PROPER 9, YEAR B

Sunday, July 4, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Ezekiel 2:1-5

II Corinthians 12:2-10

Mark 6:1-13

On this Independence Day, it seems appropriate to reflect on the nature of human freedom. The Fourth of July means a great deal to me personally, because I’m not a native-born American. Instead, when I was twenty years old, I was naturalized as a United States citizen. That choice was an exercise of my freedom to embrace the ideals of liberty, civil rights, constitutional government, and the rule of law that this country stands for. And I’ve never once regretted that decision.

Our Catholic Christian tradition affirms that God created us with free will, the ability to make basic decisions about how to live our lives, including the crucial decision between good and evil: whether to live in accordance with or in rebellion against God’s laws. The readings appointed for today afford penetrating insights into this mystery of human freedom.

The prophet Ezekiel receives the commission to declare the Word of the Lord to a nation that has misused its freedom: “I have sent you,” God declares, “to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels, who have rebelled against me.” Nonetheless, God respects their freedom. Ezekiel’s mission is not to coerce Israel into obedience but to offer the opportunity to repent. Either way, the choice is theirs: “whether they hear or refuse to hear, they will know that there has been a prophet among them.”

Today’s Gospel sets forth the same divine respect for human freedom. When the people of his hometown Nazareth reject him, Jesus simply remarks that “a prophet is not without honor except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own home.” While marveling at their unbelief, he refrains from performing signs and wonders that would overawe them into submission, much less anything vindictive like calling down fire from heaven to consume them.

Subsequently, when Jesus sends the Twelve Apostles out two-by-two on their mission to Israel’s towns and villages, he instructs them, in effect, to respect the freedom of those whom they visit. If any place will not receive them and refuses to hear them, they’re to confine their response to shaking off the dust of that town from their feet as they depart. 

Again, in today’s Epistle reading, Saint Paul simply accepts the consequences of people’s rejection of his apostolic mission and preaching. “For the sake of Christ,” he writes, “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities …” 

The common theme running through these readings is that God never forces himself on us. He always respects our freedom—even when we misuse that freedom to reject him, or his Word, or his will for our lives.

Freedom is one of God’s greatest gifts to us. Lest I give the wrong impression, I hasten to add that it’s never an end-in-itself, but always the means to the far greater end of allowing us to make choices that are in our true best interests by contributing to our objective good and our eternal salvation.

The purpose of seeking to remove political bonds of servitude and oppression, as the Founding Fathers of this country did in 1776, is never to set us free to do whatever we want regardless of the consequences, but always to work for the common good in this world, in preparation for eternal blessedness in the next.

The Collect “For the Nation” in the Prayer Book expresses this idea by asking that we may “use our liberty in accordance with God’s gracious will.” The Collect for Peace, traditionally said every day at Morning Prayer, goes one step further, addressing God as the one “whose service is perfect freedom.” And that really expresses the Christian ideal: the goal of freedom is always to fulfill our true purpose in the service of God and not of self—or of any of the other false gods we set up for ourselves in God’s place.

Today’s Scripture readings challenge us to reflect on how well we’ve been using our freedom, for good or for ill, and to resolve to do so in ways that contribute to the common good as well as to our own eternal good. That’s admittedly a tall order. But, as Saint Augustine of Hippo said repeatedly in his Confessions, written towards the end of the fourth century, we rely on God to give what God requires. His refrain there was: “Command what you will, O Lord, and give what you command.”

In today’s Old Testament reading, Ezekiel is not expected to fulfill his difficult prophetic mission on his own strength alone. Instead, as he testifies, “The Spirit entered into me and set me on my feet.” 

In the Epistle reading, Paul writes of his mysterious “thorn in the flesh”—which generations of biblical scholars have spilled gallons of ink proposing various theories to explain, some more outlandish than others. His real point, nonetheless, is that human frailty opens the door to God’s strength: “I will all the more gladly boast of my weakness, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

The mission of the Twelve to the towns and villages of Israel in today’s Gospel meets with success: “So they went out and preached that [all] should repent. And they cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many that were sick and healed them …” 

All these scriptural texts testify to the power of God’s Spirit at work in human life. So, as we celebrate our National Independence today and tomorrow, we do well to remember that it’s by giving ourselves to God’s service, and relying on his strength to accomplish in and through us what we could never achieve on our own, that we find the perfection of our God-given freedom.