The Least of These: Prisoners
The Least of These: Prisoners.
Zach Williams – Chain Breaker (Live from Harding Prison)
“For I was hungry and you gave Me food, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you made Me your guest, I needed clothes and you covered Me, I was sick and you took care of Me, I was in prison and you visited Me… I am telling you the absolute truth, so take this to heart! Whenever you did these things for one of the least of these brethren of Mine, you did them for Me!” (Jesus’ complete parable of the Sheep and the Goats is found in Matthew 25:31-46).
Merle Haggard – Mama Tried (Live)
Extreme Empathy? Christ so closely identifies with those who suffer in the world that He somehow attaches Himself to each sufferer and literally ‘feels their pain.’ He even thinks of the sufferer as “brethren,” (v. 40) of being in the same family as Him. Jesus has welcomed every needy person in the world into His presence, and He has invited Himself into their presence as well. Jesus is present with the least important, the overlooked, the neglected in a spiritually meaningful way. Jesus knows what it’s like to suffer, He is familiar with poverty, rejection and loneliness, He is well-acquainted with grief and shame. The Lord is saying in this parable that He is personally present with that person in the midst of his suffering. When we care for the needy, therefore, we end up caring for Christ as well. When it comes to those who are forgotten or devalued, Jesus weaves together His identity with theirs. When we are serving the hungry in a soup kitchen, we are also filling the plate of a hungry Jesus. When you dress the wounds of a soldier on a battlefield, we are welcoming Jesus into the foxhole with you. When we visit a prisoner in his jail cell, we’ll find that Jesus occupies the same cell, and of course the top bunk belongs to Him. If we offer a spare room to someone who needs a bed for the night, we are welcoming Jesus as a guest as well. If we offer the shirt off our back to a half-naked man on the street corner, be aware that we are clothing Jesus in His “distressing disguise.” (Mother Teresa). The miserable have captured the heart of Jesus to the extent that He joins them in their misery. He is a presence in their poverty. Jesus so closely identifies with the needy that when we care for the needy, we care for Him who is standing right there in solidarity. In a sense, Jesus seems to love hiding in the needy. So somehow here’s a gospel mystery… Each believer is hidden inside Christ, while at the same time Christ is hidden in us when we suffer (Col. 3:3). Are we hiding inside each other? The reality is that when we ignore the needy, we are ignoring Jesus as well, to our peril.
Johnny Cash -I Got Stripes (Live at Folsom Prison)
“Tell them, ‘As sure as I am the living God, I take no pleasure from the downfall of a wrongdoer, or the death of a sinner. Instead, I want sinners to change their ways and live. Turn your life around! Reverse your sinful ways!” (Ezekiel 33:11).
I found Jesus on the jailhouse floor – George Strait lyrics
The Lord has a Soft Spot for Prisoners. The Lord God seems to have a special place in His heart for the prisoner. He has gone on record as listening to the “groans of the prisoners” (Ps. 79:11; Ps. 102:20), of wanting to “set the prisoners free” (Ps. 146:6-8; Ps. 107:10; Isaiah 61:1). God in His mercy is always poised to demonstrate His lovingkindness to those in desperate need. He deeply cares about the prisoner because those who are locked up in a cell certainly qualify as needy: forgotten, unimportant, ignored in polite society. Prisoners are seen as dispensable and among the least valued in our world. Prisons, too, tend to be places where the inmates are not appreciated as being made in God’s image, and so they often have to suffer dehumanizing environments. Much like the nursing home and the orphanage and the homeless shelter, “out of sight, out of mind.” And we could add, “out of sight, out of heart.” The Lord Yahweh went out of His way to release the captives in Ps. 107:10-16… “We are those who sat in darkness, locked up in a gloomy prison, living in the shadows that were as dark as death. We were prisoners in absolute misery, bound in chains. All this because we defied the instructions of Lord Yahweh, we despised the counsel of our God, scorning the thoughts of the Most High. So Yahweh humbled our hearts through suffering, and if we fell down, there was no one there to pick us up again. We cried out to the Lord in our distress, and He saved us. He rescued us from our miserable plight. He delivered us from the gloomy darkness and the deathly shadows. He shattered our chains of captivity, He broke the jail wide open. We thank Yahweh for His goodness and lovingkindness, His faithful love for us, His wonderful works for the children of mankind. He broke open those gates of bronze, He smashed the iron bars, and He shattered those heavy jailhouse doors. Yes, we cried out to Lord Yahweh in our distress, and He saved our lives from the Abyss, the pit of destruction, from certain death. We will thank the Lord for His mercy, faithfulness, and goodness!” This would be the testimony of our fallen heart if it could talk. What better way to paint a picture of sin holding us captive, hopelessly locked into a dark dungeon without any true freedom. The truth is that we aren’t strong enough to break those chains. Only Jesus has “bound the strong man” and mercifully liberated us in a dramatic spiritual jailbreak. And don’t forget that Jesus quoted Isaiah 61:1 as His mission statement at the start of His ministry, which included, “to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.” The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25:31-46 will certainly confirm the Lord’s heart for the imprisoned, and for all who are considered Nobodies, unworthy of compassion and care. Nobodies who have the potential of rehabilitation, who can experience the miracle of redemption.
Chris Stapleton Death Row lyrics – YouTube
“While Jesus was still speaking to His disciples, Judas, one of the Twelve, with a great multitude with torches, swords, and clubs, came to Jesus in the Garden. Now His betrayer had given them a sign, saying, ’Whomever I kiss, He is the One; Seize Him!’ Immediately Judas went up to Jesus and said, ‘Greetings, Rabbi!’ and kissed Him on the cheek. But Jesus said to Judas, ‘Friend, why have you come? Are you really betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?’ Then the mob came to Jesus, laid their hands Him and arrested Him. They then bound Him as they took Him away.” (This scene is in Mattthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, and John 18).
Jesus in Chains. Is it any wonder that Jesus had prisoners on His mind in this last public teaching of His before the Passion? He knew He would soon be a prisoner Himself. He knew He would soon have to weep through the intense fear of Gethsemane, and the tragic betrayal of a trusted friend. It wasn’t that long ago when the Father asked Him to experience the complete rejection of His hometown friends, when they wanted to execute Him for blasphemy. He was well aware of what was just around the corner, that He would go through the heartbreak of His best friend denying Him when it mattered most, and an ignorant mob would take Him prisoner in handcuffs in the middle of the night and deliver Him to the brutal killing machine known as the Roman soldiers. He knew that while a prisoner they would beat Him without mercy, spit onto His face, strip Him and humiliate Him by mockingly draping on Him a royal robe. Jesus knew that the soldiers wouldn’t stop there, that they would jam a crown of 3- inch thorns onto His scalp, and scourge Him with a Roman whip fashioned with pieces of metal at the end of the leather straps. And then, as so happens with all prisoners everywhere, His closest friends would all abandon Him when He needed them the most, on the Cross. If anyone could identify with the plight of a prisoner, it would be Jesus. Every prisoner everywhere since that time can honestly claim that God truly knows what it feels like to be behind bars.
Johnny Cash – Folsom Prison Blues – Live at San Quentin (Good sound quality)
“How happy and blessed are you whose hope is in the Lord his God; Who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them; who keeps truth and is faithful forever; who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. Lord Yahweh sets the prisoners free” (Psalm 146:5-7).
John Prine – “Christmas In Prison”
Our Moral Universe Laced with Compassion. We need to think with both hands when it comes imprisonment. On the one hand, God has designed a moral universe, and so was built on the moral imperatives of absolute rights and wrongs. The world is established on the need for moral accountability, because as He said, we will reap what we sow. There must be justice if we are to accurately represent a just God. So there must be consequences for illegal behavior, and punishment for those who break the law. Creator God is a law-and-order God. On the other hand, all those who are imprisoned are made in God’s image, and thus are sacred and worthy of humane punishment. Every prisoner must be treated as a person who is beloved of the Lord. So the legal punishment must take into account the inherent dignity of each prisoner and treated with compassion while behind bars. It’s interesting that Jesus declared that we need to visit the prisoner whether or not the prisoner is guilty or deserves the punishment. We are called to visit the prisoner regardless of guilt or innocence. The truth is that every prisoner has the presence of Jesus standing right by his side and sharing that prison cell. In every cell, Jesus is right there in the top bunk. The prisoner remains a human being and deserves our compassion and respect whether or not the time behind bars is deserved.
Gospel Song – No More, My Lawd. “No More” was first recorded in 1947 at the notorious Parchman Farm of the Mississippi State Penitentiary System. The Farm was modeled after a slave plantation during the slavery era, and was called “the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.” 90% of the prison population was black during the Jim Crow era in the early to mid-1900’s, because African Americans could be imprisoned for vagrancy, loitering, curfew, insulting gestures, mischief, and other so-called crimes for which whites would not be arrested. The Farm is located in the fertile Mississippi Delta, and was mostly producing cotton until recently, when the crops became fruit and vegetables. Following the Civil War, many plantation owners wanted the blacks to have the same conditions as in slavery. So the powers-that-be found a loophole in the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. They founded a program whereby the prison system would lease out prisoners during their incarceration to local plantations, where, while working off their sentence, the blacks could be exploited, inhumanely treated, and used for forced labor. Many have described the infamous Parchman Farm as legalized torture. Since most of the prison population was black, there were men, women and children as young as six years old assigned to Parchman Farm to work in slave-like conditions. “No More” was recorded by Alan Lomax, and features an axe cutting wood as the background driver of the beat. This blues song is heart-breaking when you consider the context, and brings painfully home the wrenching experience of the African Americans during Jim Crow in the South.
The Blind Boys of Alabama – No More (2001)
“You can never learn that Christ is all you need, until Christ is all you have… There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still… I talked with my Savior. Never before had I such close fellowship with Him. It was a joy I hoped would continue unchanged. I was a prisoner – and yet – how free!” (Corrie Ten Boom, imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for harboring Jews. Her story is told in the book, The Hiding Place).
“I was taken to prison, and here have lain now a full twelve years. I have continued with much contentment, through grace, but have met with many turnings upon my heart – from the Lord, from Satan, from my own corruption, by all of which glory be to Jesus Christ! I never had in all my life so great an insight into the Word of God as now. Those Scriptures that I saw nothing in before, were made, in this place and in this condition, to shine upon me. Jesus Christ has never been more real and apparent than now. Here I have seen and felt Him indeed.” (John Bunyan, jailed for twelve years for preaching the gospel in England in mid-1600’s, at which time he wrote one of the most famous books of all time, The Pilgrim’s Progress).
Zach Williams – No Longer Slaves (Live from Harding Prison)