Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

4th in Lent "Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" Jeremiah 31:1-9, John 8: 1-11 Have you ever felt trapped and enclosed either because of the circumstances that you've found yourself in or because of your state of mind, or both? Where thoughts of the future brought no hope of release, thoughts of the past brought only regret over failures met with or else achievements left behind and, as for the present, well you preferred not to think about it ... it was simply a matter of enduring! The prophet Jeremiah spoke God's word to the people of Israel as they approached just such a time. That is during the forty years or so leading up to the conquest of Judah and the laying waste of Jerusalem which took place in 587 BC. When he began to speak to them he challenged them to repent of their disobedient ways, their lives lived for themselves ignoring the God who had loved them, led them, and protected them and so had a right to their obedience. He challenged them to return to the lord before it was too late so that he might show mercy to them and put a stop the punishment that was coming. Then, when they refused to listen to these words, Jeremiah spoke of that now inevitable judgement before introducing hope into what was to seem a hopeless situation, talking of God's great mercy and of the eventual restoration of what was left of the people. However, the fact was that what was about to happen to them would turn their world and their understanding of who they were on its head. They had always lived out their lives on the basis that they were God's chosen people, a special people, a holy nation. They'd grown from such small beginnings from one man, Abraham, they'd known such victories, the Lord had always rescued them before they could be completely crushed by their enemies. They might be a small nation; but they had always punched far beyond their weight. Indeed, as far as they were concerned they were invincible. Yes, it was true that the Northern Kingdom had been crushed and taken away by the Assyrians nearly a hundred and fifty years before in 723 BC, but hadn't they deserved it for their continued apostasy? And anyway they, the Southern Kingdom, Judah the true family of King David, the true inheritors of God's covenant of grace, had survived hadn't they? But then came the Babylonian invasion culminating in their king, as well as the cream of the people, being taken away; and along with this there was the destruction of David's city and the great temple of Solomon where the Lord had been worshipped. Where indeed he dwelt seated upon the ark of the covenant, which itself was removed by the invading forces never to be seen again. Suddenly all that they had depended on no longer existed, no homeland, no king. No focal point for their faith. Indeed as the years past and the elite of Israel were forced to make their home in an alien land it must have seemed to them that their God had abandoned them, or perhaps worse. Because as they looked around themselves and saw the greatness of Babylon, the wonderful sights that declared the glory of man, and as they compared these with their own small scale experiences up until then, and then they considered how the people of this new land had their own gods, well perhaps the truth was that the God of Israel wasn't a match for such deities. Maybe all that they'd been told by their forefathers had simply been the wishful thinking of a group of relatively insignificant, culturally sheltered, people. And yet how they must have hurt when they remembered what had been taken from them and how they must have yearned to be home again and for everything to be as it once was. Sentiments that we become aware of we as we read the words of psalm 137: "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? If I forget you, o Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy. Remember, o Lord, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell. 'Tear it down,' they cried, 'tear it down to its foundations!'" And yet to such thoughts of misery, anger and regret, the words of Jeremiah spoke as he gave the Israelites assurances for their future saying to them from verse 2 of our passage: "The people who survive the sword will find favour in the desert; I will come to give rest to Israel." And "I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness. I will build you up again and you will be rebuilt, O Virgin Israel" Once more, then, God would begin a new work with his people such that they would be fresh and pure. Once more they would sing and dance with joy. On the land that had been taken from them they would plant and enjoy the fruits of their labour. "See, I will bring them from the land of the north and gather them from the ends of the earth", sounded God's words spoken through Jeremiah, "Among them will be the blind and the lame, expectant mothers and women in labour; a great throng will return. They will come with weeping; they will pray as I bring them back. I will lead them beside streams of water on a level path where they will not stumble, because I am Israel's father, and Ephraim is my firstborn son." However, in spite of these words of great encouragement and hope, the people were still captives in Babylon. And the long years would have slowly passed since they were first spoken without any apparent change to that situation. Until that is at last a new power conquered the old one. The Persian Empire was now in control, a new king with a new foreign policy, and finally the Jewish people began to return home. And yet still things were not as they had been, as they had hoped that they would be. It wasn't easy to rebuild what had been knocked down. They met with so much opposition from those who were now settled in the land. They were confined to only a small area of land around Jerusalem. And in any case their worship would never be as it had been before now that many of the holy objects had been removed. And so the people became discouraged, hopes of a new start were dashed. Until Nehemiah and Ezra came to them to challenge them to work harder and to once more remember the Lord, to work for him, to put off the impure ways that continued to infect their lives even after their time of punishment, and to focus on being obedient to the word of God, living lives pleasing to him. Jeremiah's words hadn't yet been fulfilled. Yes, they were free but then this wasn't the freedom that had been promised. And yet they were able to do something, they could strive to be obedient and holy so that God would surely at last bless them as he'd promised he would. And so the people began to dedicate their lives to being obedient, to devising rules for living based upon the Law of Moses, Gods law, to doing what was right. But then they took their task so seriously that they began to trap themselves all over again. Now they became hemmed in by those very efforts to please God which were intended to bring them ever more of his freedom. Now, as the people were taught the rules for living by the teachers of the law, there developed an atmosphere of legalism where man's status before God was determined entirely by his works. And Jesus, God's son, was born into this situation, a situation where God's ancient people were not only entrapped by the Romans, who now ruled over them, but also by their own religion and by those who taught it to them. But the time was near when the Lord would ensure the fulfilment of his ancient promises of true freedom spoken through Jeremiah and others. And right from Christ's birth we read that here was one who would bring change, who would bring light and order into the darkness and confusion that hung over the people. Who would be the saviour of all who would put their hope in him; who would at last release people from their own vane efforts to win God's favour themselves so that they might instead freely accept that liberty which was the Father's desire for them. And so, after he had grown up, at the right time, Jesus began to teach. And not surprisingly what he had to say didn't go down well with the religious authorities. Because what he was saying was directly challenging their views of what it meant to be Jewish, to live as obedient servants of the God of Israel. He was speaking in terms of love and acceptance not only for Jews but for Samaritans as well, for women as well as men. And, rather than upholding the law as they saw it, and in particular the many regulations that they'd surrounded it with, in their opinion this Jesus was actually going out of his way to break the law as he treated it not as he should have done, as something to closely regulate one's life by, but instead as something, again it seemed to them, to be ignored when it pleased him. There was the great danger that people would actually listen to him, in fact they were listening to him. What would happen next? Surely anarchy, and then the inevitable loss of what it meant to be followers of Israel's God. And then this opportunity to get the better of Jesus arose; a woman had been caught in the act of adultery and she was brought to Jesus by the righteous teachers of the law and Pharisees. Now clearly in both the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy the punishment for such a sin was laid out, "If a man is found sleeping with another man's wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel" And so they said to Jesus that she should be stoned, but how would he react? "What do you say about this?" they asked him. It seemed as if he had no choice but to agree with them, with their view of what the law demanded in this particular situation. It looked as though both he and the woman were well and truly trapped by the letter of that law. So what did Jesus say? Go ahead and stone her? Or as they expected him to say, based on his teaching up until now, did he say: "Let her go free" so that they could rightly condemn him as a law breaker? No Jesus passed the judgement that was found in God's word, kill her. But, he said, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." Now Jesus wasn't saying that only those who are perfect are able to punish people for wrongdoing. Such an attitude, if we were to adopt it, would make a mockery of our legal system and would prevent us from exercising any form of discipline. Rather, because it was the requirement that the witnesses of the sin should begin the stoning, he was challenging their integrity in bringing the charge against her. You see it seems as though they weren't being completely honest in their motives, where for instance was the man who she'd been caught with? Because, after all, the law also said that he must die too. But they weren't interesting themselves in obeying the law to that extent, it seems. And Jesus knew that, and gradually each of the woman's accusers slunk away leaving Jesus alone with her. Leaving her to stand before the one who will one day be the righteous judge of the whole of humanity. What would he say to her? "Neither do I condemn you", he declared. In other words, Jesus was presenting to this trapped woman, who lived in a society of entrapment, who was without doubt guilty of great sin, guilty before God himself, Jesus was presenting something other than the righteous punishment which stifles the individual's personality, keeping them cowed and fearful; he was offering to her free, gracious forgiveness...true freedom at last. Demonstrating the truth of the words of verse 36 of John chapter 8: "If the son sets you free, you will be free indeed". And then Jesus said to her. "Go now and leave your life of sin", the only right response to the new life that she had been granted, the response that was only now truly possible once she had tasted forgiveness, now that she could actually live as a free person. The response that those who had walked away would not be able to give in spite of all their learning and best efforts. Here then the Lord Jesus was revealing the freedom that God had long spoken of through his prophets. And now the remnant of Israel, indeed the whole world, is at last able to look with expectation to the Lord bringing his people from the land of the north, gathering them from the ends of the earth. The blind, the lame, the expectant mothers, and women in labour, those trapped by circumstance and state, who he will lead beside those streams of water on a level path where there is no stumbling. It's a freedom from judgement and guilt, freedom to trust, freedom to receive and to experience forgiveness, freedom to change. This is the freedom that Jesus on the cross declares for all who will look, and see, and accept. The freedom that is granted to us by God when we realise our own guilt and our complete inability to escape judgement by our own efforts, and then when we hear and claim that promise for ourselves: "neither do I condemn you...go now and leave your life of sin." May we all know that freedom and live the life of freedom. And may we, as redeemed children of God, freely offer that freedom to others, as in humility we recognise that, though we may be God's chosen people, we are far from invincible. That indeed we are simply sinners saved by grace who live by grace and that all that we can offer, all that we would ever want to offer, is Christ and his love for, and acceptance of, those who are trapped as we once were. Amen