Dear Friends
Freedom’ is one of the great words of this century. Those who were once slaves have received not only legal freedom but increasingly freedom from those unwritten restrictions which human beings use to create underclasses. If you speak with most people it sounds like almost everyone is in favour of freedom, it seems.
Yet few people, in my experience feel free. In our daily lives, in our relationships with one another, in our work and even in our leisure pursuits, we still feel ourselves in a kind of bondage. Things are expected of us. Demands are made, we feel trapped by circumstances.
In law we are probably the most ‘free’ people who ever lived. In practice far too often we still feel like slaves.
So when Jesus says he has come to proclaim ‘freedom for the prisoners’(Luke 4:18), we hear him speak our language too. Unlike many founders of great religions, he didn’t come to heap a new set of requirements on us, more rules to keep, more rituals to observe but to set us free. If that is really what he has promised, and if he can really fulfil it, then his message is truly ‘good news’ of a quite unique kind.
And once Jesus sets us free, we cannot be enslaved again. We ‘belong’ to him but that freedom is bought at a price. It always is whether it is the blood of ‘ freedom fighters ‘or great pioneers of human freedom. The freedom of God’s people the glorious liberty of the children of God as Paul puts it is also bought at a price of blood.
God in his love for us sent his Son to be the means of redemption the key to real freedom for all those who put their trust in him. This inner freedom is a great transforming force for good. It sets us free from the shackles of the past and liberates us to be the people people God intended us to be. As Charles Wesley reminded us last week in his famous hymn ‘My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth, and followed thee’. The question is then: Are there areas where God’s creatures are still in other kinds of slavery, from which they need to be released?
InKosi mayibe nani (The Lord be with you)
Solomzi