Freedom Part 2
In the Gospels at the beginning of his ministry Jesus enters into the synagogue and he reads a passage from Scripture. He reads Isaiah 61, which says: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” Jesus tells us his purpose for coming, his mission statement if you will, and in it he says twice that he has come to bring liberty, to bring freedom. This was his goal. He came to set us free, but free from what?
The Reformer, Martin Luther, said Jesus delivers us from “a spiritual and everlasting bondage under mighty and invincible tyrants, namely, the law, sin, death, and the devil” (Commentary on Galatians). These are the oppressors that Jesus read about in Isaiah. These are the things that hold us captive. All of these really only have any power because of the law. Just think about it: our sin is the inability to keep the law, death is the penalty for breaking the law, and the devil lies to us telling us it’s all up to us, that we can do the law, and then accuses us, constantly shaming us, when we fail. It all relates to the law.
But what is the law? Essentially it is covenantal conditionalism. What does that mean? “Do this and you shall live.” Conditional, “if, then” living. If you do this, then you’re good. If you don’t do this, then you’re bad. The “this” we’re talking about here is the 10 commandments…just do these 10 things and you’ll be good. The 10 Commandments are God’s original self-help book. 10 Steps to your best life now. But for all of us in our day to day living, if we’re honest, we are not usually explicitly concerned about God’s law, but the law is still very much present with us. Our daily experience of the law, of conditions, is usually that perfectionist voice in your head. The unrelenting task-master in your mind that scrupulously examines and judges everything you say and do, that feeling in you that you never match up and you just don’t cut it. That is surely the law at work on you. The law is the demand for perfection. Jesus says it plain as day in his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:48, “You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Everything in the 10 commandments and all of the other ceremonial laws in the Old Testament and all of the scrutiny you feel in your mind every day can be summed up in that line…you must be perfect like God is perfect.
Christians often forget the problematic nature of God’s perfection for us. In fact, if you are not a Christian then this holiness stuff must sound a bit odd. Why do we celebrate God’s perfection? I thought perfectionism was a bad thing. It only leads to anxiety and unrealistic expectations. In fact in our contemporary context full of a heavy emphasis on psychotherapy haven’t we learned that an emphasis on perfection can lead to all sorts of mental disorders? How do we reconcile the perfection of God with the fact that the pursuit of perfection can drive us crazy?
Do remember the television show Monk? I loved that show. It was a light hearted crime show, a whodunit in which Adrian Monk was a former detective in San Francisco, who now served as a consultant to solve crimes. I am sure you remember Adrian had a special condition, he had a debilitating case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which stemmed back to the trauma of his wife’s death. He became obsessed with perfection. He needed everything to be clean and in order at all times, and this made him very observant. He noticed when anything was out of place, which made him an effective crime-solver. Most often it was pretty light and humorous, but the flipside of Monk’s condition was that he could barely function in real life. He could not be an actual detective any more because his condition would often cause him to freeze up in certain situations or to be distracted in vital moments. He couldn’t handle the pressure of it all. His perfectionism was actually preventing him from living. Beneath it all was deep-seeded fear. He was trapped in fear, which made him try to control everything around him. He was not free.
Now we may not go to the same extremes as Monk, but the truth is that perfectionism drives all of us into fear-based living. We all lose our freedom when we are concerned with perfection. So, how does this work then? How do we relate to a perfect God, to a holy God? And how do we deal with Jesus’ demand in Matthew for us to be perfect? Is Jesus really advocating that we all become like Monk and become obsessed with perfection?
Actually no. That would be ridiculous, right? No, He is demanding that we be better than Monk. He is demanding that we be like God himself. It makes sense doesn’t it when you consider the nature of our sin. We want to be God. We want to be in control. We want to be calling the shots. We think we know better than Him, and we certainly think we know better than everybody else, don’t we? This know-it-all-control-freak in each of us is the very thing that causes us to damage our relationships both with God and with others. Instead of loving God and each other we exert our will over one another. We join Frank Sinatra and sing, “I did it my way.” Or we echo that old mantra, “If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.” “Anything you can do I can do better…I can do anything better than you.” This is what resides in our hearts: competition and comparison, not love.
SO, Jesus saying we must be perfect as God is perfect is simply giving us our wish. In effect he is saying, “Ok, you want to be in charge, then you’ve gotta perform baby. You want to live by the law, then you’ve got to keep the law.” Or as Paul says in Galatians 3:12, “The one who does them shall live by them.” It’s like Yoda in Empire Strikes Back when he tells Luke to move his X-wing fighter out of the swamp, and Luke says, “Alright, I’ll give it a try.” Yoda’s response is, “No, try not, do or do not. There is no try.” No compromise. No more games. This is it. If you want to be God, then you have to be perfect as he is perfect. If you want to earn your way and prove yourself, stand on your own two feet, then you’ve got to do it perfectly.
This is the bad news, and we’ve got to hear it first because if we don’t we will continue on in our deluded notion that we can be good enough on our own. We need the law to do its work on us and bring us to the end of our own effort. We need to hear how extreme the demand really is so that we will see the impossibility of our situation…so that we will hear Paul when he says, “all who rely on works of the law are under a curse…and a person is not justified by works of the law…by works of the law no one will be justified” (Galatians 2:16, 3:10-14). The law is not the answer…it does not lead to freedom. The exact opposite in fact. It leads to fear. Paul tells us it was given to hold us captive, to imprison us until faith came. He calls it our “guardian” and many translations try to soften this word and say Paul is calling it our teacher, but when you hear that it is holding us captive, that it imprisons us there is no mistake about it. Paul is telling us the law is like our prison guard (3:23-24). It’s keeping us in jail. It forces us to see our need…we need to be rescued…we need to be set free…liberated as Jesus said through Isaiah 61. And that’s exactly what he did.
“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’— so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles (non-Jews), so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith” (3:13-14). Jesus took our place under that demand for perfection. He was perfect for us…he fulfilled the law for us, and then he took our sin upon himself and became a curse for us. He is the spotless lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world…yours and mine.
This was the plan all along. Paul explains that “the Scripture (aka the law) imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe” (3:22). The law did it’s job, and continues to do this job whenever we go back to trying to be good through our own effort. It kills us in our sin, it stops us dead in our tracks, so that we might be raised to new life in Jesus…so that we would be saved by faith. It is all by faith. “Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (2:20) Jesus is our perfection. He alone is the way, the truth, and the life. Only by him are we able to be with our God. We are perfect in him, to the point where Paul says, “we no longer live, but Christ lives in us.” He takes us away from the law…because we have been crucified with him we are now dead to the law. The law no longer accuses us because it cannot accuse a dead person. We are now hidden in Jesus from the law. But the incredible news is that he makes us alive to God. Where we were once dead in our sins before a perfect and holy God…now we are alive before him, in relationship with him, because of the perfection of Jesus Christ given to us. It is ours by faith.
Jesus has set you free from the law, from the conditional life, the life of fear. You don’t have to worry any more about performing. You don’t have to keep trying to keep the law. He has done it for you. You can stop. You can rest. You can enjoy the moment. You are free in him. He is all that you need. He is life itself. He is yours by faith. Amen.
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