The Amazing New Testament: Prisoners of Hope

A question popped up 4 weeks ago: can you run for President if you’re in jail? Eugene Debs did in 1920. Not defending him or Donald Trump, it’s true that history has seen quite a few noble and holy people in jail: Galileo, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, Francis of Assisi, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, the prophet Jeremiah, the apostle Paul, and Jesus himself.

Here we are, just days before our great festival (party?) of freedom, July 4 – a good time to ponder great stories about who’s in jail, who’s out, who’s free, and who isn’t. One night in a Jackson, Mississippi jail, back in 1961, a young civil rights protester, named James Bevel, with a stunning voice began to sing. The white prison guard demanded quiet. But Bevel sang on. The guard arrived at the door and asked for the radio: “No radios allowed in here – you niggers ought to know that.” Bevel replied, “You ain’t getting this radio from me.” He kept on singing “The Lord is my Shepherd.”

Paul and Silas made their first intrusion onto the continent of Europe, landing at Neapolis and taking the highway to Philippi – where they were thrown into jail. The reason? “These men are disturbing our city” (Acts 16:20). The disturbance was primarily economic. A slave girl was making her handlers rich because of her uncanny ability to plunge into a trancelike state and voice cryptic words from the god Apollo. So when Paul healed the girl, they lost all hope of gain, and had the apostle incarcerated, beaten by the lictors with rods, and shackled in stocks.

In the pitch black dark, at midnight, far from weeping and trembling in anxiety, Paul and Silas were singing hymns. As Tertullian described it, “The legs feel nothing in the stocks when the heart is in heaven.” Of course, an earthquake rattled the cell door open. The guard was terrified – clearly not free on the outside, while Paul and Silas were very free on the inside.

I hope you saw or read the brilliant and wise graduation speech Ken Burns made last month at Brandeis. {You can read it, or watch!} A highlight was a long quote from one of my favorite thinkers, James Baldwin: “No one was ever born who agreed to be a slave, who accepted it. That is, slavery is a condition imposed from without. Of course, the moment I say that, I realize that multitudes and multitudes of people for various reasons of their own enslave themselves every hour of every day to this or that doctrine, this or that delusion of safety, this or that lie. Anti-Semites, for example, he went on, are slaves to a delusion. People who hate Negroes are slaves. People who love money are slaves. We are living in a universe really of willing slaves, which makes the concept of liberty and the concept of freedom so dangerous.” I’d add slaves to political ideology, to consumerism, to cynicism, to “Look out for #1” or “It’s all up to me.”

Maybe it’s like “faith.” Everybody has faith in something or another. We are all prisoners to something or another. Is there a good kind of captivity? Zechariah 9:12 speaks of “prisoners of hope.” Most Israelites has soured into a pouty cynicism, feeling abandoned or cursed by God, stuck in political and economic despair. But a few doggedly clung to hope in God; they were “prisoners of hope.”

Paul, in many of his letters written while he was in prison, doesn’t chafe against his shackles, but instead understand himself as a prisoner, not to Rome or the rough authority of this or that municipality. He was a “prisoner of the Lord Jesus” (Ephesians 3:1, Philemon 9), willingly and enthusiastically held captive to his Lord and whatever was required of him – including landing in the slammer.

One of my favorite hymns captures the irony: “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free… Imprison me within thine arms, and strong shall be my hand. My heart is weak and poor until it master find… It cannot freely move till thou hast wrought its chain; enslave it with thy matchless love… My will is not my own till thou hast made it thine.”

So a question to ask yourself – now, or midday tomorrow, or at bedtime the next day, or on rising the next morning: to what am I enslaved? Am I the sort of imprisoned one James Baldwin talked about? Or am I a Prisoner of Hope, a Prisoner of the Lord Jesus?