The Truth will set you free.

Goethe once said that there was no crime of which he could not concieve himself guilty. Let's think about that for a moment.  This includes genocide. This includes rape. This includes infanticide. It includes all imaginable evil, and Goethe could imagine himself comitting all of it.

Damn, that's harsh.

I'm not sure what he meant exactly with this statement, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a self-deprication made in order to get sympathy. I once heard a reading of this statement, which went along the lines of this. Goethe is acknowledging his oneness with mankind. He is acknowledging that he is intimately connected to the world to an extent that it is impossible to tell where the world ends and Goethe begins, and that this world that he is a part of is full of suffering and evil. He has not escaped sin, for merely by being born he has become part of patterns of violence and hatred which he can not control. He is continually involved with this world, which we can well call wicked in parts. It is not his fault. He did not choose this. It is very unfair, and he did not want it.

And that is what we express in the Church when we confess our sins. We say that "I am part of the world, part of the good and the bad alike. But I want to be free from the  bad, and only be part of the good". We do not want to be trapped in the cruelty of a fallen world, for we want to be free. Be free of patterns of violence. Free of slavery to our own egos.

What then, can set us free? Is it to be kind to all people? Is that what it is to be free? Is it to be a generous person, giving lots of money away to charitable foundations? Is it to have pot-luck dinners with your church? Is that freedom? Is to protest against political opression and the unfair parts of society? Is that what it means to be free? Is it perhaps freedom to buy organic grocieries and reduce carbon emissions? Is being polite and friendly to all people you meet freedom? All those things, are good things. But they do not make you free. For if your freedom rests upon your personal righteousness, then you will never be free. You would just become trapped in prideful self-righteousness or fall into despair at your short-comings.

Not goodness, kindness, not even love, sets you free. Truth, sets you free. The truth of where you come from and where you are going. The truth of how things are, straight up. During Jesus' trial, Pontius Pilate asks "What is truth?". unawares that the Truth was standing before him, battered, dirty and bruised. The revealed Truth of the conditions of human existance. In the person of Jesus we see what true humanity is like, and what true godhood is like. By embracing him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, we can have Truth live in us, and the Truth will set us free. But not before pissing us off.