What Jesus Says About Political Freedom
26th Sunday of the Year
The way we talk about freedom most of the time shows us that politics really controls the way we think about the world. You might consider yourself a conservative or a progressive, a Republican or a Democrat, but no matter your leanings or sympathies when you talk about freedom most of the time you are probably talking about political freedom. Political freedom is the liberty of non-interference: you (whether the ‘you’ is a government, a group in society, a business, or another person) cannot tell me what to do; you (whoever or whatever you are) must recognize my liberty and respect my rights.
Conservatives talk about freedom in the life of commerce and ownership: stay off my land, leave my business alone, and do not tax me; a free society features non-governmental interference in the life of business and trade and raising the family. Progressives talk about freedom in the life of personal choice and sexual morality: let me do what I want (with my body or my life) whenever I want so long as I am not hurting anyone else; a free society features the government protecting these spheres of private action for us to do whatever we want, and a good society finds the government giving us the money we need to do it.
You can see how these two kinds of freedom dominate our conversations about politics and culture. These two positions on freedom are not exactly contrary or opposite to one another (libertarians attempt to combine them). There is actually more in common with these two kinds of freedom than whatever differences drive them apart. Both the conservative and progressive vision of political freedom consists of identifying the ways in which outside forces (government, groups, businesses, other persons) cannot be allowed to interfere with living your life the way you want to live your life. When it comes to political freedom, conservatives and progressives think the same way, they just care about different things.
The way we talk about freedom most of the time shows us that politics really controls the way we think about the world. We are in the middle of an election season and if you pay attention to how you are talking about freedoms and rights and obligations and what is good or bad or right or wrong about government and culture and society, you will probably discover that most of the time you are talking about political freedom. We are hardwired in an age of democratic government and personal liberty to care most about the freedom to be left alone by whoever threatens to control us.
The point I want to make with my homily today is very simple: Christ does not spend much time talking about political freedom in the Gospels. The kind of freedom that dominates our conversations about the good life today is something that Christ almost never considers or discusses. His concerns about freedom are deeper and more important.
Christ in the Gospel today talks about a most horrific form of un-freedom, a terrifying way of not-being-free: the life of interior division. He talks about the common experience of being torn apart inside ourselves over what we care about the most. He says that we find ourselves in these awful places where we love what is good and true and beautiful while at the same time loving what is evil and false and ugly. He describes the way that we sometimes find ourselves loving God and loving sin. Christ reminds us that you can possess as much political freedom as you could ever want—no one nowhere telling you how to live or what you can or cannot do—and yet you would still find yourself living as a slave, a servant, broken and controlled by your own interior division about what you care about the most.
When we talk about political freedom, the enemy is always someone or something outside of ourselves. But when we talk about interior freedom, the enemy is us: we are the problem, the source of our own imprisonment. When we talk about political freedom the danger is that we get so accustomed to oppression that we become apathetic; we just stop caring about our liberty and allow someone or something outside of us to control us. When we talk about interior freedom the danger is that become so accustomed to our own sin and love for what is evil and false and ugly that we likewise become apathetic; we just stop caring about our liberty to love most what is good and true and beautiful.
Christ knows that the enemy of our interior lives is ambivalence: the condition of interior division and contradiction over what we care about the most. The word ‘ambivalence’ is new, developed by a Swiss psychiatrist in the early 20th century to describe the exact phenomenon that Christ talks about in the Gospel today. We form good and bad habits of mind and soul that literally change how we think and what we care about and what we want the most, and our lives become imprisoned between the push and pull of virtue and vice; we find ourselves torn apart, sometimes loving God and sometimes loving sin, a person who is incomplete and not wholehearted. St. Augustine called his experience of interior ambivalence a ‘monstrous condition’ that prevented him from knowing real freedom.
How do we find our freedom? I am going to give you two answers.
The first answer is my own: stop caring about political freedom more than you care about your own personal interior freedom. Our conversation about freedom in the world today is impoverished and reductive. We would create a world in which each of us secures the liberty to become a slave to our own vices, and that means that no real freedom would exist at all. If what you talk about the most is political freedom, then that is the kind of freedom you will end up caring about the most. I recommend that you go deeper.
The second answer comes from Christ: cut off your hand and your foot and pluck out your eye; whatever causes you to love sin more than God needs to go; whatever causes you to love what is evil and false and ugly more than what is good and true and beautiful needs to become your enemy. What that probably means for most of us is that our greatest enemy is ourselves: our vice, our bad habits, our personal form of brokenness becomes the power that controls us and makes us not-free. And the danger is that we become ambivalent about our un-freedom; we just get used to our condition and stop caring.
To these kinds of experiences, Christ makes no excuses: cut off your hand and your foot and pluck out your eye. The person who is divided within themselves about what is good and true and beautiful will not reach God.
Homily preached on September 29th, 2024 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary