Galatians 4: 1-7 (links validated 12/13/23)

In Leo Tolstoy’s book Resurrection that Louise Maud translated we read about Prince Dimitri Nekhlyudov’s misguided attempt at redemption. He visits the imprisoned maid Maslova whom he’d earlier impregnated and corrupted. She’d become a prostitute and then a prisoner. Nekhlyudov’s conscience eventually convinces him to marry Maslova in order to atone for his seduction and redeem his victim. However, she wants no part of his effort at self-vindication. She tells him, “You go away. I am a convict and you are a prince, and you have no business here. “’You want to save yourself through me,’ she continues, hurrying to express what had risen in her soul. ‘You’ve got pleasure out of me in this life, and want to save yourself through me in the life to come. You are disgusting to me – your spectacles and the whole of your dirty fat mug’.”

When God adopts us, his reaction is similar to that of a little girl named Olivia. Olivia had always liked to hear how her parents loved her from the time they first saw her at the adoption agency. But as she approached her twelfth birthday, the fact that she was adopted didn’t seem so entertaining any more. “I don’t really belong to anybody,” she thought one day as she picked wild berries in a field near her home. “Sure, Mom and Dad took care of me since I was six weeks old, but I’m not a blood relative, so I’m not really a member of their family.” As Olivia started home, a rather dirty, skinny little dog timidly approached her. “Hi, little guy,” Olivia said gently. “Did someone dump you along the road? Why don’t you come live with me?” It didn’t take much coaxing to get the hungry puppy to follow her home. I wonder if Mom will let me keep him, she thought. Nice word–Mom. I wish it were really true...

("Martin Scorseses' contemporary masterpiece Hugo is the story of a boy living in the Paris train station who, like everyone else around him, is looking for the purpose of his life. After his father, a watch-maker, dies in a tragic fire, all Hugo has to figure it out the purpose of his life is an 'automaton' that his father found in a museum attic. It was a mechanical person—essentially a robot—that was broken and tarnished from disuse, and together they set about to repair it...")

Some years ago many of us were riveted to the fine—but at times searing—movie 12 Years a Slave. In it we see the true story of Solomon Northrup, who had been a free black man living in the North in the years before the Civil War. Through a series of tragic circumstances, however, Northrup is abducted and sold into slavery where he remains for a dozen years before another series of (this time good) circumstances leads to his being freed. The nightmare scenario of the film is obvious enough: when you know what it is to be free, you never want to become a slave. And if for some reason you do, your life falls apart. You very nearly lose your own identity, and the dignity you once had as a free person can begin to feel like a distant dream...

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