Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

July 6, 2008

Genesis 24:34-67

Romans 7:15-25

Matthew 11:16-30

 

The fact that humanity has long struggled to establish freedom and to laud it as the highest and best state in which we can live suggests that humans have frequently enslaved others.  When we speak of slavery, we usually think of a state of affairs in which somebody is being held captive by a force that is beyond their control - a force which it is necessary to overthrow in order to regain freedom.  Such enslavement takes many forms. At its most brutal and inhuman, it involves the treatment of other human beings as property, to be bought or sold at the whim of their owners. People have also had their freedom taken away from them in less horrible, but nevertheless demeaning ways. Governments often enslave people and establish control over them to serve their own ends. People are also enslaved by draconian laws, by dictatorial families or by unscrupulous bosses and dishonest multinational corporations.

 

Paul was no stranger to all of the forces that I have mentioned. He knew what it was like to live under Roman rule, and during his travels he had frequent opportunity to observe the sad consequences that result from the enslavement of one human being by another.  He often speaks of such enslavement in his letters. Although he does not overtly support the abolition of slavery (and his position on women is utterly alien to that of our own culture), his views on slavery deserve a second look. Paul believed that we are not so much enslaved by external forces which act upon us to deprive us of our freedom, as we are enslaved to our own will. Desire enslaves us. We arc constantly in a state of unsatisfied longing for what we do not have. According to Paul, our desires are so deeply rooted and strong that even when we think we want to do the right thing, we end up by doing the wrong one.

 

Our own culture is not very good at analyzing the desire and longing of which Paul spoke. We tend to take such desire as an inevitable given. There is little we feel that we can do about it. The French philosopher Baudrillard has claimed that our capitalist society is equivalent to the economics of desire, and the only way to escape from the cycle is by death. We are taught that our freedom means that we can (within the limits of not hurting others) give free reign to our desire. We are bombarded by advertisements and marketing which is intended to educate, fulfill or direct our desires as consumers. We are sold on the notion of “personal improvement” which encourages us to actualize our desires and search for a partner or lifestyle that will fulfill our deepest longings. The democratic principle on which most Western governments are founded takes the rights of the individual as its keystone. At its worst, such a system reduces people to blind consumers who feed the capitalist machine by their constant search to fulfill their perceived needs. Democratic capitalism has its slaves too. Though we are willing slaves and have programmed ourselves to keep the system running, our liberty is no less compromised by our blind participation in the materialistic dance.

 

Freedom, then, is something that people struggle to get from others when they know that they have been enslaved. It is usually perceived as something that has to be fought for, and something that is conferred from outside. We fight for it against those who would wish to take it from us; governments, families, churches, bosses, multinational corporations.

 

The same must hold true for the freedom of our souls. But how can we win freedom from our slavery to ourselves and to our desires? That is the question that Paul asks himself in the reading we had from his letter to the Romans. Paul argues that our enslavement to our desires is complete, until we realize that Christ has already won our freedom for us. Christ willingly and lovingly enslaved himself through his incarnation. He fought the all-powerful human desire and all-powerful death in his own flesh, and he brought us home to victory.  When we trust that Christ has won that victory for us, the shackles which bind us to our destructive desires to dominate, to control, to consume, or to pander to our addictions are broken, and we are free.

 

In order to know what it is that is enslaving our souls, we must examine our desires. Why do we want the things that we want?  Why do we do what we do? What pushes us into action? How will the attainment of my desires affect my life or the lives of others? As soon as we know the contours of our desire, we can offer it to God in Christ. It is in that offering of ourselves that we will truly become free. As Jesus himself said, “He who loses his life for my sake will gain it."  When we have begun to undertake this difficult road, we will learn the true meaning of Christ's saying, “Come unto me all who labor and who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

NJM