“He hath sent me … to preach deliverance to the captives”

(Luke 4:18).

Every now and then some dangerous criminal breaks out of jail, and a warning is broadcast to the public to be on the lookout for him. We are incessantly bombarded with reports of the overcrowding in all our jails and prisons. Most people are disturbed by the enormous number of felons who are walking our streets, out on bond, committing fresh crimes. For years one of our most pressing national preoccupations was the problem of how to spring from their imprisonment our fellow Americans who had been kidnapped and held hostage in Lebanon. One might say that we are a jail- and prisoner-obsessed people.

How to get those who ought to be in jail locked up and kept there, and how to get out those who ought to be free and kept from all harm, is for us all a very thorny problem. Being in jail is a terrible ordeal for both the guilty and the innocent.

Once I went to see a man in prison. I can still hear the locks clicking behind me as the guard led the way through one barrier after another. I can still see the expressions of shame and despair and bitterness on the faces of the prisoners. I can remember now how I then thought with a shudder, “What a fearsome thing it is to be a prisoner of the law.”

But there are prisons, we all know, other than city jails and state and federal penitentiaries. I’ve seen prisoners who weren’t behind bars, and you have too.

Fear imprisons people. I have visited with prisoners of fear. I have looked into their haunted eyes. I have heard them describe the miseries of their harsh imprisonment. I have seen whole communities locked up by their fears in a spiritual concentration camp. I shall never forget the feel of fear that hovered in the very air over a city caught in the grip of a polio epidemic back in those years before the Salk vaccine was perfected.

Sickness or crippling can imprison people. If you don’t believe it, just wait till you or a member of your family has to spend weeks, months, or even years confined to a hospital bed or a sickroom.

The lusts and passions of the flesh can imprison the soul. What can be a more complete confinement than that of men or women shut up under the lock and key of a self-destroying habit, barred from the good life that goes on all about them?

A life situation can imprison us. How often circumstances in the middle years conspire to make people feel hopelessly jailed. It may be heavy family responsibilities; it may be a vocation or a job too hastily chosen years ago that does not now really satisfy the soul or intrigue the talents; it may be just the pressure of modern society, the piled-up requests and calls on one’s time and conscience. Any one or a combination of these circumstances can crib, cabin, and confine us until we feel hopelessly jailed in a dismal prison.

Now, of course, the worst part of any form of imprisonment is what it does to the soul. When John the Baptist was imprisoned by Herod, he sent a messenger to ask Jesus if he really were the Messiah or should the world look for another Savior? Just think of it! That bold, fearless, reckless man who had been the first to discern our Lord’s identity and the first loudly to proclaim it was now in the depths of doubt. “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?” See what continued imprisonment does even to the stoutest hearts? It gnaws away at one’s vitals. It corrodes faith. It destroys deepest convictions.

“Once one of the Macdonalds, a Highland chieftain, was confined in a little cell in Carlisle Castle,” writes William Barclay in The Gospel of Luke. “In his cell there was one little window. To this day you may see the marks in the sandstone of the feet and the hands of the Highlander as he lifted himself up and clung to the window ledge, as day by day he gazed with infinite longing out upon the border hills and valleys that he would never walk again.

Shut in his cell, choked by the narrow walls, John asked this question because his cruel captivity had put tremors in his heart.”

Devilishly perverted people can do appalling things to the hearts and souls of longtime prisoners in the way of brainwashing. Human beings, created in the image of their great Maker, were intended to be free, and when they suffer imprisonment, they are most hurt where they are most like their Maker, in their immortal souls.

And it follows that the more sensitive, conscientious, and noble a person is, the more likely it is that any form of imprisonment will destroy him. In the play by Ketti Frings Look Homeward, Angel, based on Thomas Wolfe’s novel, two brothers discuss their father’s latest drunken spree. The younger asks, “If he hates it so much here, why does he stay?” His brother Ben, speaking as much about himself as about his father, replies, “It’s like being caught in a photograph. Your face is there, and no matter how hard you try, how are you going to step out of a photograph?” Yes, the deeper one’s sense of responsibility and capacity for affection and loyalty, the more cruelly imprisoning and soul-destroying many a jail can be.

Do you remember the popular song, “It’s been a blue, blue day. I feel like running away. I feel like running away from it all”? That is about the way most of us have felt at times, isn’t it? Those intolerable burdens, those impossible responsibilities, those irksome people. But breaking out of our prison ourselves is not the solution to our problem. Running away is not the real answer to our need. In fact, few if any of us can manage all by ourselves the particular jailbreak we need. We can’t get the consent of our soul to step out of the photograph. What we really need is genuine release — full pardon. That, someone else will have to do for us.

Now Jesus Christ thought it one of his most important purposes in life to set the prisoners free. That day in the synagogue in Nazareth when he announced the objectives of his life’s work, he put near the top this one: “To preach deliverance to the captives.” And the early Church in its experience of the living Christ found him, as it is written in the First Epistle of Saint Peter, visiting the spirits in prison and setting them free.

As we read the Gospels we see clearly that this was Christ’s life, this was the big business of the Son of God — to accomplish the release of all who had become imprisoned in life one way or another, to set the prisoners free.

Yes, and even yet this is the Great Redeemer’s continuing work — to free even the violent terrorists, the hardened, dangerous criminals by forgiving their past sins, changing their hearts from hate to love, freeing them on the inside from the tyranny of evil, springing them from the jailhouse of destruc­tion, and setting them free to serve God and man.

How does Christ deliver the captive and set the prisoner free? Not by granting physical release necessarily, though that so often follows, but primarily by bringing spiritual deliverance and granting the soul freedom, which is the very point where, as we have seen, all imprisonment pinches hardest. Yes, Christ has the remarkable power to transform forbidding prison walls into open doors of opportunity, a gibbet into a pulpit of truth, and handcuffs into swords competent to carve out new human rights. Many a person has felt as did Ben Gant about the impossible human situation in which he found himself — “how are you going to step out of a photograph?” — but discovered that the grace of Christ can put a new radiance on an old face and supply a new spirit for carrying accustomed responsibilities and so change the people and the grouping in that photograph as to effect a complete deliverance from within.

Where have we more remarkable evidence for this reality than in the experience of Saint Paul? The great champion of the Christian faith is thrown into prison. The intrepid missionary is snatched from his wide-ranging travels and chained to a Roman soldier. “Oh, what a loss,” we say, “a tragedy beyond repair. Christianity is set back a hundred years.” But how wrong we are. For Paul in prison writes, “The things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel” (Phil. 1:12). How? In his letter he goes on to make it clear that he has two things in mind. First, his imprisonment has brought the unique opportunity to witness for Christ before his prison guards and win them for his Lord. Second, Paul has observed that his courage in bearing his imprisonment has not been without its effect on other hard-pressed Christians. But there is yet another way the gospel is furthered by Paul’s imprisonment, of which he, in writing, was not aware, but which we, his spiritual heirs, see now so clearly: that prison correspondence of Paul’s has become one of the Church’s choicest treasures. Here Paul pours out his heart on what Christ means to him, and had not the imprisonment interrupted his missionary labors, he might never have had the time to do for us this incomparable service. So Paul’s imprisonment by Christ’s grace serves as the method for setting his spirit free to go campaigning past his own generation and down the centuries.

A beautiful young woman suffered a crippling illness. Circumstances sentenced her to life imprisonment in her own home. Yet Christ with his gospel came into that house and preached deliverance for her soul. Out from her bed went letters in a steady stream to missionaries all around the world. In correspondence and prayer she had fellowship with Christ’s foreign legion. Amazing power went out from her life to distant lands. And what interest and exuberance of spirit flowed back into that little upstairs room from far away places because Jesus Christ had delivered a captive, not by healing her body and sending a robust young woman to the uttermost parts of the earth on missionary activities, but because he had proclaimed deliverance for her spirit.

I once knew a man who suffered a long imprisonment caused by alcoholism. He and his wife were separated because drink was destroying his life. He lost job after job. How often I’d seen him with defeat in his eyes and talked with this doomed prisoner about his dismal future. Then came a strange, unbelievable miracle in his life. The patient love and prayers and labors of a devoted son who never gave up on his father — a sort of prodigal son parable in reverse — finally paid off. The man maintained a level of sobriety for a number of months. He got a job and held it. He and his wife were reconciled. Finally, the day came when I saw him with all the lines of tension gone from his face. His eyes had lost their shifty, roving glance. Suntanned and poised, he stood before me. “My, you look well,” I said. And he replied, “Well, I’m living right now.” And he knew that I knew what he meant.

How had it happened? What had set the prisoner free? That man would say he became a free man after a long and bitter imprisonment because Jesus Christ had set him free, using as the human instrument of the divine love the man’s own son.

Are you and I in a prison of our own construction? Have we let our lusts, our selfish ambitions, our precious luxuries, our indulgence in self-destroying habits imprison our souls? Do we feel caught in a life situation that is a jailhouse to us?

Well, Jesus Christ is interested in us and in our release. He came to preach release to captives. His continuing work in the world is visiting spirits in prison to set them free. All around and about us he is springing the lock and letting them go. Today he is knocking at the door of our imprisoned hearts to tell us he has come to let us out. Just turn yourself over to him. Put yourself in his hands. In trust and commitment, surrender yourself to him and see how free he can make you.