The Least of These: The Prisoner
The Least of These: The Prisoner.
“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).
[this article is in process and thus is incomplete at this stage. Please don’t read until it is finished.]
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.
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. 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.” Those passages and their hints at spiritual Jubilees will be discussed in articles later on, but for now the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25:31-46 will certainly confirm the Lord’s heart for the imprisoned, for all who are suffering or in need.
“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).
For those of us who are a prisoner of war, which includes all of us, whether the battles are within an inner prison like fear or shame, or waging the spiritual battle against the Enemy, or trying to survive in a literal prison with a Warden and cell doors, we can be assured that the Lord Jesus has experienced the same things. That’s right, God Himself, Yahweh in the flesh, has been a helpless prisoner, powerless before the authorities, physically abused, emotionally traumatized. Regardless of your personal type of prison, Jesus has personally experienced it.
Jesus had to endure long periods of time without food, shelter, or rest. He had to weep through the intense fear of Gethsemane, and the tragic betrayal of a friend. He was required by the Father to experience the complete rejection of His hometown friends, when they wanted to execute Him for blasphemy. He went through the heartbreak of His best friend denying Him when it mattered most. A mob took Him prisoner in handcuffs in the middle of the night, and delivered Him to the brutal killing machine known as the Roman soldiers. They proceeded to beat Him without mercy, spit onto His face, strip Him and humiliate Him by mockingly draping on Him a royal robe. The soldiers jammed a crown of 3- inch thorns onto His scalp, and they scourged Him with a Roman whip fashioned with pieces of metal at the end of the leather straps.
On Prison as a Picture of Our Spiritual Captivity.
“Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quickning ray, I woke, the dungeon flamed with light.
My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth, and followed thee.
Amazing love! How can it be that thou, my God should die for me!” (hymn by Charles Wesley, 1707-1788).
The remarkable, and anonymous, Psalm 107 offers several vignettes of what has been called “God’s Great Works of Deliverance.” We find people in all kinds of trouble in this psalm, and the Lord provided salvation each and every time. Most scholars claim that this psalm can be taken either literally or as metaphor, or more probably both. Historically we can point to the Chosen People here, experiencing exile and all sorts of problems because of their disobedience to their Lord Yahweh. But there are many who say, especially in verses 10-18, that the description of people hopelessly imprisoned in a dark, windowless dungeon is rightly understood as a picture of our spiritual captivity before the arrival of Jesus Christ. This is a realistic picture of the inner prison of the heart before redemption and deliverance. This is certainly a bleak snapshot of the state of our soul without Jesus. Weaving together many translations of Ps. 107:10-18, the following paraphrase can best be understood at the spiritual level, and is what salvation looks like when we are delivered from our spiritual captivity. I have written the following in the more direct and personal first person instead of the more impersonal and distant third person.
“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.
‘He saved us.” The word for save here is “Yasha,” which means to be set free into the wide open; to be delivered in a time of desperate need; to be saved from destruction and certain death. “Salvation” literally means to become spacious, and refers to “the sense of deliverance from an existence that had become confined, compressed, or cramped.” (Eugene Peterson). When Jesus delivers us from our inner spiritual prison, we are liberated into a wide open, broad, expansive place.
“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).
Freedom: (Greek, “aleutheroo”); to liberate from captivity or bondage; to deliver from a certain fate; to set free from a hopeless addiction or dependence; to remove the shackles of confinement; to save from an internal prison of woundedness; to remove whatever it is that has us bound; to enjoy a carefree, childlike spirit after being squelched or limited in some way. “If you continue in my teachings, abiding in what I have said and done, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. And if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed… If you make yourself at home in my Word and make yourself a student of mine, you will intimately experience the Reality of Christ, and you will be spiritually liberated into freedom. And when Jesus, the very Son of God and the Author of Truth, liberates you, you will be completely free.” (John 8:31-32, 36).
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.
Christian Prisoners Offer Words of Wisdom and Faith.
“There was a fiddler who played so beautifully that everybody danced. A deaf man who could not hear music considered them all insane. Those who are with Jesus in suffering hear this music to which others are deaf. They dance and do not care if they are considered insane… Christians enter prisons for their faith with the joy of a bridegroom entering the bridal chambers… A faith that can be destroyed by suffering is not faith… A man truly believes only in the things he is ready to die for.” (Richard Wurmbrand, imprisoned in Romania by the Communists for 14 years for believing in Jesus).
“This man Solzhenitsyn had learned in the prison camp the one thing you would have expected him not to learn, what it really means to be free. He realized that we can be free only if we are free in our souls; that a man in a prison camp who has learned to be free inside himself is freer than the freest man.” (from the British author Malcolm Muggeridge).
“And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through countries, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – But right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. All the writers who wrote about prison but did not themselves serve time there considered it their duty to express sympathy for prisoners and to curse prison. I have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!” (Russian author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn after being release from a Gulag prison camp).
“When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away your ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer… 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!… I was not brave. I was often like a timid, fluttery bird, looking for a hiding place. Coward and wayward and weak, I change with the changing the sky; today so eager and brave, tomorrow not caring to live. But God never gives in, and we two will win, Jesus and I.” (Corrie Ten Boom, imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for harboring Jews. Her story is told in the book, The Hiding Place).
“But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist? – ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for those who despitefully use you.’ Was not Amos an extremist for justice? – ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? – ‘I bear on my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’ Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? – ‘This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.’ So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremist we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, imprisoned for his civil rights activity in Alabama, in 1963, ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’).
“O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will, but also those of ill will. But, do not remember all of the suffering they have inflicted upon us; Instead remember the fruits we have borne because of this suffering—our fellowship, our loyalty to one another, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart that has grown from this trouble. When our persecutors come to be judged by You, let all of these fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness.” (an anonymous prayer found in the clothing of a child at Ravensbruck concentration camp).
“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… I will stay in jail to the end of my day before I make a mockery of my conscience.” (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).
An excerpt from his poem written on death row in a Nazi prison: “Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today, and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? Or is something within me still like a beaten army, fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved? An excerpt from his last letter to his fiancé while awaiting execution: “It is as though in solitude the soul develops senses which we hardly know in everyday life. Therefore I have not felt lonely or abandoned for one moment. You must not think that I am unhappy. What is happiness, what is unhappiness? It depends so little on the circumstances; it depends only on that which happens inside a person.” (by German pastor and author Dietrich Bonhoeffer, jailed by the Nazi’s for conspiring to assassinate Hitler, 1944; to learn more about his experience there, read his book, Letters and Papers from Prison).
“In one day, I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and after dark nearly as many again, even while I remained in the woods or on a mountain. I would wake and pray before daybreak, through snow, frost, and rain.” (St. Patrick, who was kidnapped in his homeland in Britain as a teenager and brought to Ireland, where he was sold as a slave to an Irish chieftain. After six years of slavery out in the brutal elements as a shepherd, he escaped, and returned later to remain for 30 years, becoming Ireland’s most famous missionary).
“My story is one of brokenness. I was actually very weak in prison and broken, and then God rebuilt me. I said in prison, ‘God, if you ever let me out of here, if I have a chance to speak, I will be open and honest about my brokenness. I’m hoping my story will be an encouragement to other weak people… I see God as the grandmaster chess player. Behind all the political intrigue it took to get me released, actually God was really in charge.” (Andrew Brunson, an American missionary in Turkey who was imprisoned there unjustly for two years, 2016-2018. His book about that experience is “God’s Hostage”.)
“All I did every day in prison camp was pray every day. I promised God that I would serve Him if He could get me out alive. When I became a Christian, I knew that I’d instantly forgiven my very cruel prison guards in Japan. When you hate somebody, you don’t hurt them in the least. All you’re doing is hurting yourself. If you hate somebody, it’s like a boomerang that misses its target and comes back and hits you in the head. The one who hates is the one who hurts. Like Mark Twain said, ‘Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” (Louis Zamperini, whose incredible story is told in the book Unbroken. Louis survived two months lost at sea in a little life raft, and then two years in a torturous, abusive Prisoner-of-War camp in Japan. Soon after he left the Air Force, he returned to Japan to be a missionary and proceeded to forgive every one of his prison guards).
“I wish to make a request. I wish to take this man’s place in those being executed.” (Rev. Maxamillian Kolbe made the request of the Nazi commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The sadistic commander said, ‘Your request is granted.” And so Fr. Kolbe volunteered to take the place of another man he didn’t even know. He was executed by the Nazi’s in 1941).