Daily Archives: October 13, 2026

The Path to Freedom

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The first reading today begins: “For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.” The larger context of his message to the Galatians is about reports he is receiving that some among them are advocating an adherence to the Law of Moses as the basis of salvation – hence his reference to slavishly following the precepts of the Law. To be clear, Paul holds that the Law is God-given and good, and he is certainly not arguing that Christians have been liberated from its moral obligations. However, Paul will go on to describe a new foundation for moral agency: the Christian is no longer trying to earn a relationship with God through obedience but is called to exercise freedom because that relationship has already been given in Christ. The key word being “exercise.” Christ has set the believer free, but that does not mean that nothing is now required of the believer. With freedom comes responsibility.

Our belief in Christ and the grace received does not eliminate human agency. Grace makes a new kind of agency possible and this is central to the life of all Christians. Paul is clear that Christian life is not passive and because Christ has accomplished salvation our actions are not irrelevant. The question is not whether our choices and actions matter, but rather, what makes them genuinely Christian. 

The first reading concludes: “For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.” (Gal 5:6) The Greek is pistis di’ agapēs energoumenē meaning faith becoming effective, active or operative through love. The believer’s choices become the place where faith takes visible form. Those choices become the basis of our moral life. It is no longer “what must I do so that God will accept me” but now the basis becomes: “Because God has already loved and accepted me in Christ, how shall I now live?” The latter understands obedience as the response of a person who has been loved.

Just beyond our reading Paul admonishes the Galatians to “use this freedom as an opportunity… [to] serve one another through love.” (Gal 5:13) In other words, Christ frees us from slavery so that we may freely become servants of one another. Or put another way, this is how we are to exercise our moral agency, which is neither autonomous self-sufficiency nor passive dependence on God. It is cooperation with the Holy Spirit which transforms our capacity to decide well. We still must choose whether to forgive, whether to tell the truth, whether to be generous, whether to respond to another person’s suffering. But now those decisions can arise from a heart being transformed by grace.

Returning to Paul’s admonitions about the Law of Moses, think of this way: the Law can tell us what love requires; grace and the Spirit makes us capable of loving. This is more demanding than a secular understanding of freedom, the ability to make one’s own choices without interference. Freedom in Christ asks that we not only choose, but choose the good, especially that which is good for the other.

Christ frees us not merely from external constraints but from the powers within us that prevent us from loving as we ought. And the Spirit gradually forms a person capable of acting from love rather than fear, resentment, compulsion or self-interest. That is moral agency in its deepest Christian sense.

In the everyday choices we make when we choose whether to forgive or hold on to resentment, to speak kind words instead of gossip, to be generous and in all the small choices we make over the course of a single day. Paul asks us to consider something deeper than the choices themselves – be clear about what is moving us to make them.  He admonishes us to work toward a position in life where our faith is working through love.

Paul begins with freedom and ends with love because, for the Christian, love is what freedom is for. Christ did not set us free so that we would have nothing more to do. He set us free so that what we do might finally be done in love.

Image Credit: generated by WordPress AI using the text of the post and the prompt path to the light of freedom.

Taxes and Faith

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This coming Sunday is the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time. In the previous post we noted that Matthew is sending us in the direction of a series of controversy stories that follow on the heels of the three parables of the Kingdom of God. As it has throughout this section of Matthew’s gospel, the question of authority continues to play out. In this scene the Herodians have been added to the playing field as a counterpoint and yet similar view as the Pharisees. Boring (Matthew, The New Interpreters Bible) comments:

Although the Herodians play no role in Matthew’s time… they represent the overt supporters of the Roman regime and would support paying the tax. The Pharisees, on the other hand, were popular with the people because they in principle resented and resisted the tax, but did not go as far as the radical nationalists who publicly resisted its payment. [p. 420]

The controversy is initiated by those Pharisees who have already decided to kill Jesus (Mt 12:14). It is ironic because in each of the three following controversies (taxes, resurrection, the Great Commandment), Jesus affirms the Pharisees’ positions. But then it was not about the answers; it was about authority as it has been since 21:23 “By what authority are you doing these things? And who gave you this authority?”

Certainly the question of taxes is as much about authority as any topic. And there is perhaps no thorny or inflammatory topic of conversation than taxes. As noted in v.18, it is with “malice” that the Herodians ask about the census tax payable to Rome. The empire exacted three types of taxes: a ground tax, which required that ten per cent of all grain and twenty per cent of all oil and wine production be given to Rome; an income tax, equivalent to one per cent of a person’s income; and a poll/census tax, which amounted to a denarius or a full day’s wage. To add insult to injury, the tax could be paid only in Roman coin, most of which contained an image and inscription considered blasphemous by many Jews: Tiberius Caesar Divi Augusti Filius Augustus Pontifex Maximus (“Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest”).

There are four different words used in the NT for taxes.

  • The most general is telos (used of “taxes” in Mt 17:25; Ro 13:7)
  • The word in our text kensos is borrowed from Latin (“census”) which was a tax paid by each adult to the government (Mt 17:25; 22:17, 19; Mk 12:14).
  • The word used in Luke’s parallel phoros is the payment made by the people of one nation to another, with the implication that this is a symbol of submission and dependence. (Lu 20:22; 23:2; Ro 13:6, 7).
  • The final word, didrachmon, refers to the annual temple tax of two drachmos required from each male Jew (Mt 17:5).

The idea of taxes is laced with controversy in both the secular and religious worlds. Combine the two arenas and the results can be disastrous. Remember that from the perspective of Israel, their God-given homeland was under foreign occupation. The census tax, which was instituted in 6 CE when Judea became a Roman province, triggered the nationalism that finally became the Zealot movement, which fomented the disastrous war of 66-70 (the Jewish War according to Josephus) that resulted in the destruction of the city of Jerusalem and the Temple. The annual payment of the census tax to Rome was a painful reminder of being in lands occupied by foreign powers who worshiped false gods.

Image credit: The Tribute Money, Peter Paul Rubens (1610–1615), Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Public Domain PD-US