“No one takes my life from me, I lay my life down of my own free will.” John 10:18

The writer of the Gospel of John placed these startling words in the mouth of Jesus. In John’s stories, the statements of Jesus are about the essence of Christian faith within any human being. In the above verse, John is witnessing to the radical freedom of the Christian life in overcoming death in a way that is more radical than simply accepting death as part of our lives. The life of Christian faith includes intending our death for the causes that we alone choose to make “death ground” for the living of our lives.

So, if I am a person of faith, no ruling power of my society takes my life from me, because I lay my life down of my own free will. No power of nature takes my life from me, because I lay my life down of my own free will. No God or Goddess takes my life from me, because I lay my life down of my own free will.

This means that no oil company can take my life from me when I insist upon phasing out fossil fuels, because I am already laying down my life for the moderation of the climate catastrophe. No pharmaceutical or health insurance company can take my life from me when I insist upon a government administrated Medicare-for-All type of justice, because I am laying my life down of my own free will for an affordable healthcare provision for all persons in my society of responsibility, and also for the human species as a whole. If I make these causes my death ground, pubic health has taken on a meaning for me that no insurance company can intimidate.

The phrase “free will” as meant in the above scripture is about every human being’s essential freedom to act beyond biological impulses; beyond personality impulses; beyond sociological conditioning, beyond the norms & laws; beyond superego voices of restraint; beyond conscience ,if conscience is seen as internalized sociality.

If freedom is lost in my life, it is because I have employed my freedom in giving away my freedom. This can be a simple act of mimicry of my peers. However complicated be my loss of freedom, freedom is still my essential being, even if I cannot now recover it. Perhaps I am still free enough to pray to the Giver of freedom to restore my freedom.

When I am free to be free, I can make this free response in obedience to the Giver of my freedom and to the neighbors given to me by this All-encompassing Giver. I do this freedom alone, but I do freedom in active surrender to a cosmos of people and events.

Being my God-given freedom includes“freely giving back” to the Giver of my life all the gifts of my life, including my life itself. “No force whatsoever takes my life from me. I lay my life down of my own free will.” This is an expression of and also a definition of true Christian faith. Jesus is our exemplar. We follow him. As pictured by John in the above passage, Jesus defines our Christian faith. This is clearly the view of the writer of the Fourth Gospel. But our essential humanness is not so because John says it is so. John says it is so because this freedom is an aspect of the essence of our being human. Jesus is the Christ because he opens for us a return to our essential humanness—a human essence that includes the freedom to ”lay down our life of our own free will.”

Now of course, if I don’t lay down my life, I die anyhow. But not intending my death means that I “back into my grave” instead of “going forward” toward my grave “headfirst,” so to speak. Of course, death may grab me at any time, but death will happen to me as I am either expending my life of my own free will or as I am refusing to do so. Perhaps my whole life is about just trying not to die. Or perhaps I am dedicated to resentfully wasting away. But such passive relationships with my life and death are not necessary. Within whatever circumstances of life I am living, including my closing days, I can lay my life down of my own free will, or I can live otherwise. With whatever bits of awareness remains for me, I can intend my living with whatever powers I have left.

That is, I can lay my life down if I am experiencing my essential freedom. If I have sold my freedom into slavery, then I cannot be a person who freely lays down my life, I must serve whatever lesser values I have sold out my freedom to serve. So perhaps I cannot lay down my life of my own free will, because, at the present time, I have no free will with which to do that. Perhaps I am refusing to have my freedom because I deny the very existence of freedom, or at least my freedom. Perhaps I simply refuse the response-ability of being free. Perhaps I am so trapped in my serious addictions that my freedom would be an agony for me—an agony I do not choose to live through to the realization of my essential freedom, glory, and tranquil joy.

If I am being my freedom and indeed laying my life down of my own free will, what does this look like. It does not necessarily appear all that extraordinary. If I am president of the United States, laying down my life of my own free will basically mean doing what is expected of me—namely, using this office to serve the people rather than using this set of privileges and powers to serve myself and my narrow set of interests. Or to put this more carefully, do I let being president serve me in the context of my serving the people, or do I provide a scrap of service to the people in the context of the presidency serving me. For of course, this role of presidency does serve me, not just my support, comfort, and pleasure, but my felt need to make a contribution, to have a purpose, and other values. Are these services to myself done in the context of laying my life down for the people? Or is whatever good I grudging do for the people done in the context of my being served by this role?

Or take the more ordinary case of my having chosen to provide my own life support with a plumbing business. The same dynamics apply to plumbing as to being president. Do I do this plumbing in resentment about having to do this “dirty” work—seeing it only as “necessary” for my survival, or do I lay my life down of my own free will in the service of the plumbing needs of my community? In this latter case, I continue to learn and to improve what I do. I make an art of plumbing. I do not even call it “dirty work”—at least not any more dirty than what a politician has to put up with. It is simply my work. No one is taking my life from me: I am laying my life down of my own free will.

The Truth of Response-Ability

A core truth in both of the above illustrations is that our lives are not being freely given unless we are actually giving our lives in the exercise of freedom within the actual particulars that are being given to us by the Almighty Giver. If I view my life as an already determined drama that is destined to work out the only way it can, then there is no laying down of my life of my own free will. I am viewing myself as a complicated piece of rock, water, and air for which all my processes are being determined by a fixed fate.

Of course there are many forces impacting me—forces over which I have no control or even knowledge. But I am also an aware being, and that awareness includes not just watching, but also being response-able to a significant degree. Being a recipient of this gift of the ability for free response, I am thereby responsible for all my response-able responses.

Nikos Kazantzakis in his book-length poem entitled “The Saviors of God” provided us with words that might be viewed as the voice of Jesus on this topic of freedom unto death:

“You are not my slave, nor a plaything in my hands. You are not my friend, you are not my child. You are my comrade-in-arms.

Which road should you take? The most craggy assent! It is the one I also take: follow me.

Learn to obey. Only he who obeys a rhythm superior to his own is free.

Learn to command, Only he who can give commands may represent me on earth.

Love responsibility. Say: “It is my duty, and mine alone, to save the earth. If it is not saved, then I alone am to blame.” (Kazantzakis, Nikos. The Saviors of God. pages 67 & 68)

These words describe a commitment to the gift of radical freedom, and they also imply a deep guilt in my not living my free responsibility. Taking on such a radical commitment does not mean that our choices always succeed in saving the values we seek to save. Our freedom is indeed a finite power. Our power to bend the course of history is limited. We will, therefore., be guilty of failures, as well as guilty of mistakes. In addition we may even be guilty of betraying our gift of freedom through crawling back, in a cowardly fashion, into one of our well-practiced slaveries.

Nevertheless, in the practice of an authentic version of Christian faith, we can resist the temptation of the determinists and fatalists who tell us that we have no guilt, because everything works out the only way it can in accord with some overall dance in which we play no role in creating the choreography to which we dance. Instead of attempting to handle our guilt in this illusory way, we can take on a full consciousness of our guilt, when we are also taking on a full forgiveness from the Profound Reality that judges us guilty of our unrealism.

This Christian faith not only resists the notion of a totally determined existence, but also views each conscious moment as a fork in the road between being our freedom and fleeing our freedom. We have to choose which fork to take. Choosing freedom has a different quality than choosing slavery. Choosing freedom is a surrender to the gift of freedom as it is being given to us in the situation of each moment of choice. We do not accomplish freedom. We do not create freedom. We choose the freedom that is being given to us with which we at the same time are freely choosing among the options that lie before us.

On the other hand, choosing slavery is choosing an obliteration of the freedom already being given. My choosing slavery as my operating identity creates a slave version of me from which I am not empowered to escape. Choosing slavery renders a bondage of our will—a bondage of our own choosing for which we are responsible. Freedom cannot be chosen by a will that is bound in slavery to something other than realism. The will that was meant for freedom is no longer free. The will is now caged within a prison cell of a slavery that we have chosen. The restoration of our essential freedom requires that Profound Reality come to our rescue, restoring us to that deep realism that includes freedom.

The gift of freedom means that we are now free to leave the cage of slavery through enacting the gift of freedom—that is, by making specific choices with that gift of freedom. Our liberation from bondage is completed not by fate, not by cause, not by chance, but by a choice to use of our given freedom to choose freedom.

I recently viewed the film Harriet, a 2019 American biographical film directed by Kasi Lemmons. Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women’s suffrage.

This film drama of her life was as gripping a portrait as I have ever seen about an ordinary human being laying down her life of her own free will. She became simply uncanny about risking her life under the most threatening circumstances on behalf of rescuing others from their physical slavery. Her cool, effective freedom of action under such pressures illustrate the meaning of this text:

“No one takes my life from me, I lay my life down of my own free will.” John 10:18

Christopher Fry, in his play The Ice Man Cometh, has an alcoholic drunk pronounce the word freedom as “free-doom”—a cute, but also profound insight. Freedom is the doom of all the slaveries of spirit that we may prize. And such freedom is the aliveness, courage, and grandeur of our essential being.