Aware of my involvement with Kairos Prison Ministry, a dear friend recently asked me, “When you visit people in prison, how do you think of them? Do you see them differently from your friends or neighbors?” These were great questions, so for today’s post I thought I’d flesh out my response.
My view on crime has not changed. Society needs accountability and rightfully demands justice for the wrongs perpetrated within it. We know this; we all clamor for justice in its various forms. Moreover, society needs to be protected from those who have demonstrated their willingness to harm its people one way or another. And conversely, malefactors need protection from those who would otherwise take vigilante vengeance and perhaps to a disproportionate extreme, i.e., an eye for a tooth. But what has changed is this: I no longer categorize offenders as refuse to be wadded up and discarded into dumpsters like yesterday’s news. They are instead individuals, each with his own life story, each surviving or trying to survive, and each precious to God. How precious? Let’s look.
Shortly before His betrayal and arrest, Jesus spoke of a future judgment when commended are those who have shown proactive love toward the hungry, thirsty, strangers, unclothed, sick, or imprisoned—or in His words, “the least of these my brothers.”1 If Jesus claims the least among us as His brothers,” how can we categorically belittle or dismiss them? Why even would we want to? If anything, we might do well to look inwardly and spend some time praying about our own heart.
Yet to these least among us Jesus draws even one step closer than “brother,” for what we’ve done for one of the least of these, we, in His words, “did to me.”2 Notice He did not say we did it “as if to me,” rather, “to me.” This is the intimacy of identity and oneness with believers: Christ in us and us in Christ.
So do I see people in prison differently from my friends or neighbors? No, many are my friends and, in a sense, all are my neighbors. In fact, some of my closest friends live this life in lockup, yet in their words, “free on the inside.” And how do I think of these people in prison? I must think of them as Jesus does—His brothers, and closer still.
Father, we confess that, though you have shown us much love, forgiveness and grace, we sometimes fail to extend these to others. May we know your love so intimately that we freely, eagerly and joyfully share it with those in our midst. In Christ we pray. Amen.
1, 2 Matthew 25:40 ESV
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Paul Nordman—Author 