Prisoners of our own freedom?
Tenth Sunday after Trinity, 11.00am Sung Eucharist, 21 August 2022
When the crab apple tree arrived in the Cathedral to play its part in our current ‘Wild Cathedral’ project, its branches were tied up and constricted with orange twine. I felt rather sorry for it, and was pleased to volunteer to stand on a step ladder with a pair of scissors – there is the occasional benefit to being on the tall side. I found that even when the twine had been snipped, some of the branches needed careful disentangling before they could be released into a more comfortable treelike configuration.
You can tell, I’m sure, that I rather enjoyed ‘freeing the tree’, but doing this also felt a bit like a parable or a metaphor for the vital work of freeing human lives from all that binds and constricts and imprisons. This work is at the heart of today’s gospel, where Jesus lays hands on a woman bent over and unable to stand up straight. To the consternation of some, but with rejoicing from the crowd, she is healed and offers praise to God. Remember that this is more than a physical healing: for this ‘daughter of Abraham’ (as Jesus calls her) illness and disability has meant the loss of social relations, exclusion and loneliness. Jesus describes her bondage – physical, social, mental – as evil, caused by Satan no less, and that therefore releasing her is an absolute priority, Sabbath day or not.
‘Removing the yoke’, to quote from the prophet Isaiah in our first reading, is a great biblical theme, and a continual theme of the ministry of Jesus, who longs for all people to live full lives. In Christ, humankind has been created and recreated in the image of God. God calls each of us to wholeness of life, body, mind and spirit, and calls us to do all we can to free ourselves and others from all that constricts and imprisons us. Needless to say there are far too many human lives in today’s world like the tied up crab apple tree, restricted by poverty, violence, abuse, discrimination, lack of opportunity. And so it is only right for the church to call for, and work for, social justice, peace and reconciliation: to cut the cords that bind and oppress.
There is a less discussed aspect of this theme that fascinates and disturbs me, however, and that is the way so many people who are not short of material resources, live unhappy and empty lives. In the early sixth century, the Christian philosopher and statesman Boethius wrote about those who are ‘prisoners of their own freedom.’ By this he meant those who had lost the ability to see clearly, so bound up were they with false priorities of all kinds, whether possessions, ambition or sheer wickedness.
Paradoxically, he wrote about this when he was in prison, having been accused of treason. From within his prison cell, he felt he could see clearly. Centuries later, Natan Sharansky, imprisoned for a decade in the Soviet gulag, expressed something similar when he wrote as follows: ‘it is in prison, behind bars and concrete walls, that one gains a level of moral clarity and simplicity that is impossible to achieve in almost any other situation.’
Sometimes this clarity is achieved because imprisonment carries with it the threat of death, and it is often the case that people living with terminal illness also seem to attain the moral clarity of which Sharansky writes. Just yesterday saw the publication of a memoir by the journalist and campaigner Dame Deborah James, who spoke openly and courageously about living with incurable bowel cancer.
I don’t know what the memoir will say, but I did hear a recent interview with Deborah James’ mother, in which she spoke movingly about her daughter. I was particularly struck when her mother recounted a conversation in which she said to Deborah, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do when you’re gone’, and the reply came back: ‘you will continue and you will enjoy life’. ‘I don’t know if I can’, said her mother, to which Deborah responded, ‘then you haven’t done me justice.’ ‘So I think we have to,’ concluded her mother, ‘not just live life, [but] enjoy living life, and live it to the best that we can.’
And yet for all kinds of reasons this is advice that is hard to follow, and particularly hard for some. I know a person, for example, recently retired with a good pension, receiving treatment for anxiety and stress because they are struggling to adapt to not working. I also know a wealthy elderly woman, never the happiest person in the world, who has become increasingly miserable because her constant wish to put everyone else to rights, while never making the smallest concession to the passing years, and refusing all advice, has resulted in a lonely isolated life in a completely unsuitable house.
These are just two of the many ways in which all of us can become, ‘prisoners of [our] own freedom’, failing to enjoy life, failing to live it the best we can, failing to live as those who are created in the image of God. Christ challenges and inspires all of us to ponder what is truly important and what is not; to discern what false ideas and attachments are imprisoning us; to realise just how important our families and friends are; to never lose a sense of gratitude and thanksgiving, and so much more.
The apostle Paul wrote four of his letters from prison (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon). He also called himself a ‘prisoner of Christ’, and while this is clearly intended as a metaphor; it is also true that he was often imprisoned because of his commitment to Christ. In The Letter to the Ephesians, the first verse of Chapter Four, he writes: ‘I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.’
In my imagination I hear Paul, and Boethius, Natan Sharansky, Deborah James, and so many others, begging us to learn from what it cost them so much to pass on to us, and lead ‘worthy lives’, lives worthy of the spiritual and political freedoms we are fortunate enough to have inherited, lives worthy of all that God is calling us to be.
Some of the cords binding our lives we may be able to cut ourselves. For others, we may need the help and support of our friends, families and neighbours, or indeed professional help. But most of all, we may need the grace of God as found in the Christ who is constantly inviting us to find our true freedom in him, and who is the most skilled of all in releasing us from our bonds, and helping to free our constricted limbs and lives. AMEN.