Daily PresenceSample

A motif is a recurring word, phrase, or symbol that keeps popping up in a literary text. Motifs are helpful because they help us grasp larger meanings. An example in Judges is this statement: “Everyone did as they saw fit.” How does this motif help us understand Judges? or ourselves?

Let’s examine the motif. Similar expressions have run in generational vernacular over the ages; they all mean the same thing.

In the time of Judges: “Everyone did as they saw fit.”

In my parents’ generation: “To each his own.”

When I was in high school: “Do your own thing.”

In college: “If it feels good, do it.”

All of these expressions are proclamations of liberty: the sovereignty to chart our own courses, to choose for ourselves, to act in our self-interest. That’s a concept we cherish, a patriotic principle, a declaration of individuality.

But let’s be cautious. What was the result of liberty in the Old Testament judges’ world?

Their national life and spiritual character was a mess.

A more spectacular example: Adam and Eve! God granted them free will. What was the result of their exercise of choice?

A fallen world.

So what do we do with liberty? A current situation that offers perspective is a comparison of what liberty means to someone who declares the personal right to refuse wearing a mask in a public place to the crisis of an 80-year old nursing home resident in Ukraine who’s ridden on an unheated bus for 18 hours without food, water, or sanitation after her nursing home was bombed. To which of these situations does liberty matter the most?

What we guard against, then, is prattling about liberty as a trite cliche without recognizing its highest implication. The liberty “to please myself” is hardly enshrined in scripture! In fact, the supreme exercise of liberty was Jesus’s rejection of His divine choice to call down a force of angels to rescue Him from the cross. Instead, he exercised liberty sacrificially on our eternal behalf.

Christ’s example easily reveals that the Old Testament judges were flawed, a broken people, “each one doing as he saw fit.” Let no one say that we, likewise, are flawed. As Christ demonstrated, yes, we are indeed free: free to give, free to serve, free to offer our lives, as St. Paul described, as a “living sacrifice.”

To such freedom may we strive!