Are you a slave? Or are you truly free? Some of you may be thinking: “This padre has really gone nuts or crazy. Of course I am free! How could I possibly be a slave?” But the reality is, unfortunately, many people indeed become slaves of one thing or another. We become trapped or addicted to the thing that we want to be free of. How can this be so? After all, we are free to do many things in this world, so how can we be enslaved even though we think we are free?
God invites us to depend on Him and learn from His ways, but He does not force us to do so. To be his servant, to put our entire trust and faith in him, we must do it freely without compulsion. But when we begin to place our trust in other things or persons other from God, we soon see ourselves losing our freedom to these things. We become slaves to these false gods. They begin to take control of our lives and take away our freedom. Take for example, money and wealth. We need to make a living and we need money to survive and function in this world, but when we begin to make money, some of us may begin to long for more and more of it, to the point that our entire efforts are in making money. We begin to neglect or pay less attention to other things, including our health, our family, even our relationship with God. When this happens, are we not enslaved or slaves to money? Has not money become like a false god to us?
That is why, in today’s Gospel, we are reminded that we cannot serve God and false gods at the same time. To serve God is to be truly free, whereas to serve other false gods would mean losing this freedom. We cannot be free and not free at the same time. We must never forget that we were created to know, love and serve God. The attractions of life can draw us away from living as sons and daughters of God, and slowly take away our inner freedom and we become slaves to them; we become addicted, attached and dependent on them, so much so that they have become our false gods. When we allow this to happen, when we become totally immersed to the ways of the world and the attractions of life, then we are actually breaking the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God. You shall not have strange gods before me.”
Today, let us pray for the strength to truly know, love and serve God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Today’s second reading reminds us: “For there is only one God, and there is only one mediator between God and mankind, himself a man, Christ Jesus, who sacrificed himself as a ransom for them all.” Let us always remember that we cannot serve two masters, and make every effort to cast off all our false gods and place our trust in God. Let us depend on our God, and regain our freedom to become sons and daughters of God.