Truth and Freedom                                                               9/11/49

 

Scripture:  John 8: 28-42

 

Text: John 8: 31b-32;  “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

 

As John reports the life and teaching of Jesus in the Hebrew temple at Jerusalem, Jesus was having an argument with the Scribes and Pharisees - the wise ones of Israel.  They had already tried to trip him up over the question of how a sinful woman was to be treated.  They were later to challenge his right to heal a blind man on the holy Sabbath day of the week.  But right at the time discussed in the part of John’s account which we have read this morning, the Scribes and Pharisees were accusing Jesus, to his face, of a false record, of having a devil.  Jesus was telling them bluntly that they were without spiritual understanding and sons of the devil, while he was the son of the Father, God.  They took lusty pride in being descendants of Abraham.  He told them that he had been before Abraham; that is to say, his life was at one with God who has no beginning and no end in time but only eternity.

 

In the course of the argument, some were convinced.  Speaking to these, Jesus assured them that if they were to continue in his word, becoming true disciples - understanding followers and learners - they should know truth; “and the truth shall make you free.”  I think he meant not so much that truth would set aside the bonds those people hated -- sometimes truth only intensifies one’s bonds, one’s obligations -- as that in truth, they would find freedom of spirit.  At first reading, this text seems to breathe the air of our own time and mood.  To contemporary man, truth is found at the end of a learning process.  It is revealed through scientific investigation and logical inquiry.  Its results are without limit.  Man, in his reasoning processes, hopes to extract the utmost secrets of the universe and to make truth his means of mastery.

 

When we use the word “freedom” we are prone to think of the centuries-old struggle for liberation from external controls.  Freedom is something to be secured against political and ecclesiastical domination.  We imagine that everything else that is worthwhile depends on our being free to think and act as we please to think and act.  We modern people are very near total blindness to the possibility that we may not, in such freedom as we have, elect to think and act rightly, and much of the time do not so think and act.  In that blindness, our liberty becomes not the basic goal of living, but the tragedy of error in our living, playing into the very hands of ambitious souls who are ready to say “I told you so.  It doesn’t work after all.  Let me show you how to run our affairs.”  And so our love of freedom of the ego without any adequate understanding or practice of its disciplines and obligations, betrays us and our whole civilization right back into the evil hands of the slave driver.

 

A commencement speaker addressing a recent graduating class advanced the thesis, quite commonly held, that science is about to set the world free and that religion had better conform.  For years now, we have been trying to set our religious house in order in the light of scientific demonstration.  So far as the organized church is concerned, some of this has been healthy and necessary, not because of the validity of scientific claims, but because of the misunderstanding and betrayal of true religion!

 

All of our misdirected emphasis on freedom is a tragic misunderstanding of what Jesus really opened up in his ministry.  He was actually rejecting popular pressure to take leadership in a movement of political reform.  His popularity with the masses had rested on the hope of people that he would lead them to freedom from external restraints.  It seems that he recognized that they were in no way prepared for such liberty.

 

Actually, Jesus was speaking of another kind, freedom from sin, freedom from slavery to the self.  The proud men to whom he addressed his devastating argument were people convinced of their inherent superiority.  They were descendants of Abraham, and proud of it.  They were slaves of no other person.  They had a working agreement with the politicos of Rome whereby they were let alone and got along very well.  They could levy the ecclesiastical tax and enforce the religious rules.  Rome could collect the state tax and enforce the civil order.  They were quite at liberty from external domination.  It was the mass of inferior people who had to obey their orders and accept the duties they imposed.

 

But Jesus knew that they were in a far more terrible bondage than that which they had pride in escaping.  He saw them in bondage to sin, in slavery to themselves.  Their most appalling need was freedom of conscience in devotion to God rather than to their own comfortable selves.  The common people needed the same kind of liberty from the worship of self.  But these privileged leaders needed it the more desperately because of their determination to maintain their aloofness from external control.

 

Do you know that, while I love the liberty of our free church and the other churches of its order and similarity, I suspect that the most solemn and compelling duty of the membership in a free church is the quest of the soul for what is really true and genuinely free.  If we can’t move on ethical issues, make the spirit of Christians felt in the counsels of mankind as an autocratic ecclesiastical organization claims to be able to do, we do not have the virility of freedom we claim!  The only freedom we may be worthy to have is liberty to seek, to learn, to proclaim the gospel of Christ in the lives of people!  And that gospel is burdened not with the seeking of ourselves, but with seeking the good God!

 

The truth about which Jesus spoke, the “abiding in his word” is far removed from the examination of facts which we call scientific investigation.  Our curiosity for truth must turn to yearning.  Beyond exercise of the mind is the commitment of the whole soul to the object of our loyalty.

 

            [Freedom in marriage   “ball and chain”   “Lord and master”                               Wrong approach.   

a groom - “she gets the certificate, and I get the girl.” 

a bride - “most important thing is to get the man you love.”]

 

Marriage is most truly achieved when husband gives his best thought, his strength, his affection to his wife, helping her to grow as she can grow only with his love; when wife gives her concern, her faith, her encouragement and affection to her husband that he may, with her, be a better man, more balanced, more mellow, of stronger character than he might be without her.  Marriages are achieved not in the getting one from another, but in the giving, one to another, until the “I and thou” relationship dissolves into a “we” unity that is in turn given to something higher and nobler than even a family-sufficient home.

 

[“Getting something” out of the church.  Comfort, reassurance, standing in Christian community.   Wrong Approach.   The truth Jesus spoke about involves giving one’s self in the church, working in the Christian cause, sharing Christian love and substance and service with others.]

 

The splendor of Jesus is not so much that he was a person on earth, a teacher, a proclaimer of good news, not even that he came to be a helper; as that in him we see, comprehend, recognize, God.  “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.”  “We find freedom when we find God; we lose it when we lose him.” [Paul Scherer].

 

Jesus is not recruiting men and women for a direct-action program for the Four Freedoms.  He is trying, even to the cross, to lead men and women to God; beyond fear of God to love of God; beyond assenting faith in Him to adoration of Him.

 

Christian liberty is not an end in itself; it is a derivative of Christian truth.  Happiness, if sought for its own sake, always eludes the seeker; but is the unsought reward of those who live for God and others.  True freedom is like that.  When sought for itself as a first aim, with some kind of religion that will serve it, it is elusive, for we go at it wrong end to.  The freedom of Christ’s disciples comes as a derivative of their concern to do God’s will.  It is liberty from bondage to self and it extends to all other liberties through the world.

 

The mood of modern, pragmatic man toward the teachings of Christ and his gospel --- “Yes, it is true enough, but it will not work.”  “True, I admit, but we are not yet ready for it.”  “Quite true, but it hasn’t anything to do with me.”  So long as we remain in this mood, we have not found the truth of which Jesus speaks, nor the freedom which springs from it alone.  Instead of being in a position of intellectual superiority, we are in a position of moral compromise.

 

Our desire for freedom of the self must give way to a sincere effort to achieve freedom from the self.

 

[Concern for Four Freedoms, freedom of women, freedom of youth, freedom of labor, freedom of private enterprise, freedom of pulpit and press -- they should be granted as a matter of course in any enlightened society!  The trouble comes when they are sought selfishly!  -- then they elude us --]

 

We are free to choose; we are not free to sidestep the consequences of our choice.  Jesus promises no sudden turning from the ways our feet have taken.  He knows the things that decay and those that endure.  He too lived in a dying culture as we are often told we do.

 

The Divine word reminds us of the things that abide within the heart.  His true disciples are free -- the salt, the leaven of any new order sshaped by the Father’s will.

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, September 11, 1949.