“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.” (Jeremiah 6:16)
In my previous reflection I found myself pondering why freedom takes so much longer to learn than escape. But that left me with another question—one that has been quietly growing in my mind ever since.
What makes a people capable of remaining free?
Most of us assume that freedom, once won, somehow looks after itself. History tells a different story. Nations have gained freedom and lost it. Churches have done the same. So have individuals. Freedom, it seems, is one of the few treasures that disappears when people stop practising it.
We see the symptoms all around us. Public trust declines. Truth becomes “negotiable”. Political debate becomes increasingly tribal. People lose confidence in one another. Institutions that once inspired loyalty become objects of suspicion. We instinctively blame governments, politicians, the media or the Church, depending on our own convictions. Yet I wonder whether these are symptoms rather than causes.
So often we ask, “Who is to blame?” Yet the more searching question may be, “What kind of people are we becoming?”
History has always fascinated me, not because it tells us what happened long ago, but because it asks uncomfortable questions of the present. Why have some societies managed, over centuries, to cultivate habits of liberty, responsibility and self-government, while others have repeatedly found themselves under the rule of tyrants? Why do some people instinctively resist domination, while others seem almost resigned to it?
I do not ask these questions to praise one nation or condemn another. Every nation has its own failures and blind spots. Yet history does seem to suggest that freedom is far more than a political arrangement. It is a way of seeing the world. It is a habit of mind and heart that must be learned, practised and passed on from one generation to the next.
That thought brought me back to two remarkable sayings of Jesus.
The first is familiar: “Take care, then, how you hear.” (Luke 8:18)
At first sight, it seems a rather curious thing to say. We might expect Jesus to tell us what to hear. Instead, he tells us to pay attention to how we hear. His concern is not simply with the message entering our ears, but with what that message is gradually shaping us to become.
The second saying has puzzled readers for centuries:
“To those who have, more will be given; but from those who have not, even what they think they have will be taken away.” (Luke 8:18)
For years those words sounded rather unfair to me. Surely Jesus cannot mean that the rich simply become richer while the poor become poorer. In fact, that is not the subject he is discussing at all. The whole conversation is about hearing. Jesus has just told the Parable of the Sower and warns his listeners, “Consider carefully how you hear.” He is not describing the economics of wealth but the dynamics of the human heart.
The ability to love, to forgive, to think clearly, to tell the truth, to resist domination and even to remain free are not fixed possessions. They are capacities. They grow stronger through use and weaker through neglect. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, we become the kind of people we repeatedly practise being. This gradual shaping of human character is not only true of individuals. It is also true of whole societies.
Perhaps that is why Jeremiah paints such a haunting picture:
“My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” (Jeremiah 2:13)
The first tragedy is that the people have turned away from the spring of living water itself. Instead, they place their trust in cisterns of their own making. At first, nothing appears dramatically wrong. They promise security, prosperity or certainty. But however carefully built, the cisterns eventually crack, leak and fail to hold the water on which life depends.
Centuries later, Mahatma Gandhi recognised a similar danger when he spoke of the “Seven Social Sins”: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice and politics without principle. Different language, perhaps, but the same warning. A civilisation may appear outwardly successful while something essential is quietly draining away.
Which brings us back to Jeremiah’s challenge:
“Stand at the crossroads and look.”
But before we ask how to change our politics, our churches or our culture, we need first to ask a more searching question.
What kind of human beings are we becoming?
History offers some fascinating illustrations.
Take Britain, for example. Whatever our many faults, we have inherited something remarkably precious. Over many centuries—albeit through many conflicts, injustices and some tremendous setbacks—we gradually learned that no king, government or institution should hold absolute power. The Magna Carta, the development of Parliament, the independence of the courts, freedom of conscience and a free press all helped to shape a people who increasingly expected to think, question and participate in public life. Freedom became more than a political arrangement; it became part of our national imagination.
The United States inherited much of that tradition while giving it fresh expression. People crossed an ocean in search of new beginnings, and the ideals of liberty, representative government and constitutional restraint became woven into the nation’s founding story. America has often fallen painfully short of those ideals—as the history of slavery, racial injustice and other failures reminds us—but the ideals themselves continued to challenge the nation to become something better.
Other histories have been very different.
One of my oldest school friends became a historian. I still remember him saying to me, “The tragedy of Russia is that ordinary Russians have rarely known what it is to live in sustained freedom.” Whether under the Tsars, the Soviet regime or more recent forms of authoritarian rule, generations have grown up within highly centralised systems of power. That observation was never intended as a criticism of the Russian people, whose history is filled with extraordinary courage, creativity and resilience. Rather, it raises a sobering question: what happens when the habits and institutions that nurture freedom are never given the opportunity to take deep root?
One event in recent years has stayed with me more than almost any other. After two decades of international involvement in Afghanistan, the withdrawal of Allied forces was followed by the astonishingly rapid return of the Taliban. Images of desperate people clinging to aircraft at Kabul airport were heartbreaking, not least because they seemed to symbolise the collapse of so many hopes.
I remember asking myself, “Why did the Afghan people not simply refuse to surrender the freedoms they had begun to experience?”
The more I reflected, the more I realised how naïve my question had been. Afghanistan’s story is very different from Britain’s or America’s. It is a nation shaped by centuries of invasion, conflict and deeply rooted tribal loyalties. Freedom cannot simply be imported, however noble the intentions or however great the investment. It cannot be sustained by institutions alone. It must gradually become part of the imagination, habits and shared life of a people. Without those deeper foundations, even the best political structures remain fragile.
That realisation has stayed with me ever since. It made me wonder whether the deepest foundations of freedom are not political at all, but profoundly human.
Seen in that light, none of these examples is offered to praise one nation or condemn another. Every country carries its own mixture of wisdom and blindness. Rather, they remind us that freedom is not simply a political achievement. It is a cultural achievement, a moral achievement and, I believe, ultimately a spiritual achievement.
Freedom is rarely lost in a single dramatic moment. More often it is eroded gradually, as the habits that sustain it weaken. When people cease to think critically, cease to value truth, cease to take responsibility for one another, and begin looking instead for others to solve every problem, the foundations of liberty begin to weaken long before anyone notices the building shifting.
Which brings us back to the question we began with: what makes a people capable of remaining free?
Why do some peoples remain free while others lose their freedom?
The Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) spent much of her life wrestling with precisely these questions.
Reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal organisers of the Holocaust, she coined the now famous—and deeply controversial—phrase, “the banality of evil.” She was not suggesting that evil is ordinary or insignificant. Quite the opposite. Her disturbing insight was that great evil is not always committed by monstrous people. More often, it flourishes when ordinary men and women gradually stop thinking for themselves. They inherit assumptions, obey authority, conform to the prevailing culture and slowly lose the habit of making moral judgements of their own.
That insight has echoed in my mind ever since I first encountered it.
Perhaps the greatest threat to freedom is not the tyrant who appears at the gates. It is surely the slow surrender of our own capacity to think, to question, to discern and to take responsibility for what we believe and how we live.
That is precisely how freedom is lost. Long before anyone controls our actions, they have learned to shape our assumptions. Long before people surrender outwardly, they have often surrendered inwardly. The habits of discernment slowly give way to the habits of conformity.
It is striking that Jesus seems to be concerned with exactly this danger. He does not simply tell us what to believe. He repeatedly invites people to see, to hear, to notice and to understand. Again and again he asks, “Have you not read?” “Do you not understand?” “Who do you say that I am?” And then comes that remarkable sentence: “Take care, then, how you hear.” Not simply what enters your ears, but what kind of hearer you are becoming.
That, it seems to me, is one of the deepest principles of spiritual formation. Every voice we listen to is shaping us. Every story we believe is forming us. Every habit we practise is making us into a particular kind of person. None of us escapes that process. The only real question is whether we are being formed into people who are becoming more truthful, more compassionate, more courageous and therefore more free—or whether, almost imperceptibly, we are becoming less so.
Truthfulness carries a cost
Jeremiah discovered that. The prophet who accused his people of abandoning the fountain of living water for cracked and leaking substitutes was mocked, threatened, imprisoned and eventually lowered into a cistern himself. Jesus repeatedly warned that faithfulness to his Kingdom would bring opposition and persecution. Gandhi was imprisoned repeatedly and eventually assassinated. Hannah Arendt knew exile and fierce hostility. Those who challenge the assumptions by which a society has learned to live should not be surprised when the society pushes back.
The courage required is not fearlessness. Jesus himself knew anguish. Courage begins when something becomes more important to us than our fear: when the desire to speak truth becomes stronger than the fear of retaliation; when love of neighbour becomes stronger than the instinct for self-protection; when conscience becomes more precious than belonging.
Perhaps this, too, is part of learning to live as free people. Pharaoh is not only the power outside us. Pharaoh survives in the fear that whispers, “Keep quiet. Don’t draw attention to yourself. You have too much to lose.”
Freedom comes when that voice is no longer the one we obey.
The Way of Hope
Jesus had no ambition to seize political power; his concern was to form people. He knew that societies are ultimately shaped by the kind of human beings they produce. Laws matter. Institutions matter. Governments matter. But none of them can remain healthy for long unless people themselves are learning to become truthful, compassionate, courageous and free.
This is why he consistently rejected domination as the way to change the world. “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them... Not so with you.” His Kingdom would grow by transforming people, not by controlling them. That is why Jesus did not simply leave his disciples with a body of teaching. He promised them the Holy Spirit—the very life of God at work within them—fulfilling Jeremiah’s vision of God’s law being written on human hearts (Jeremiah 31:31–34). The new covenant is not simply about better instruction, but about inward transformation, so that people gradually become capable of living the life Jesus taught.
The Kingdom, then, was never intended to spread primarily through power, wealth or even institutions, but through ordinary men and women whose lives were being transformed from the inside out.
That is why Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed. To the farmer it was an inconvenient, even subversive, plant. It spread quietly, took root in unexpected places and refused to stay neatly contained. God’s Kingdom advances in much the same way. Not through force or domination, but through lives quietly shaped by the Spirit into the likeness of Christ.
The problems facing our world are immense. Polarisation, distrust, violence, environmental crisis and the seductive pull of power can leave us wondering whether anything we do could possibly make a difference.
Yet Jesus deliberately chose images that speak of influence out of all proportion to size. Salt is one of the commonest minerals on earth, yet a tiny amount transforms everything it touches. A mustard seed is almost insignificant, yet it grows into something surprisingly expansive. God’s way of reckoning is wonderfully different from ours. He delights in changing the world through apparently ordinary people.
The first disciples lived in a world that looked no less overwhelming. They possessed no wealth, no armies and no political influence. What they did possess was a willingness to listen to Jesus, to walk in his way and, however imperfectly, to practise what they heard.
History conforms to the remarkable truth that the quiet revolution begun by Jesus has changed the world more profoundly than all the empires that once seemed invincible. Rome has gone. The Caesars have gone. Yet the call to love our enemies, forgive without limit and care for the least continues to transform lives, communities and even nations.
We are so easily tempted to think that changing the world requires becoming famous, influential or exceptional. Jesus suggests otherwise. The Kingdom grows through ordinary women and men whose quiet faithfulness becomes, like the mustard seed, far more transformative than anyone imagined. Our prayer surely needs to be along the lines of, “Lord, help me to be faithful in whatever you give me to do, whether anyone notices or not.”
The Kingdom Beyond the Institution
None of this diminishes the importance of the Church. Christian community has always been one of God’s great gifts to the world. But Jesus never suggested that the future of his Kingdom depended upon the ecclesiastical structures that would later grow up around his followers.
That may encourage those Christians who have become disillusioned with institutional religion. Christian community matters deeply, but the Kingdom has always been larger than any institution. Wherever people, filled with the Holy Spirit, hear his words and put them into practice, there the mustard seed continues to grow.
Perhaps Mahatma Gandhi was right to urge us, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Whether or not he spoke those exact words, the sentiment captures something deeply true. The transformation of a society begins with the transformation of people.
Or, to put it another way, perhaps Jeremiah, Hannah Arendt and Jesus are all inviting us towards the same place.
Stand at the crossroads. Look carefully. And what will we see there? Not simply a choice between competing political programmes, religious systems or visions of society, but a far deeper question. What kind of people are we becoming? Take care how you hear. Then, with the help of the Holy Spirit, begin practising the way of Jesus.
We cannot heal every nation, reform every institution or solve every crisis. But we can become the kind of people through whom God’s Kingdom quietly spreads—like salt preserving what is good and bringing out its true flavour, like yeast working unseen through dough, like a mustard seed that refuses to remain small.
And, in Paul’s beautiful phrase, we become “the aroma of Christ” in the world: a quiet fragrance that cannot be forced upon anyone, yet gently fills every place where love is lived.
Perhaps that has always been the ancient path.
And perhaps lasting renewal has always begun there.
Jeremy Marks, 10th August 2026
A great read! Thank you Jeremy. You have challenged me to think through, both 'how' I hear and 'what' I am doing with what I hear. As a side note, one of the books I am reading right now is Hannah Arendt's (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism - great read!