Jesus Means Freedom

You are a manifestation of who God is in the world. Don’t look away. Don’t laugh it off. Don’t say no. You are the revelation of what God’s love looks like. The love you have received is the love that you also share.

But I think part of the problem is that most of us don’t believe we are loved. Who and how we are in the world is more frequently reflective of believing we are threatened. We respond to the world and the people around us out of fear, skeptical of love: skeptical of receiving it, skeptical of giving it. This looks differently with other people. Some of us, when we’re afraid that someone won’t – or doesn’t – love us, we push them away. Some of us dig in more deeply, insisting, begging, chasing after love. Some of us act like we don’t care, like we’re above it all, like not receiving love can’t touch us.

Because love is scary. Really really scary. Vulnerability is scary. Being in community is scary. People get to know you – the real you – and it’s really hard to hide. News about what’s happening in your life travels almost faster than it actually happens. People who you were going to call later in the week hear your big news and are hurt that you didn’t call them first. It’s exposing. When our lives fall apart, when things don’t go as we’d hoped or planned, or when we’ve done something we wished we could undo, it’s as though we are on stage, naked.

So when I read Matthew 18, what I hear is blah, blah, blah “whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth you loose in heaven,” and I find it easy to become convinced that it’s not much of a heaven to go to. Because, when we’re really honest, it’s more delicious and fun to hang on to grudges, to refuse to forgive, to draw a line in the sand, to build those walls around our hearts higher and stronger. Frederick Buechner says it this way: “Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.” And, as we bind our brothers and sisters to the wrongs they have done, we hang on to our anger, we hang on to the gift of forgiveness, and, slowly but surely, it eats away at us. We sit at the dinner table with our husbands and wives and realize we have nothing left to say. We look at our children and forget the joy of their first cries. We look at our friends and remember the times that they weren’t there when we really needed them. And we bind ourselves to their sin because we won’t let ourselves forget. These become our shackles. So long as we bind each other, we can never be free. We begin devouring ourselves from the inside out.

“Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” It seems Jesus was about the business of unbinding people; how we ever came to believe that we ought to be about the business of binding people presents quite a conundrum. If we read earlier in Matthew 18, we read that those who welcome a child – someone of little status in the ancient world – welcome Christ. It’s a little better for where I’m going with this if I skip over the part about tearing out eyes and cutting off hands that cause us to sin. We hear about a shepherd who would leave 99 sheep behind to go find one who had wandered off into the mountains. But then we come to the part about someone in the congregation sinning against another person and we somehow think this is about judgment rather than love. If we read what comes right after this in Matthew 18, we read of the importance of forgiveness: not seventy times, but seventy times seven. But, by this time, we’ve all stopped listening: some of us are planning our confrontations; others of us are fearing that confrontations will come. It’s a lot easier to build walls.

But what if what this is about is freedom? What if this about loosing the things that keep another person from being themselves, from knowing they are loved? What if this is about freeing the whole world, unbinding it to recognize that Christ will stop at no lengths to find it? What if this is about Christ freeing you to be yourself, to recognize that you, child of God, are loved. You are loved, as you are, imperfections and all. And because you are loved, Jesus refuses to leave you where you are.

Jesus refuses to leave us in our self-absorbed, self-consuming ways of shackling ourselves to anger and fear. Jesus promises to show up, to show up in our mess, in our propensity to bind rather than to free each other. Jesus refuses to allow our fear of being unloved to be the end of the story.

“You can’t push me away,” he says.

“You are confident and brave,” he says.

“I know the deepest cravings of your soul,” he says.

And instead of waving a magic wand and satisfying our need to be loved, Jesus places us in community with other sinner-saints who are, to be honest, a lot stronger on the sinner side than they are on the saint side. We are placed in community with real people and bound to them. It won’t do to go off and live happily ever after with Jesus in your heart because Jesus is out in the world, freeing it, unbinding it, loving the unlovable and saving the sinner who isn’t expecting looking to be loved. Jesus is among us, freeing us, unbinding us, teaching us how to fall in love with each other when we’re not really looking to be loved. And so, sideswiped by forgiveness and grace, we realize that love has shown up, freeing us, sending us out into the world to unbind and love a world that is shackled to its own anger and self-absorption, setting it free.

We are made perfectly free lords and ladies of all.

We are made perfectly dutiful slaves of all.

We are drawn into the paradox of being at once free and bound, sinner and saint, broken and whole. We are called to live out the gospel promise that Christ is with us, gathering us together here and sending us out into the world, to tend and to serve, to love and to keep, to proclaim the truth that God’s love is out loose in the world.

You are not bound to your sin or death. You are bound to Christ’s love: for you, for your neighbor, for your enemy, for all of creation. For freedom you have been set free.