Matthew 25.31-45 is a powerful and challenging section of scripture. A question asked there is, “When did we see you a stanger and invite you in, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick, or in prison, and come to you?”And Jesus’ reply is this: “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me.”
Here’s how you can do exactly that. (more…)
I’ve been thinking for many years about the idea of freedom, and I’m certain that there are nooks and crannies I have yet to discover, as well as many rooms into which I’ve only glanced.
One of those rooms is human slavery, a condition in which one person becomes the legal property of another and is forced to obey that person. On my own I can only explore this room intellectually, having never been a slave or a slave owner. I can explore it emotionally with the help of those who have known slaves or been slaves, and one who has helped me do a little of that is the poet Elma Stuckey, mother of my friend Sterling Stuckey. Her work in The Collected Poems of Elma Stuckey has touched me and taught me.
But there is one room at the intersection of freedom and slavery that I do know something of, and that is the spiritual room. The apostle Paul knew about it too, and what a person to write about it! He was, of all men, most “free.” He was an Israelite, a Pharisee, highly educated by the best of Rabbis, and he was also a Roman citizen. In his culture, in his time, no one could be his master.
Except that he made himself a slave to Christ, because he realized that otherwise he was a slave to sin.
There is amazing freedom in being a slave to Christ, and it is a condition I highly recommend. Most of us don’t, of course, think of our relationship to Jesus Christ in that way. We think of him as our brother, our savior, our friend. We sometimes even say that he is our Lord or our Master, but that doesn’t mean we are his slaves.
Or does it?
I was fairly young when I first heard someone say, “The only way to be free is to be a slave.” The person saying this was someone I trusted, but I didn’t understand what he meant. Let me correct that — I understood all the words, but I didn’t understand how his statement could be applied in my life, or in anyone else’s life, for that matter.
The idea that to be free you must be a slave is what is known as a paradox. My first encounter with that word was in the old joke, “What do you get when you put Dr. Harrell and Dr. Brickman together?” The answer, of course, is “a pair o’ docs.” Eventually I grasped the real definition of paradox as a seemingly self-contradictory statement that when understood proves to be true.
Being a slave to be free certainly fits that. I had read Huckleberry Finn, and I knew that Jim was running away from slavery because slavery was bad. I also knew that Jim eventually got caught by a “slave catcher,” and that Uncle Silas (who would be Jim’s master) was the embodiment of evil. So why would I want to be a slave, and how could that make me free?
Paul writes about this in several of his letters, including a passage in Ephesians we examined in part last Sunday. I’ll come back to this topic, but for now let the paradox of being made free by becoming a slave roll around in your mind and in your heart.