Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” (John 8:34-36)
This is what Jesus is always doing: finding people who are regarded as less-than and outsiders, and bringing them to belong forever. He seeks out the folks on the margins and gathers them in. He meets up with the lowly and stepped-on and raises them to places of dignity and honor as members of the family. Or like the line attributed to Martin Luther puts it, "God is always taking beggars and making them kings."
On this, our final day reflection on the theme, "With Jesus on the Margins" in our year of "Life on the Edge," before a new theme for November closes out the church year, I want to ask us to return to these words from the Gospel that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship. Without getting lost in the weeds in the backstory of this whole passage, let's just zoom in on the imagery of these concluding verses. Jesus imagines a typical ancient household within the Greco-Roman culture of the first century, with which everyone listening to him would have been familiar. There were family members who all shared biology and therefore official legitimate status in the household: the father and mother, their children, and maybe a generation of grandparents who also lived in the same villa as part of an extended family. And then there were (at least in many households in the Roman Empire) slaves. The fact that Jesus acknowledges the institution of slavery in the ancient world is not an endorsement or a statement of his approval of the practice, but rather a description of a reality that everyone in his audience would have seen and known, some perhaps from personal experience. And if you were enslaved, you were typically treated as less-than. You didn't control your situation, you didn't control your future, and you or your family could be sold off somewhere else at a moment's notice on the whim of someone else. You were constantly around the other members of the household, but without the sense of permanency, without belonging, and treated without the same dignity or worth as the family members who all shared the same DNA and status before the law.
Everybody in Jesus' day had seen that; it was a basic reality of daily life for many in the Empire. One of the particular cruelties of the practice of slavery in any era was just how precarious it made the lives of the enslaved--that you could be shipped off to another place, another family, another job, or another "owner" without any input, or your family, your literal spouse or children, could be sold away as well. And everybody knew the truth of the statement that "the slave does not have a permanent place in the household." That's when Jesus proposes something radical: what if someone who does have a permanent place in the family and who does have authority over the affairs of the household just sets you free? What if, to follow Jesus' metaphor here, someone were to redeem you--to buy you out of enslavement to an old master--and instead of making you a slave to just some new master, what if you were welcomed into the household as a real, full member of the family?
Could you imagine it? Well, for one, you would no longer be anybody's property to be ordered about and treated like an object. You wouldn't be treated as less-than or demeaned. You would know that you, your spouse, and your kids wouldn't be sold away to some other owner without notice. You would know that there was a place at the table where you belonged. You would know that you, who had previously only been kept at arm's length on the margins to serve the "real" family members were finally at home and were welcomed in with open arms. If someone who really has permanent standing in a household buys you out of slavery, frees you, and welcomes you into their home and family, it changes everything. Former outsiders become insiders. The ones who used to be exploited are now treated with honor and dignity. Those who were constantly afraid about a precarious future now have assurance. That kind of change surely would have been radical in the first century.
And here Jesus just up and says that's what he has come to do. For all of us who have been enslaved and captive to the power of sin, Jesus speaks as someone with authority to redeem us--to buy us out of slavery, set us free, and presumably, to welcome us into his new family, where we can share a permanent place in the household of God. That's what the Good News is really all about, according to Jesus here. He has come to find us while we're stuck in dead-end captivity to our worst impulses and all the ways we have been dismissed as less-than. And he liberates from all that, gives us a permanent place within his own household, and welcomes us to the family table at which there will always be a place set for us.
That's good news we all deeply need. For whatever ways you have been treated before as an object or a non-person, Jesus says you are an honored member of the family alongside him. For whatever ways you have felt trapped and captive in old patterns of selfishness, meanness, fear, and greed, Jesus says he has set you free from those old masters and made you a free member of his household. And it's all been a gift.
Hold onto that word, both for the days you need it, and for the times you cross paths with someone else who is desperate for belonging and freedom and the same time. Go tell everybody--even the face in the mirror--you are free indeed, and you share with Jesus a place in the family.
Lord Jesus, remind us again that you have set us free, and let us be a part of your work to tell others that they are free as well in you.
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