In Matthew 25 Jesus commands
that we are to find our Lord in the people that we find in prison. Come O
blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation
of the world; for.... I was in prison, and you came to see me. Here Matthew
is not just suggesting a little measured assistance, or some comforting
reassurance for those in prison. The expectation is that we will find Christ
himself in prison and that we will encounter Him to our own saving benefit.
When visiting prisons Christians can’t say: “we saw only hopeless sinners or cynical criminals whose sincerity of relationship must be questioned at all times.” Jesus rejects our realism as unreal. He identifies Himself with the prisoner in such a way that we are in truth encountering Him in them. In this encounter we find that there really is a love which is not a matter of gracious condescension, but a love that strips itself, exposes itself, commits itself and identifies completely with sinful humanity. This is a radical and genuine love that is creative and transforming. A love that dares to descend into the world of lovelessness, a world that sees love only as a utopian pretence.
Grace at Work
Christ revealed in the lives of those in prison is a radical reversal of all of our short-sighted experiences. We know that as Christians we can’t judge as to whether God’s grace is working or not working in any individual. We believe that in every person there is an eternal destiny beyond the successes and failures of our lives. We know that the grace of God is made available to all regardless of heredity, upbringing, environment or sickness. We know that these conditions are not the absolute determining factors of any person. We know that what lies in essence within imprisoned humanity is a merciful God who has conferred an eternal dignity on all people.
Our Christian faith requires us to acknowledge that we can be wrong in our understanding about anything. It is recognizing that it is possible within an attitude of righteous certainty to walk blindly past Christ. To some extent we are all continuously running away from ourselves. Only the perfect say that they are no longer capable of self deception. Only the perfect have stopped repressing the truth of God within themselves. We in truth know that we are sinners who do not love God with our whole heart and strength.
In our partial acceptance of God’s grace, in our repression of the truth we are not free, we are prisoners until set free by the Holy Spirit. If we have not been set free by the Holy Spirit then we are hopeless and helpless prisoners in the prison of our own guilt, our unsaved condition. No matter what the cause of incarceration the one ultimate cause is the guilt of humankind, a guilt that propagates itself through personal guilt and a failure to love. It is this guilt that creates cells of imprisonment for us all in the great prisons of our lives.
All in Need
When we come into a prison from the outside we are not coming from a world of perfect harmony. The realities of our world are only made more sharply apparent to us in prison. Our need for the grace of God is the same as the prisoners we encounter. So we find ourselves in the prisoners we meet, seeing in them the hidden truth of our own situation and the wider human condition. In the care of prisoners and in the building of relationships with them we can see reflected our own need for God, and in doing so we may encounter a humility that leads to the grace of God.
I began to appreciate my own unreflective and self-righteous response to prisoners when I realized that the Chaplain was often unaware of the crime a prisoner had committed. He later told me that he sometimes never knew. That the only time a prisoner’s crime came up was when I asked what this prisoner was in for. It was then that I realized I was focusing on a single predetermining aspect of the prisoner and ignoring everything else about that person. In the brevity of most meetings with prisoners this was guaranteed to restrict my understanding.
This reality of our common need for the love and grace of God through Christ most clearly presented itself to me in the last few minutes of my time at Wandsworth HMP. The circumstance was a choir rehearsal for the Sunday service. Before the practice began, each prisoner was encouraged to share the concerns of the week and to listen to each other, to give support and encouragement, to share their experiences. Each did so with deep compassion and dignity, each challenging the hopelessness in one another. I will forever remember singing, at the request of one of the prisoners, that old familiar hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and feeling that this was the first time that I had really heard it. We ended the evening joining hands in a circle and saying the Lord’s Prayer and I can without a moments doubt confirm that Jesus was with us.
Bennett Spong is a non-stipendiary Anglican priest in the diocese of Southwark in London, England. You can contact him via email: bjspong@hotmail.com.