“You
are free…” (Genesis 2:16)
These are God’s first words to the man
he just created and placed in the garden of Eden, words that would separate man
from the animals God would soon create: “You are free.”
These are words we like to hear. Yet
they are accompanied in the text of Genesis by two words we don’t like to hear:
“order” and “except.” To some this may seem a contradiction--how can man be
free if there is an exception to what he can do--especially if this exception
is called an “order”?
Until we understand the true meaning of
freedom, with the accompanying order we are bound to obey and the exception
we must respect, we can’t understand the Theology of the Body, and thus we can’t
understand the meaning of our life as human persons. In this bite-size piece,
we’ll explore the true meaning of freedom.
First, the text in its entirety:
The
Lord God gave man this order: “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the
garden except the tree of knowledge of good and bad. From that tree you shall
not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.” (Genesis 2:16-19)
Let’s explore a false notion of freedom,
one that suggests freedom is the ability to do anything we want to do. That’s an
idea many children have (“It’s a free country!” is a time-honored expression
children use to justify unacceptable behavior they choose to display) and one
that too many carry into adulthood. Let’s use a childhood example to dissect
this false notion of freedom.
I’m a child on the playground. Sally is
using the swing I want to use. I am free to choose either to wait patiently for
Sally to finish using the swing, or to bully her into getting off so I can use
it now. I choose the latter. Someone says “That’s mean, you shouldn’t do that,”
to which I reply: “It’s a free country!”
Here’s what’s wrong with that idea of
freedom. First, by bullying Sally to get off the swing, I’ve deprived her of
her “freedom” to do what she
wants to do--she wants to use the swing also. Second, I’m not free at that
moment to be the kind, considerate person God made me to be, because I’ve allowed
myself to become a slave to the ungodly allure of selfishness, which imprisons
me as a sinner rather than frees me an a child and image of the loving God.
So freedom as an idea that everyone can
do whatever they want--that everyone can decide for themselves what is right
and wrong to do at any given moment--simply doesn’t work, because sooner or
later somebody’s “freedom” is going to be denied by another’s decision.
Free will is the God-given ability to decide what I am going to
do. Freedom is the God-willed destiny I achieve, for myself and for
others, when I consistently use my free will to choose the good, which I
learn by listening to God, who alone knows what is truly good and bad. I can’t
decide for myself what’s good and bad, for that’s the first wrecking ball swung
at true freedom. It’s Sally and the swing all over again.
God gave us free will because, as people
created in his image, we are called to love. We cannot love unless it is a free
choice. Nobody wants to be in a relationship with someone who really doesn’t
want to be in the relationship, if they’re only there because they think they have
to be, and don’t have a choice. That doesn’t mean anything.
Love only means something when a person
also has the choice to not love, or even to hate. In that case the choice to
love is meaningful, it’s real.
God cannot call man to love unless he is
also free to hate. That’s why God gave us free will, not so we can go hog wild
doing anything we please, but so we can choose to love in a way that is real.
And we learn what is good and bad by allowing God to tell us, not grasping at
the tree of that knowledge which is his alone to know in his divine
omniscience.
The warning of death for disobeying this
order is fairly simple. God is reminding man of his total dependence on God for
everything, and ultimately his life. If man chooses to be his own god by
deciding for himself what’s right and wrong he’ll separate himself from the
true God, the author and source of his life. If he chooses to separate himself
from the source of his life, the natural consequence is death. God does not say
“the moment you eat from it I will kill you.” God says “the moment you eat from
it you are surely doomed to die.”
Now that we have an understanding of
free will and freedom--the difference between the two and how they are
integrated in our lives--we can proceed with more of the Theology of the Body,
which we’ll resume in Part Four.
