The Point of Absolutely Everything
Ending scene in Braveheart (1995)
The New Testament passage in the ACNA lectionary this week contains my favorite verse in the whole Bible, Galatians 5:1. “It is for freedom that He has set you free.” “For freedom Christ has set us free.” Instantly, I have multiple movie scenes pop into my head when I think of that verse. The most obvious one is of William Wallace crying out “Freedom!” in defiance of his executioners in the movie Braveheart – I think one of, if the most, beautiful of scenes in modern film. I think of the movie Glory and the scene where the men of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first all African American regiment in US history, march out to the beach on Morris Island in Charleston Harbor to launch an assault on the Confederate Fort Wagner and all of the white regiments lining the sides of beach cheering them on. “Give em hell 54th!” Again, a breathtaking scene. I cry every time. It is a must if you haven’t seen it. A little bit different, but still an image of freedom that is fixed in my brain is the moment in Moulin Rouge when Christian and Satine sing their love medley and Christian launches into the chorus of “I will Always Love You” and the screen explodes with fireworks and Satine who had been trying to resist his love can’t help but respond by echoing his chorus. Tears every time…every time.
All of these capture elements of freedom to me. They help to paint a picture of what freedom is. And they each, in their own way, capture the fact that freedom is best understood, most clearly known, in the face of real crisis and fear. William Wallace’s freedom is most evident while he is being executed by his oppressors. The brave men of the 54th display their freedom by marching against one of the most heavily fortified forts in the Confederacy, one that would never fall during the war. They stood against their oppressors in the face of certain death. Their freedom compelled them forward into the danger and in the fear. Satine was a prostitute, who had become a slave to sex and money, and was literally being bought by an evil duke! BUT Christian (his name is not an accident!) breaks into her life and sings songs of true love to her, pursuing and inviting her to experience true love for the first time. Her carefully crafted hard exterior defenses are broken down. She is never the same.
I love that verse “For freedom Christ has set us free” because Paul tells us the point of everything from God’s perspective in one sentence. If you have ever asked the question, what is the point of all of this? What is the end game? Where is all of this going? Galatians 5:1 gives us the answer: humanity set free. Why the cross? Why all of the suffering and pain and torture? So that we can be alive and free. God wants you free.
I have preached and written on these same passages multiple times and talked about the various kinds of freedom we might think of when we consider what freedom is. Political, religious, economic, social, physical, etc. But the basic truth about freedom, that I think is illustrated in these different movie references, is that freedom is really rooted internally first. There can be all sorts of external kinds of freedom that we could cite and are objectively good things, but without being free internally, no amount of external freedom is going to matter a lick. As Lenny Kravitz sings, “Being free is a state of mind.”
And it is this internal freedom, the liberation of your heart, that Paul is most concerned with in our Galatians passage. The whole letter to the church in Galatia is focused on reminding the Galatians of the freedom they had received through the grace of Jesus Christ. The occasion was that there had been some teachers that had come into the church some time after Paul had left that began to tell these new Christians, most of whom were Gentiles, that if they really wanted to be in with God they needed to get circumcised and become like Jews. After all, that was one of the main signs of the old covenant that God had made with Israel, the men would be circumcised. The Galatians being normal people like you and me, heard this and thought, “Oh dang, well I really do want to be sure to be good with God, so I better get circumcised too.” Paul got wind of this as he was on his missionary journeys and wrote this letter to set them straight.
He gets very upset because, as we see in our passage today, nothing short of their very freedom was at stake. The very thing that God wanted for them was at risk because they were being led back into bondage under the law. What does that mean? Well, the message that Paul preached to them was the message of grace…the message that God loves them unconditionally and had done everything for them in Jesus’ death and resurrection to set them free; free from sin, death, and the devil. But even more significant that Jesus set them free from God’s wrath. The threat of condemnation from a righteous and perfect God because of their sin. The message of grace that Paul preached told them that they did not have to do anything to earn their way to God. They did not have to prove themselves before God in order to make Him happy with them. That’s how all of us think it is supposed to work with God. We need to be good, prove ourselves as good, in order for him to accept us as good…in order for him to like us. This is life under the law. It is conditional. If you do this, then I will accept you. If you do not do this, then I will reject you.
That’s what the Galatians were falling back into…the life of conditions, believing that God would not love them or accept them unless they performed in a certain way, namely unless they got circumcised. This is what Paul calls bondage, “a yoke of slavery” (4:3, 5:1). It’s because this way of operating has dramatic internal effects. The conditional life, the life under the law, is a life of uncertainty and doubt internally. You’re always operating from the starting place that God is displeased with you…your starting point is always with the presumption of his wrath. God is against you until you do something about it and make him like you. That is not freedom. And Paul could not put it into starker terms than he does in our passage. He tells the Galatians and us that the results of this way of thinking, or believing I should say, are that we “are severed from Christ, we who would be justified by the law; we have fallen away from grace” (5:4). And it’s true, if we think that even in the smallest way something about our acceptance before God, something about our salvation and justification remains up to us, then we have lost the whole shootin match!
There is no half way. There is no partial way. There is not a 99% God and 1% us deal. Paul prevents any misunderstanding here about the law and grace and how they work. He says in verse 3, “I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law.” If you’re gonna say that following one part of the law matters for you to be right with God, then you have to say that following ALL of the law matters. It is either you live 100% under the law or you live 100% under grace. That’s it. No compromise. No nuance.
You would think that we’d all be good with this. You would think that we’d all be relieved to be off the hook of having to be perfect law followers all of the time. But the strange thing is that this actually makes us upset initially. We don’t like being told that there is nothing we can do. We like being able to contribute, if only even in the smallest of ways. This is what Paul refers to in verse 11 as “the offense of the cross.” It offends the performer in all of us.
We always try to find some place in our lives where we can stand and say, “I’m good here.” “I am performing here.” We always want to have some little bit of righteousness or goodness that is our own…that 1% or maybe even a fraction of a percent…something, at least something that says, “I’m doing it. I’m not totally screwed.” That’s how we naturally think, and it’s how we naturally live. It is our sin at play. “I don’t need to be saved. I’m not that far gone. I can do it myself.”
But Paul won’t let that stand. He can’t. He reveals to us in this passage just how toxic that kind of thinking and living is. He says, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” (v.9). Just the smallest bit of that self-sufficient way of thinking infects the whole system. If you go that route you are returning to the life of slavery. The life of proving yourself, and trying to please God through your effort. Internally you are trapped. Never accepted. Never loved. Never free.
But the message of grace…the message of the cross says that there’s nothing you can do to save yourself. You need to be rescued. It’s offensive and it must be to shake us out of our delusional addiction to self-will. As we said before, the point of everything from God’s perspective is humanity set free, and if our belief in our own ability stands in the way of that, if it is actually a lie that keeps us bound, then it must go. It must be offended, it must be attacked to the point of death, so that we might be truly free. And that’s the good news of Jesus Christ for us. Because of Jesus our starting point is that God is pleased with us. His wrath and the threat of his wrath are completely removed. Jesus’ death and resurrection are the very proof that God is not against us, but is for us. He loves us! He comes after us and pursues us like Christian after Satine and sings, “I Will Always Love You!” to us again and again and again. This truth sets our hearts free. We become free internally. No matter what our external circumstances may be because who knows what will happen next in this crazy confused world…but whatever our external circumstances may be, internally we are free. Christ has made sure of it. We live under grace, not law. We are accepted, not rejected. We are free in him. In him we “stand firm.”
And as author and professor Steve Brown says when you are free, when you live under grace and know you are loved “you become dangerous.” Dangerous because you are unpredictable. Instead of being ruled by fear and always having to try to prove yourself, you are free to stand in the face of fear. As we saw at the beginning with Braveheart, Glory, and Moulin Rouge, this gospel freedom is not an absence of fear or complication or difficulty, but instead it is the freedom to walk right into those places, places you would otherwise avoid because they’re too risky or messy. The self-preservation and self-justification way of life would prevent us from getting involved in the mess of people’s lives because it might somehow taint us or pull us down, and then we’d have to work harder to get back up to where we were. BUT, if you are starting from a place of total acceptance, from a place of being completely loved, then you are free to step into the fray, to stick your neck out for the sake of the outcast, the ostracized, the rejected. You are free to hold the hurting and the sick. To sit in the pain with the lonely, depressed, and anxious even when you don’t have any answers. To stand up against injustice. To defend those who cannot defend themselves. To love the unlovable. You are dangerous because you are free to love. This is the freedom our Lord walked in throughout his ministry. He did not run from conflict or controversy, but instead he went wherever he had to in order to love those in need…all the way to his own death. “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10). Those are the words of a dangerous person, of a free person. This is freedom, and it is for freedom that he has set us free. Amen.
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