Faith Venture

There are people who try to make a rule to proscribe every possible way to live a life. Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with not only the 10 Commandments but a total of 613 laws. Many of those made a lot of sense to a huge group of recent slaves now loose and on their own in the desert. Raising pigs would have destroyed their way of life. Eating shellfish would have killed them.

First Century Jewish teachers added many more rules trying to keep up with changing times. Jesus often talked about the burdens the Pharisees were laying o the people with all these additional laws.

Then Jesus came. During his final instructions to his followers, he said that he would leave them with one new commandment. Not 614, but 1. Love one another as I have loved you. Do this and people will know you are my followers.

The Apostle Paul explained this in his letter to the Galatians calling it freedom from the law. (He explained it in many other places, too.)

We humans try to make it hard by over-thinking. It’s a simple concept just hard to live:

Love one another as Jesus loved his followers (and us). The extension of the love was giving up his life for them (us).

I listened to a podcast interview on dialectical behavior therapy. The psychologist stated that people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder do not have an overwhelmingly strong ego. They have a great fear of being ordinary. I can think of several examples without straining my memory.

These are people who crave power and status. Many of us have a little of that. As Ryan Holliday wrote in The Daily Stoic, “You’d think that the more powerful you are, the more freedom you’d have. The more money and success you have, the more you can do. You’d think that being a millionaire or being a celebrity or being the CEO would finally unshackle you from all the obnoxious and annoying constraints of being a ‘regular’ person…”

Maybe you have had those thoughts at times. Holliday continues, “How wrong this is. How wrong this has always been.”

Freedom longings populate the world in this era. In America a weird sense of what constitutes freedom has recently evolved. No one can tell me what to do, when to do it, or how to do it, any time or any where.

Paul tried valiantly to describe freedom in the spirit in his writing to the Galatians and Romans and other places. He fell a little short of clarity. Or maybe it’s difficult to understand.

I picked up this thought from Holliday in The Daily Stoic, “It was Eisenhower who said that freedom is really better described as the, ‘opportunity for self-discipline.’ ”

We must learn to tell ourselves that what we want to do is neither moral or ethical or just or beneficial. We must aim again.

Freedom is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.

Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

When I was in grad school, I studied freedom. I looked at it from various angles. However, every angle was from the point of view of an adolescent, privileged, white guy. Viktor Frankl, whom I had read as an undergraduate, was a Jewish psychotherapist who studied freedom from within a Nazi concentration camp.

Privileged, white, adolescent guys lived for freedom. We hated the other side of the coin Frankl discusses–responsibleness. I wonder how many of us Baby Boomers still around continue to harbor those feelings.

Jesus talked about freedom. I was puzzled. Then I realized–he meant freedom from a social system that was built upon following rules. And those who studied the rules could play the power game of “gotcha” over those who merely were trying to survive until another day. It was something like someone said in a movie or novel once, “I practice the Golden Rule; he who has the gold makes the rules.”

Paul wrote an entire letter on this topic. The letter to the Galatians is all about freedom. Throwing off the shackles of the old Laws (rules) left you free to live in the Spirit.

Living in the Spirit is freedom. It is also responsibility. We are responsible to love God and to love our neighbor as ourself.

You don’t get either/or. You get both/and as a follower of Jesus.