Using Our Freedom Well

If there is one concept which our polarized society can agree upon, it’s the importance of freedom. Everyone wants to be free, and everyone agrees that being free is a good thing. Our country was founded on such a notion: that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights given to each of us by our Creator.

The problem, of course, is defining what freedom means in practice. Completely unchecked, freedom devolves into lawlessness; without any limits, one person’s free action may impinge upon on the rights of others, preventing them from being free. The founders of our nation understood this. That’s why they worked hard to establish a system of laws, i.e. checks and balances which strive both to promote the general freedom of the individual while also safeguarding the rights of others.

The dynamic between freedom and laws goes beyond the political sphere; it also pertains to the moral life as well. In the Gospel today, Jesus redefines the moral law for the Jewish people. To the amazement of his listeners, he sets himself as a higher authority than the Torah they had received from Moses. In doing so, not only does he once again point to himself as God-made-flesh, he also reveals that morality is not just about exteriors, about actions or omissions that are good and bad. Morality is also about interior, namely what exists within our hearts.

Some voices in our culture today say that traditional religions – for example, Judaism and Christianity, maybe especially Catholicism – are too overly fixated on moral rules and regulations: do this, don’t do that. These voices see all of these requirements as limiting our freedom, being imposed upon us from the exterior as if by a dictator, even if divine. Jesus though sees things very differently. By giving us commandments, indeed even by calling not just to exterior observance but interior adherence, God’s law in fact makes us even more truly free.

How is that possible, you might ask? How is it possible to be more free if we have to follow a law more closely? Remember that I said at the start that the purpose of law in society is two-fold: to allow for individual freedom but to guard us from using that freedom in an improper way. The same is true of the moral law. God’s commandments first are aimed at keeping us from doing that which is truly destructive of the rights of others. Jesus gives us some examples: murder, adultery, falsehood. But God’s law doesn’t stop there – rather than merely allow us to operate indifferently within exterior parameters, it also calls us to be transformed interiorly, to be free, but not just free in whatever way we might say – rather in the truest sense of freedom.

It’s a central principle in the Jewish worldview, just as it is in the Christian one, that God has given to each of us a free will. We are, in short, not robots. To each of us he has given us the freedom to think and act as we determine. But God gives us this free will not to use in whatever way we’d like – a freedom indifferent, you might say, to what is truly good for us. Rather, he gives us freedom for excellence – freedom so that we might freely choose that which is good for us, that which truly fulfills all of our capacity to be good. The moral law, then, is isn’t merely intended to keep us from doing wrong; it’s given to us by God to make us truly excellent.

We see how this plays out practically in the Gospel. Jesus doesn’t just want us not to carry out murder; he wants us to be free from every angry impulse. He doesn’t just want us not to commit adultery; he wants us to be free from every adulterous desire. He doesn’t just want us not to lie; he wants us to be from every impulse to falsehood and deceit, to live completely in the truth.

Now you might say, “Well, that sounds really hard.” On the one hand, you’d be right. It’s certainly not easy. It’s even harder if you give into the thinking of so many today – that every moral law is merely a kind of constrictor, something that binds up our freedom. But I think if we search our hearts, we know that that logic is unsound. We know that when we follow our base impulses – our desires for the four pernicious P’s (Possessions, Pleasure, Power, Prestige) – we end up not free but enslaved. Instead, God gives us his grace to follow an understanding of freedom much different than how our culture understands it.

Harold Copping, The Sermon on the Mount (1922)

Authentic freedom comes when we are able to strive for that which makes us truly flourish, the kind of happiness that comes from fulfilling the nature God has given to us. Take a moment to think about whatever sin you most want to be rid of. Maybe it’s something like Jesus mentioned: anger, lust, untruthfulness. Maybe it’s something else: letting go of a past grudge, being envious of your best friend, trying not to be so consumed with worldly success. Whatever it is, God desires you to be free of that – and not just free from it, but able to be good, to be excellent in the opposite way: generous, faithful, charitable, loving. Through the power of grace that comes to us by being in communion with Christ, we learn how to desire what our Father has created us to desire, to find the moral excellence wherein true freedom lies.

Friends, our first reading today from the Book of Sirach tells us clearly that “if you choose, you can keep the commandments.” Set before us, to use the language of Scripture, are good and evil, life and death. We make the choice. But for us who desire to be as God has created us to be, he does not leave us on our own; rather he assists us with his grace to keep his commandments and so choose what is truly for our own excellence. It is a good thing, indeed, to be free, but let us use our freedom well. If we do so, we may be confident that, “what eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart,” that indeed is “what God has prepared for those who love him.”