Third Sunday after Easter AD 2025

How free are we? If we believe those who say that not only our feelings, but also our behavior and the decisions that make us act, are merely part of the chemical reactions and physiological processes taking place within us, then we would have to admit that there is no point in talking about any real freedom because everything we do, plan and think is predetermined by something.

This way of thinking is extremely distressing, even horrifying: we think we have free will, but in reality, even the fact that we think so is not the result of our free will, but something that has been imposed on us, as it were. If we were just a body, that would be the case. But the truth is that we are not just bodies, we are a whole, made up of body and soul.

We have received our bodies from our mother and father, as it has been passed down since the first humans created by God. However, the soul of each one of us was created directly by God, who joined it to the body at the moment of conception.

The soul is what gives us freedom. The soul transforms our physical perceptions into feelings and gives us the ability to think and make sense of what we experience. The fact that we have a real will and the ability to act on it is also possible because we have a soul.

But our soul is only able to function properly if it is not itself robbed of freedom. That is why St. Peter admonishes us in today’s Epistle: “Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul!”

So, how free are we? We are truly free only when our souls strive for truth, righteousness, goodness, and love. Remember: this is freedom that is not in our power, but that only Christ can give us. He has done this by humbling Himself even to death and overcoming death and sin through His glorious resurrection.