c. 1999 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ Much ado is made in our culture about moral relativism. That is, there are those who argue that in the morality plays shaping our society on a daily basis the line between good and evil has become blurred.
In the current language of postmodernism, that means”good”and”evil”have become subjective and distinction between is purely in the eye of the beholder. How curious, then, that in an era where all claims to truth, no matter how dubious, are deemed equal, all people are not.
Nowhere is this paradox more clearly seen than in the nation’s prisons _ the home of the unlearned, the unskilled and the unloved.
Notwithstanding the necessity and usefulness of imprisonment as a means of maintaining social order, imprisonment is often misused as a means of social retribution and political gamesmanship. No election season goes by without some candidate pledging to be”tough on crime”or decrying the”privileges”of inmates.
Nevertheless, prisoners themselves, while generally deemed the scourge of the earth, remain of great importance to God. As a pastor who has worked with literally thousands of prison inmates, it is my contention the Christian church has both the message and the means to effect redemption among those whom Christ referred to as”the least of these my brethren.” But here lies the rub.
In our debate over the subjective, relative nature of good and evil, we have forgotten those who are evil can be made good through the blood of Jesus Christ.
Such, indeed, is the essence of the gospel. As the apostle Paul notes in his second letter to the Corinthian church,”God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them”(II Corinthians 5:18). In other words, those who commit sin can be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, whose death provides the only acceptable compensation for their sins.
For most Americans, inundated as we are with the Christian message, the concept of redemption is a familiar one. However, there remains in the minds of many _ including many in the church _ a sharp dichotomy between the sins of the convicted felon and those of the rest of us.
It is as if there is a continuum between good and evil, in which some sins are deemed worse than others. Interestingly, inmates often make similar distinctions, resulting in a prison caste system in which prisoners judge themselves and their peers based on the crime(s) for which each was convicted.
Jesus, however, made no such distinctions. In his Sermon on the Mount, for example, he likened unbridled anger to murder, declaring it will receive the same judgment from God. Why? Because murder is the outgrowth of a heart filled with rage. Such fury requires only the right set of circumstances to result in the taking of a life.
Thus, in a situation where one is given to anger, what separates a murderer from the rest of us is only opportunity. Given the proper conditions, we, too, could be serving time. For the church, which prides itself on its ability to discern good from evil, these words of Jesus should prove instructive.
DEA END ATCHISON
