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O'Malley's Best

Freedom Costs

It's a dogma of the Church that Jesus was not only fully divine but fully human. If that's true, then Jesus must have doubted--because doubt is one of the constitutive elements of being human. No rock doubts; no carrot has second thoughts; no stag wonders if he might have taken the wrong path. Humans do. And therefore these three temptations were genuinely tempting to Jesus: to buy faith with bread, to coerce faith with force, power, and fear, to seduce faith with miracles. Satan--or whatever you want to call the power of the self-serving beast in human beings--was the first of advertisers. He had a walloping success with Adam and Eve: "Eat this, and you'll become like God." That same seductive power is still working 24/7 on TV: "the more things you have the happier you'll be; Aren't you afraid you'll be a loser if you don't have a Beemer; This miraculous product will make you a goddess in a week." Well-meaning Churchfolk have fallen victim to the same underhanded methods of eliciting faith: the promise of heaven, the threat of hell, the hope that--although God may be negligible most of the time--he's always there with a miracle when you're in an inescapable bind.

But Jesus refused to lower himself to using bribery or scare tactics or seduction to evoke faith. For reasons known only to God, genuine faith--like genuine love--has to be freely given: not bought, not coerced, not seduced. We have to freely choose to make Jesus the model of our lives because we honestly believe his is the way to genuine fulfillment, freely choose to believe God himself became human to show us how it's done and rose from the dead to liberate us from the fear of ultimate meaninglessness, freely choose to put others' needs ahead of our own, freely accept God's acceptance of us without our need to merit it, freely offer God worship out of genuine gratitude rather than out of fear.

No other species we know of was born truly free, either to get uppity and try to take God's place or to degrade ourselves and act like other animals. Every other species follows iron laws built right into their natures and instincts. No rock tries to reproduce; no tree decides the soil's better on the other side of the fence and uproots itself; no tiger toys with dreams of atomic conquest. We do. On the other hand, no other species is free to degrade itself. No rock decides to disintegrate; no tree refuses nourishment; no tiger resolves merely to vegetate. We do. Only humans are created free to be what God intended them to be-or not.

Until humans arrived on the scene, every other species faithfully followed programming instilled in them by their Maker. Then God came up with a species completely free to fulfill their God-given, defining purpose to understand and love (which no other species has), or to refuse it. In creating human beings, God freely set limits to his own omnipotence.

In creating humans, God made creatures who could defy him, degrade themselves, even ignore him entirely. Apparently love was pretty important to God, and freedom is the sine qua non of loving. And God obviously thought it worth the very real risk to give us freedom.

A few years ago, there was a poster about loving which Sting turned into a song (or vice versa). It said, "If you love someone, set them free. If they come back to you, they're yours. If they don't, they never were."

I think God did just that when he made us: gave us the freedom to know him, love him, serve him in the needs of others. Or not. And since we are made in God's image, I suspect God hopes we'll do the same with our freedom: set those we love free to love others besides ourselves, to be different from ourselves, to make their own mistakes even despite our best advice-just as God does.

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