Our freedom is decisive – literally. When we take a decision, we do it in the power of our freedom. Our freedom expresses our autonomy and our dignity. Using our freedom we exercise self-determination. By our free choices, we become who we are and what we want to make of ourselves. Freedom makes us responsible for ourselves: to respond for ourselves is to answer before others for the decisions we take, for the person we are becoming. Some of the decisions we take are more significant, others less so. Deciding whom I will marry is more important than deciding on the colour of my next coat. Yet even small decisions say something about my character or personality.

Freedom is on a spectrum. Some things require a greater investment of our freedom, others less. And sometimes the spectrum is greatly diminished by things like psychological trauma or mental illness, by coercion or by the force of habit. Every person’s dignity is equal, and everyone is endowed by God with the faculty of free will, but not all are equally free in the exercise of their will due to limitations of a greater or lesser degree. That’s why it is so difficult to judge what people choose to do because we are not privy to all the pros and cons which affect their freedom.

All of that said, the Lord has not endowed us with freedom to choose whatever we please. Our freedom is not unlimited or unmoored. As we hear in the first reading from Sirach: “If you desire, you will keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of choice. He has placed before you fire and water: stretch out your hand for whichever you wish. Life and death are in front of people, and whichever one chooses will be given to him.” Freedom is given to us, then, to choose life, not death; and to ensure that we are not left in the dark as to what leads to life, God has given us His commandments. He wants us to act faithfully before Him by keeping them. If and how we keep them defines our relationship with Him. As that reading goes on to say: “He has not commanded anyone to be ungodly, and he has not given anyone permission to sin.” To use our freedom to reject or ignore God or to sin is therefore to abuse it, to undermine it, to weaken it and, if we persist, to destroy it. To sin is to choose freely to put our very own freedom to death.

This is why the psalmist says in the responsorial psalm: “Blessed are those who walk in the law of the Lord, who keep his decrees.” He prays: “May my ways be firm in keeping your statutes, that I may live and keep your word. Grant me insight that I may keep your law and observe it wholeheartedly.” In any game of sport, the rules must be kept by all the players, otherwise the game devolves into chaos and the sport itself is ruined. The rules may at first seem restrictive, to cramp someone’s style, but in fact obedience to those rules eventually proves that all members of the team and each one individually can best express their style in being obedient. It’s the same for any society: without rules, there is chaos. To preserve order, those who break the rules must be sanctioned. Otherwise, the chaos within spreads abroad.

The moral life of human beings likewise needs rules to direct and contain our freedom precisely so that we can exercise it fully. The commandments of God are given to us not to cramp our freedom or humanity but to empower them to achieve their fullest expression and fulfilment. The commandments of God are not abstruse ideals which are beyond our capacity. They show the road map of how to be truly human. And Jesus Himself, the author of the commandments and of freedom, makes it clear in the Gospel that He did not come to abolish them. Rather, He came to fulfil them. He fulfils them firstly in His own person and shows that all the commandments are so many pathways of truly loving God and neighbour. He fulfils them secondly by teaching us that it’s not enough to observe the commandments in our external behaviour: rather, they also seek to direct and guide our internal attitudes, thoughts and intentions. Physically murdering someone is not just prohibited: so also, is seething anger against someone.

At times today it can seem that people recognise the need for rules in sport but consider the moral life an open field, a free for all – which results in moral chaos. Jesus makes it clear, with even more reason and importance, that we need to obey the commandments of God. Why? Because the moral life has vital significance for a truly happy life here below and for our eternal destiny, be it “fire or water”, as the Sirach reading says. This is also why Jesus sanctions those who would “relax one of the least of the commandments and teach others to do the same”: they will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” To relax the Commandment is to close off the path to love.

One way this is done today is by misnaming the commandments of God as ideals to be reached, as if God were unreasonable, asking too much of us. Failure to observe an ideal would thus be faultless. But the truth is that the Commandments are not unattainable ideals: they are the essential foundation of our moral life. To violate or ignore them can therefore only be sinful. If the commandments were merely ideals, then it would mean that we could never really be truly free because we could never really make them our own. But Christ did not create us to be frustrated in achieving ideals beyond our power. He created us to live the truth, to live our humanity as He created it to be. He has given us His commandments to show us the way to do so, and He died to free us from sin and endow us with the power of the Holy Spirit so that we might be able, if we desire and choose it, to obey them. A second way of relaxing the commandments is to play them off against conscience. The conscience is not an alternative source of truth to the commandments. It is the same voice of God which speaks to us in both the commandments and in our conscience urging us to obey God’s will in the particular decision before us. Conscience can never mean “will I or won’t I obey the will of God?” It only ever means “how do I obey the will of God here and now?” By conscience I don’t set myself up as an alternative to God’s authority. That’s what Adam and Eve did. Rather, with the will of God clearly in my mind, I listen and discern with open heart how best to obey it here and now.

We ask the Lord today to heal our freedom of any limitations it has, and to renew His Spirit within us both to know and to obey the commandments of God. We ask His mercy to raise us when we fall and to renew our resolve and strength to obey. In this way, may we live our humanity to the full as God intended it, that is, may we obey all His Commandments and so come to their fulfilment in loving God above all and our neighbour as ourselves.