Jesus added that our love for God would be judged on how we have loved our neighbour:

“I was hungry and you gave me to eat, a stranger and you took me in, sick and you visited me… For whatever you did to one of these my little ones, you did to me” (Mt.25, 31-46).

And love meant humility, those who were truly great had to choose – through love – to be truly small. Jesus taught a revolutionary way of loving even to those in position of authority.

5) In what way did Christ “Liberate” people?

The grace of Christ brings the freedom of God to all people. Christian liberty is the result of an historic event, an ongoing event – the victorious death and resurrection of Jesus – and of union with Christ in the sacrament of Baptism, normally through a public commitment of faith, symbolised and enacted in the rite of purifying water called baptism (which means bath, a cleansing refreshment and new birth through the “Spirit” ). The Christian believer is free in the sense that, in Christ, he or she has received the powers of living from now on in the intimacy of the Father, without being impeded by the bonds of Sin, Death and the Law. St. Paul and St. John are the chief heralds of Christian liberty.

Christ liberates us mainly in six ways:

e) freedom from slavery to human respect and fear

f) freedom from slavery to sensual lust.

a) FREEDOM FROM SIN AND DEATH

Paul (Romans 1-3) describes sin’s universal tyranny over the world, but he does so to set in greater relief the super-abundance of grace. By uniting the Christian to the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, baptism has put an end to the slavery of sin (Romans 5, 12-21; 6, 6). Death, the inevitable accompaniment of sin, has also been overcome; it has lost its sting (1 Corinth. 15, 56). Christians should no longer be enslaved by fear of it. They still await the redemption of the body (Romans 8, 8), but to some extent “we have passed from death to life” (1 Jn. 3, 13) already to the degree that we live in faith and charity.

b)FREEDOM FROM SLAVERY TO OURSELVES AND FALSEHOOD.

Christ liberates us from ourselves through union with him, as St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans (6, 1-23). Man in his evolution had a “fall”, and is now a victim of this egoism and pride of his. In Christianity this fall is called “Original Sin” – i.e. the very first sin. No -one knows the precise manner of this fall. It is the tragic reality of our concrete human situation – that we are sinners. It is described through various myths in different religions. In the Bible it is given in the story of Adam and Eve (Genesis, Chs. 1-3). Man became enslaved to sin and to his little ego self and thus needed a Saviour or Liberator, a Messiah (Messiah in Hebrew means “The Anointed One”; in Sanskrit “Abhishikta”; in Greek “Christos” the Christ), a second “Adam”, a new representative for the whole race, a universal Brother, through whom all might rise up again.