Sermons
Epiphany - 3 (Liberty and Law)
Jesus says the spirit has sent him ‘to proclaim release to the captives…to let the oppressed go free’. Are we to open the doors of our prisons then, and let the murderers and the thieves and the rest go free? Is Jesus recommending an antinomian or anarchic freedom? Is God’s anointed son proclaiming that we are to answer his proclamation of freedom in such a radical way as to put ourselves and others at risk?
Well, Jesus is, I think, offering freedom of a sort, and proclaiming liberty to those enchained in various ways, he is announcing to those who are held captive that God extends a liberating hand to draw them away from what has captivated them. But this question of law and freedom is one that runs through the New Testament writings. In the sayings of Jesus and the writings of St Paul, the law seems to get a very bad press. But if we are listening to a proclamation of some sort of liberation of those held captive, some sort of freedom, what might this Christian freedom entail?
Let’s look first at the context of today’s gospel. Jesus is beginning his ministry, the spirit descended upon him at his baptism and the spirit drove him out into the wilderness to be tempted, and now he returns to his home town and in the power of the spirit enters the temple and reads from the prophet Isaiah.
So far, for the men assembled in the temple, so normal. But then out of the blue, this man whom they all know claims that not only is the time of the prophecy now fulfilled, but that it is fulfilled in himself. Jesus claims to be the longed-for Messiah, the anointed one of God, the one who will bring in the year of the Lord’s favour, the scriptures are fulfilled in the hearing of the people and they are in the company of the one who both brings the message and is the message.
Jesus proclaims that in his person the last days are begun but that the signs of the end are to be found not in the overthrow of the people’s wretched Roman overlords but in actions of mercy, of healing, and of liberation. In this final age there will be no further need for the periodic time of jubilee, of the setting free of the prisoners and slaves, for all will now hear the proclamation of freedom, the year of the Lord has come, bringing the true freedom of life lived in the spirit. And of course the people reject him and seek to destroy him, this isn’t the sort of freedom they wanted at all and anyway, who does he think he is this Jesus of Nazareth?
So Jesus offer of freedom is rejected and we are at once encountering the development of the enduring ambiguity with which Christians have approached questions of law. For the very first Christians, of course the first questions to ask were about the nature of a Christian’s obligations to the laws of Hebrew religion. Christians found that the religious zealots of their time seemed to want to pile law upon law, to multiply the number of things that one could find oneself guilty of, with most of the punishments including some form of banishment, of exclusion. The Jewish law is about drawing boundaries; within the boundaries are the ritually clean and outside is everything else, the outcasts, those besmirched by the world, by contact with the ordinary. So women at certain times, those who had contact with corpses, those who had not performed the correct ceremonies of cleansing, adulterers, thieves, etc etc.
Against this context Jesus and Paul do appear antinomian. Paul talks of being dead to the law, and Jesus again and again undermines the religious authorities by pulling out the carpet from under their ritually clean feet and showing how empty and loveless their conception of a holy law has become. Again and again Jesus tries to show that the underlying law of love needs to be returned to and needs to be understood as the way in which a life lived to God in the spirit is both free and earnest about moral action.
Religious zealots though are frequently popular, they were in Jesus day, and they have been throughout Christian history, praying on the fears of their followers and issuing frightening messages in sound-bite size chunks of moral teaching and often revealing their own deepest insecurities in the process. And we live in a time of renewed religious zeal, and renewed Christian zealotry, and it is in just as much danger of obscuring the central teachings of Jesus as was the zeal of the legal purists in Jesus’ day. We still live in a church where religious zealots are preventing women becoming bishops, in a church where gay people are sometimes treated as ritually unclean , as somehow second-class citizens in the eyes of God, as being in need of healing. We still live in a church where the proclamation of freedom in the spirit is crushed by a zealotry that will scare you into thinking that the foundations are crumbling and that the centre will only hold by the re-introduction of a pre-Enlightenment reading of scripture, a literalism that aims at denying the fruits of scholarship and denying the underlying law of love which characterizes the teachings of Jesus.
One of our callings my friends, is to proclaim afresh the liberty and mercy that is offered by God. We do not proclaim anarchy, the gospel never did, we proclaim a liberty which is ordered and finds its meaning within the most demanding and highest of laws, the law of love. And this law is enjoined upon us by our Lord, whose service is perfect freedom.