – he designed it after all. He knows the cancerous effects of Original Sin on that human nature. So he flexes his infinite freedom and power to do one thing: to conquer evil by obedience, to offer his own body as the temple to be destroyed and rebuilt, to freely die so that we finally accept the freedom to live as we’re meant to live: for love.
This love is not the wisdom of the world, which looks at rules and rituals with disgust. It is the wisdom of God that looks fondly on the liberating power of objective morality, that willingly endures the limitations placed on it by other people’s needs and weaknesses. It is the wisdom which sees that having no bonds is not freedom, it is the isolation of hell. Freedom is the chance to look at the face of another, the face of God himself and say with absolute integrity, “I am yours.” If you want that Freedom, then submit yourself to the whip wielded by Jesus Christ, let him drive out your sins and errors to make your soul into what it’s meant to be, his Father’s house.