The Truth Will Set You Free

             To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

Soon after COVID hit, I began reciting a mantra: You aren’t my parents, my masters, or my gods. It wasn’t so much that I felt threatened by the people who thought they had a right to dictate my life to me. It was more to try to make them aware of what they were doing, as it ran counter to what they claimed they valued. It didn’t work. But there was a small sense of wanting to be free and having someone think they had a right to simply take that freedom from me.

I’m not alone in that. Members of the LGBTQ+ community want to be free of any restrictions on them whatsoever. Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, and Asians want to be free. The Palestinians want to be free, and so do the Israelites. The Ukrainians want to be free. The Democrats and Republicans both want to be free. I doubt anyone in the world doesn’t want to be free to or free from something and most of the time, we tend to see someone as getting in the way of that freedom. Sometimes, something is designated as acting in someone's place.

In today’s passage, however, Jesus tells us something we probably don’t want to hear. What keeps us from being free is – more often than we want to believe – that we’re believing a lie. It’s not the someone or something that keeps us from being free, or at least not the person or thing we tend to blame. It’s that we believe the lies we’re told, including the lie that it’s “their fault.” Their problem is often that they’ve also believed a lie.

When we dig through to the truth, we are set free from the lie until we enslave ourselves to another lie (or the same one) by believing it. The only way to be free of the lies is to be enslaved to the truth, but this is another of those wonderful paradoxes in which freedom comes from being enslaved.  You can either be a slave to the truth and free of lies or a slave to the lies and free of the truth. And that brings to mind something I've said many times: If you're determined to reject the truth, any lie will do. But if you're determined to reject the lie(s), only the truth will do.