No More Chains
This Sunday, in our reading from Isaiah, we will hear the words God uses to commission God’s anointed one, the messianic figure: “I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.” Right now, I do not plan on preaching on that text, but the image of God’s messiah coming to set prisoners free is speaking to me this week in a way I would like to share with you.
Over and over in scripture, God promises to come and set God’s people free. The vision of God’s reign that Isaiah and the other prophets envision is one in which those who have been bound in chains are now released. But that freedom, which the prophets describe in detail, is not merely a general state of political existence—the kind of freedom we might celebrate on Independence Day—but the literal loosing of chains, the opening of prison doors, and the basking in the sunshine of those who have been incarcerated.
When does God promise to lock people up? When do the prophets imagine a future in which the bad people are thrown in jail? When does the Bible describe the world as a place in which God’s peace is maintained by a strong commitment to law and order? Never.
Actually, I should say almost never. Although the Bible is full of passages in which God’s people long for God’s judgement to be exercised on their enemies, only in Psalm 149 is that longing expressed in the hope that the kings and nobles of the enemy nations would be bound in chains and iron fetters. Again, in Isaiah 45, the prophet anticipates a day when the wealth of those who have oppressed God’s people and stolen their riches will be returned by those who “come over in chains and bow down to you.”
Likewise, in several parables, Jesus speaks of weeds being bound and thrown into the fire or an improperly attired wedding guest being bound and thrown into the outer darkness. And the Book of Revelation imagines that Satan will be locked in prison for a thousand years, but that sounds more like a metaphor for cyclical manifestations of evil. Plus, in the end, even Satan is released from prison, though eventually he is to be cast into a lake of fire forever.
There may be other isolated examples in scripture of incarceration being used as a metaphor for divine justice, but I cannot think of any. How remarkable it is, therefore, that the Bible repeatedly uses the release of prisoners as a metaphor for divine intervention yet almost never relies upon the image of the imprisonment of our enemies as a way to give us hope. In effect, as people who wait for God to come and make all things right in this world and who offer themselves as vessels through which divine justice becomes more fully manifest on the earth, we are called to stand with those who are behind bars and not with those institutions that seek to lock people up.
When I say it like that, however, a part of me bristles at the simplicity and naivete represented in those words. What would the world be like if we had no jails? No police? No judicial system? I want to know that, if a member of my family ever faced a violent threat, there would be someone around to help them. I want to know that individuals who are a real danger to society are not allowed to mix and mingle with the rest of us. Is there anything wrong with that?
No matter how reasonable and necessary that approach to civil society seems, the Bible makes it clear that that is not God’s vision for the world or for our safety. As Christians, we are called to identify with those who are in chains, not with the jailers. As Christians, we should look for Jesus not among the powers of this world who keep us safe but among those who have been incarcerated by those powers. Maybe holding onto simplistic and naïve values is part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
Over the centuries, Christians have found different ways of engaging with the kingdoms of this world while seeking to belong primarily to the kingdom of God. Some take the radical view that any participation in earthly political structures is antithetical to being a Christian. As a matter of conscience, they do not vote or sit on juries. Others believe that the governments of this world can be direct manifestations of God’s reign on the earth. They tend to identity political leaders as servants of God as much as servants of the state. Most of us, I suppose, are somewhere in the middle, but all of us are called to be faithful—to be Christlike—not only in our religious observances but also in our public lives.
Perhaps the takeaway for me is one of mindset. For ancient Judeans and first-century Christians, incarceration was not thought of as an instrument of justice but of injustice. For those who lived in biblical times, prison was not a place where bad people were kept apart but where good people were punished by their oppressors. To call the carceral structures of the ancient world “judicial systems” is to attempt to apply a contemporary framework onto a diverse and complicated series of political apparatuses that largely will not accept it, but remembering that God is on the side of those who are in chains helps me know where my heart is supposed to be drawn. We may not think of today’s carceral system as fundamentally unjust, but Jesus is still found on the other side of prison bars, and that is where he calls me to follow him.
I live in a world in which it is safe for me to assume that the judicial system will benefit me and my interests because it always has. Not everyone can say that. We know that Jesus ate with sinners and invited outcasts to follow him. We know that Jesus was arrested, tried, convicted, and executed as a criminal—as one whom the powers of this world determined should be tortured and put to death. We know that Jesus came to the earth as God’s anointed one—the Christ—who was commissioned by God to deliver us from captivity. Should we be surprised, then, that Jesus calls us not to lock people up but to work for a world in which all prisoners are set free?
Yours faithfully,
Evan D. Garner
