At the time of writing, Covid protesters continue claiming their personal right to be free from government mandates that have saved lives.

In a global epidemic, if I were to assert my right to freedom regardless of anybody else, that paints a grim picture of my humanity. Those who have died of Covid have no freedom. When I exercise my will that is an act transformed into the ethical question, “Am I doing well?”

Those who pursue their own right to freedom regardless of anybody else create an ideology. Ideologies, not least patriotism, by their very nature have unfortunate consequences. They tear apart relationships between individuals, groups and nations with the potential for terrorism.

The effects of the French revolution with its winsome call freedom, equality and brotherhood is a case in point. Following a revolt in western France, revolutionary leaders decided that going to war against Prussia and Austria would unite the nation. Years later, eight countries had been drawn into wars with the loss of over a million lives. In France, citizens turned on each other. An estimated 70,000 were executed, the vast majority without proper trial.

Ideologies have consequences: colonisers who continue to take land from indigenous people; communism sacrificing the rights of the individual upon the altar of the State or Party; Nazism’s fulfilment at Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen; Christian crusaders killing Jews and Moslems; President Putin’s bid to restore the past glory of the Russian empire by massacring innocents; American nationalism assassinating an enemy half a world away, reinforcing distrust of the motives of western nations.

In Aotearoa we have the spectacle of a self-proclaimed Bible-believing Christian coordinating protests claiming individual rights to freedom over the welfare of all others. By supporting that view, Brian Tamaki seems to have overlooked chapters three to eleven of the book Genesis.

Those chapters present characters acting out their self-appointed right to freedom with such consequences as hard labour, pain, brother killing brother, a complete breakdown of the moral universe and the collapse of a tower built by a developer keen to enhance his reputation. Then floods. Now that’s topical!

The Bible takes a different view of freedom from Brian Tamaki. Freedom belongs exclusively with the sovereignty of the Deity. There is no just human freedom outside the doing of God’s will. This includes a social responsibility to build a just society for all.

Along with acknowledging the grief of those who have lost loved ones to Covid, we owe an immense debt of gratitude to our health workers. Over the past two and a half years they and their families, supported by government agencies, have sacrificed their own freedom for others.

In Christ God gave an antidote to humanity’s quest for absolute freedom. A gift represented in the birth of a helpless child. It is written of this child as an adult that, “although in the form of God he did not regard equality with God something to be exploited. He emptied himself taking the form of a slave to the point of death… Therefore, God has exalted him!”

To God’s people, God’s Spirit revealed in Jesus gives them freedom to love translated into social order - the freedom to offer kindness with patient faithfulness in their relationships - the self-control to become instruments of peace offering life in its fullness to those they greet and meet.