This passage from Luke is sort of a miscellany of themes that show up through the Gospel. And Luke is of course organizing this material in his own way and for his own purposes. But the thing that seems to be central in this passage, and at least which is coherent with the first and second readings, is the notion of living out of faith, faith that the Son of Man, Jesus, is going to return, sent by God, to judge the world and complete the human enterprise and establish the Kingdom of God.

This little story in Luke about the master going, putting people in charge and their misusing their authority, was probably created by the early Church to address the big problem that the promise of Jesus' life and death, and above all, his resurrection, did not seem to be kept. That is, the early Church lived, certainly until about the year 70, in the expectation that Jesus was going to return. Paul, until the day that he died, probably around the year 66, truly believed that. And it did not happen. So they had to accommodate themselves to that. And the different Gospels do it in different ways, but clearly, especially in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, they told these little stories, the point of which was to be ready, to be prepared, to continue to structure your life along the lines of the promise that God made. And that is of course what faith is: to live out of that promise. We see this over and over in the passage that John read from Hebrews, that is, that faith is always faith in a promise. We are to construct our lives living out of a promise. The notion of promise is absolutely central to the notion of faith.

But, in addition, there is something that underlies that notion which can easily be missed and is, in a very real sense, more basic and more worthy of attention, namely, that if you look at the Biblical material - - the call of Abraham, the father of all believers, or the call of Moses - - you will find a reoccurring pattern of God addressing people. And the point is that in the very act of addressing people God enables peoples' freedom. That is, you can only become free if someone takes you seriously, pays attention to you...addresses you. At least that is the Biblical view of freedom. Abraham is promised and he could say no. Moses is promised and he could say no. But the capacity to say no is obviously rooted in freedom. If you look at all of the other religions in the ancient world - - for example, Buddha's great interior illumination in which he saw that life was suffering and the ego was an illusion etc., or the great Native American religions which operate in terms of great cosmic patterns so that one’s job is to somehow fit into these patterns - - only the Jews had this strange God who said, "No, I am talking to you, and therefore, you are now able to respond to me". And of course the capacity to respond is freedom. Because if nobody ever talks to you then you do not have to talk back, you do not have to do anything! You may have to work out an ascetical practice as the Buddhists do with these deep and profound thoughts about the transformative power of meditation and the path to enlightenment etc. But this ferocious emphasis on peoples' freedom and responsibility is a peculiarly Jewish thing, because I can only respond to the promise if I choose to respond to the promise. Thus, if the promise is a very central notion to faith, freedom is even more so. I can choose not to believe, but faith is precisely choosing to believe. And of course this spells itself out in all kinds of extraordinary, rich, and deep ways. We believe that faith is a grace. Yes, but it is the graces enabling freedom, as all grace is in the Biblical view of things.

I think that this is extremely important today for all kinds of reasons. For example, how many people in our world really feel free and responsible for their own lives? In many ways I am a child of the sixties and I remember all of the protests and the buttons that said, "Do not fold, bend, or spindle" because everybody in the old days saw themselves as these little computer cards with multiple holes in them. And there was this sense that we were simply numbers, ciphers in some great scheme of things. I do not know whether the dangers that were acknowledged with such force and excess often enough in the sixties have passed. Maybe they are even more dangerous now because we don’t recognize them. Or maybe this accounts for the kind of rabidity of freedom of these Survivalists, for example, here in Canada and the United States, who are going to assert their freedom in the face of everything else. I think that their stance is intelligible in terms of the seeming disappearance of freedom. The problem with the Survivalists' of course is that their notion of freedom is totally boneheaded, at least as far as the Biblical stuff is concerned, because they want to do it their way over and against everybody else. And freedom in the Biblical view is the freedom to say yes, and ultimately, to say I love you, which is supposed to be the highest form of freedom here.

And finally, this is really important for us today because I think that the area of freedom is becoming more and more constricted. This is a terrible danger. For example, we who live in a world where freedom is being compressed, denied, restricted, or simply ignored over and over again, all over the world...we do not have to go to Cambodia. Look at the power of the structures within which all of us exist here in the greatest country in the world. How much room is their for freedom, for real choice? And so the Church, which ought to be able to testify to the centrality of freedom...because that is what makes me a human being! That is how I build a life! I build a life on my choices, that is, my choice to say yes, my choice to say yes to the promises of God, my choice to say yes. This is the axis along which I am going to construct my existence. And the Church ought to be at the absolute forefront of doing that. Unfortunately if anybody asked for one word to describe the Roman Church today, I do not think that many of us would respond by stating that it is the arena of the greatest human freedom. So, thank God that we have the chance to hear these readings week after week. They help us to examine ourselves, our world, and our own behaviour, or non-behaviour, in the face of so many things that constrict our humanity.