Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." They answered him, "We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to any one. How is it that you say, ‘You will be made free’!" They answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not continue in the house for ever; the son continues for ever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed." - John 8:31-36 (RSV)
This short passage of Scripture used to elude me. Being trained in the Reformation tradition, I was used to the ideas of guilt and forgiveness, of rebellious alienation and reconciliation. But it took some time for the third major way the Bible views Christ’s work for us to sink in.
This is strange in a way, because it had been in front of my eyes every time I studied the Small Catechism.
The first part goes like this:
I believe that Jesus Christ -
true God ... and true man
... is my Lord.
At great cost
he has saved and redeemed me,
a lost and condemned person.1
So far, so good. In these words, Luther has brought out the Scriptural revelation that we were lost like sheep, but the Good Shepherd rescued us. We also stood condemned by the Law and were under God’s wrath, but Jesus fulfilled the Law for us and absorbed God’s wrath against sin at Calvary.
These things are known to every child of the Reformation, whether Calvinist, Lutheran, or Anabaptist. What, then, was my problem? Notice what comes next in the Catechism:
He has freed me
from sin, death, and the power of the devil
... with his holy and precious blood
and his innocent suffering and death.
All this he has done that I may be his own,
live under him in his kingdom ...
just as he is risen from the dead and
lives and rules eternally.2
With words like "freedom," "Lord," "kingdom," and "rule," we have entered into another way of thinking, a third way of portraying what Christ has done for us in his death and resurrection. Such words have to do with power and authority, conflict and liberation.
So Jesus’ words in John 8 have to do with the liberty Jesus has won for us at Golgotha. Jesus came to deliver us from the tyranny of darkness, sin, and death. He came to claim us as his rightful spoils of war in order to usher us into his kingdom. Under his Lordship, we are really free.
Jesus said, "All who practice sin are its slaves." To this verbal slap in the face his hearers reacted strongly: "We are the descendants of Abraham," they retorted. "We have never been enslaved to anyone." Their memory, I fear, was short. At that time their country was only a small holding of the Roman Empire ruled by Caesar. Beginning with Moses, they had become progressively enslaved during the years of their sojourn in Egypt. It appears that even Abraham’s children had been slaves on and off for centuries.
Moreover, the reality of their spiritual enslavement was even more binding. The sons of Abraham are also the sons of Adam. And when Adam sinned he opened a Pandora’s Box of death and darkness, of sin and enslavement - and the lid is still ajar.
Just a few years after the Fall, God said to one of Adam’s sons, "Sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you."3
Paul also wrote about it: "Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.... Death ruled (as king)4 from Adam to Moses."5
In these scriptures sin is not merely a minor defect or flaw in human character; it is not merely a misdirected or weakened will. Sin is stronger than our will, our intelligence, our moral ability, or our physical prowess. Sin is revealed as an objective power, a mighty lord, which seizes, imprisons, mistreats, and eventually kills its victims.
People under sin’s power reminded me of a public television presentation I saw once. The program described the return of a middle-aged Jewish woman to Auschwitz where she had managed, somehow, to survive two years of imprisonment. As she conducted the PBS reporter on a "tour," she told him what it was like. The hardest thing, she said, was keeping a strong will to live. More than one inmate simply lay down and willed himself or herself to die - and usually did rather quickly. For, as she put it, no one lived at Auschwitz: They either died or survived. But they never experienced anything similar to what we ordinarily would associate with life. All their human potential and energy were reduced to the lowest denominator:
"Will my bunkmate die tonight? Will I be able to take that woman’s boots when she dies? Will I get her allotment of mush (and the survivability it gives)?"
She then related how people in the very center of a man-made hell could believe they were happy. This was a coveted job. Even here people could have the illusion they were experiencing life. She knew this from personal experience. Somehow, she was chosen to work in the commandant’s office. This was a coveted job because it involved only light work. Occasionally, she got some time "off." She would go out in the sunlight of a spring day and enjoy the grass and the trees, which surrounded the office compound. By simply looking up and away from the camp behind her, she could feel, as she put it, "free." But, of course, she wasn’t. All the time the ovens carried out their grisly work behind her back. When the wind was right the stench assaulted her nostrils and made her afraid, terribly afraid.
It was the children, however, that made her the saddest. They had to spend their childhood in a living hell they neither wanted nor asked for. She watched amazed as they somehow grew to accept that what was going on at Auschwitz was normal life, life in its fullness. All the while, their tormentors demanded more work for less food, more human flesh for their cruel experiments, much like the ancient Pharaohs who, while taking away the straw necessary for such work, kept up the incessant demand, "Make more bricks!"
The children, and all the slaves of Auschwitz, were not fully alive. They merely existed. They may have survived. But life had been wrenched away from them.
Sin’s power enslaves: It robs us of life in its fullness. It deludes us into thinking we are free and happy in the midst of death. Here’s the real mystery of sin: We not only perceive living under sin’s power as normal, we gladly swear allegiance and heartfelt loyalty to this tyrant. So Jesus is speaking to us, too, when he says, "All who practice sin are its slaves." Apart from Christ, we find our situation as death, that is, "without God and without hope in the world."6
Now, lest we despair, we need to look at the other side of the coin. Jesus not only said that "all who sin are its slaves." He also said, "If the Son makes you free, you will be really free."
The Good News is that "God loved the world" - that’s you and me - "in this way: he gave his unique Son, so that all who believe in him might not perish (or die), but might have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world ... that the world might be saved through him."7
Jesus came to provide a way out of slavery to liberty, to "pass over," as he put it, "from death to life."8 In Jesus, God provided for us all a new Exodus, a way to enter the promised liberty his death and resurrection have won for us.
And only Jesus could have done this. Only he has the authority, and the right to do it. He said, "The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does. If the Son sets you free, you will be really free."
We’re dealing with not just "any old body" when we relate to Jesus. He is the Son of God, the Lord and co-creator of all things. As the Son, he has all the authority of the Father. We read in John 3: "He who God has sent [namely, Jesus] utters the words of God; ... the Father loves the Son, and has put all things into his hands."9 All things. Including the "Keys of death and hell."10 His Lordship extends over sin itself.
He is the Son - and only his authority makes us free. It’s something like the situation in which many slaves found themselves in the antebellum South. What did it matter to them if a fellow slave should say, "Brother, sister, you’re free! Take my word for it!" They’d find out the hard way just how far a fellow slave’s authority extended.
But let us say there is the son of some plantation owner who wants to end the abomination of slavery on his inheritance. He has to wait until the his father dies. But the very day after his father’s death, the son issues his own "emancipation proclamation." Now this promise means something. The son has control over all his father’s holdings. The son has the same powers that the father had. So, when the son made the slaves free, they were really free. All they needed to do was believe the good news, and begin to live a new life as free people.
But as history has demonstrated, the price for freedom - whether for black slaves or for concentration camp slaves - is not cheap. Over a million Americans died in the Civil War. Tens of millions died during World War II in Europe alone to set nations free of the Fascist jackboot.
The price for our freedom from sin was not cheap either. The price was nothing less than Jesus’ holy and precious blood, and his innocent suffering and death. Many people have asked over the centuries, "To whom was the ransom paid? The devil? God the Father?" Such questions have led to many foolish and even dangerous speculations. The wrong question was being asked. If the men hitting Utah Beach had been asked the question, they would have been at a loss how to answer: "To whom was our blood and pain paid to set Europe free? That doesn’t make sense. We didn’t pay the price of death to Hitler or Eisenhower or Stalin or anyone else. We paid the price necessary to set Europe free. Nothing more, nothing less. It cost us greatly. But we got the job done."
So it is with Jesus. He did not pay a ransom to sin, death, the devil, the Law, or any other "principality or power." He did what was necessary to set us free. It was enough. His suffering and death got the job done.
Why spend - or, better, waste one more day in the concentration camp of sin? Receive the already accomplished work of liberation won for you on Golgatha. By receiving Jesus, the Son of God, you are given the right to become a child of God. And your interhitance and birthright in Christ is life, life in its fullness, and liberty from sin’s power.
Jesus said, "If the Son makes you free, you will be really free."
Suggested hymn:
"At the Lamb’s High Feast"
1. Martin Luther, The Small Catechism, (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1979), p. 13.
2. Loc. cit.
3. Genesis 5:7.
4. The Greek verb used here is the cognate for the nouns "kingdom," "lordship," "reign," "domain," etc.
5. Romans 5:12ff.
6. Ephesians 2:12.
7. John 3:16ff.
8. Cf. John 5:24.
9. John 3:34ff.
10. Revelation 1:18.