Imagine living your life according to a script. Imagine having no freedom to do what you choose, because there are so many expectations of you. You are a public person whose every word is monitored and analysed. Or somebody has pre-determined what you may or may not do. There is no space in your life for spontaneity. I often remember Queen Elizabeth II, who was so diplomatic, so trained in what
it is to be a “royal,” that she never put a foot wrong, quite unlike the blustery, narcissistic politicians of today.
This is definitely not what is meant by Jesus having to fulfil the Scriptures. He was not living his life according to a predetermined script. He was free to love, to help, to teach, to serve, to heal, to raise people from the dead, to challenge and to encourage. He was not constrained by the laws of his Jewish culture.
Although he did not deliberately set out to flout them, he had a sense of their deeper meaning and how they expressed a covenant relationship with a loving God. He was not prepared to go through the motions of keeping the law if it did not bring him to a deeper appreciation of God’s providential care.
It is precisely his freedom of spirit which so irritated the religious authorities, who were so invested in maintaining a
religious-legal status quo, which conferred power and identity on them. Their frustration and anger arose from his undermining the weak foundation on which they had built their claim to the people’s obedience. Sure, they were scholars, with insight and erudition, and somehow holy men who performed the “holy” rituals. But their ministry did not liberate the people to be themselves, chosen and sanctified by God.
Of course, the Christ
would suffer and die at the hands of powerful people like this. If not directly at their hands, then at the hands of the civil authorities whom they manipulated. It is not that a pre-written script constrained Jesus. Nor did God have a death wish for sending the Son to live among us. It’s just that the prevailing “system” could not withstand the light of such integrity, exposing its fallibility.
But the truth cannot remain buried
forever. It will always emerge, just as Jesus rose from the dead on the third day. There is an inevitability about that as well. It’s not a script. It’s reality. Which, again, many influential people of our times seem to ignore.
Do I believe that Jesus is the truth that sets us free? Do I realise that he was free to love in ways that I can only imagine? What scripts constrain me to behave in specific
ways?
Reflections by Peter Knox SJ
