I saw a remarkable video involving birds being set free the other day, ironically on the “bird app,” aka Twitter.
Allow me to set the scene: a streetside vendor with a cage full of songbirds stoops alongside an SUV with its windows down. A sun-glassed man is sitting in the passenger side front seat. He has apparently just purchased a number of the songbirds in the cage, perhaps all of them. One after another, the vendor takes a single bird from the cage and places it in the hand of the man in the SUV — and one after another, the sun-glassed man casually releases the just-purchased songbird — without ever even looking up from the vendor he’s dealing with! — allowing the now-released bird to flutter skyward to freedom.
As an act of kindness to animals, the scene is obviously a compelling one. A man purchases songbirds from a caged life, not so he can hold them captive in his own house, but so they can be free.
Call me overly spiritual, but I also want to suggest that this scene of songbirds set free paints a compelling image of Christ’s intervention in our own lives.
Locked in the cage of our own sins, and incapable of escaping on our own, Christ ransoms us. Indeed, he is the only one who can pay the price — the only one who has something that can cover the cost of our well-earned captivity, and the only one among us free to offer it.
Like the man in the video, Jesus pays for our release, not so he can hold us captive, but precisely so that he can liberate us from anything that restricts our flourishing. “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1). Of course, this freedom isn’t a license to simply fly into the void of the sky, doing whatever we want. Our true freedom, in actuality, is friendship with Christ, because relationship with God is what we are made for. “I no longer call you slaves … I have called you friends” (Jn 15:15).
When I suggested this “Christological” reading of the bird video on Twitter, someone commented that it was all a trick. That the songbirds had been conditioned to fly back to the vendor and his cage. Thus, even though they’ve been freed, it’s been habituated in them to prefer captivity. If true, the implication was that this somehow lessened the significance of the man’s purchase and subsequent release of the songbirds. If they were likely to fly back to captivity, who cares?
But rather than lessen the Christological quality of the scene, I think it heightens it. God frees us from our sins knowing full well that, in the very near future, there is the possibility that we will spurn our newfound friendship with him and return to the cage of sin. Like the conditioning of the birds even after they’ve been freed, the effects of sin still plague us, including our habits of choosing ourselves over God and others.
But God doesn’t offer his mercy because we’re perfect. He offers it because he loves us. And he will never cease offering it, even as we struggle with our sins and our selfish habits that lead us back to them.
This can be an especially important message to hear at this stage of the Easter season. The euphoria of the Resurrection has somewhat faded, and we can be faced with the recognition that — despite Christ’s victory over death and sin — we are still prone to live the old life, not the new.
This can be frustrating and disheartening. But our freedom was never about our own strength and effort anyway. It’s about the relentless mercy of Christ. He is the like the man who purchases songbirds from a streetside vendor, just to set them free. Except unlike the man in the SUV, Christ never runs out of what frees us, and he never tires of paying the cost.
Liedl, a Twin Cities resident, is a senior editor of the National Catholic Register and a graduate student in theology at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul.
