Breaking into prison

 This week's verse is Hebrews 13:3:

Remember those in prison as though you were in prison with them, and those ill-treated as though you too felt their torment.

Paul is talking about compassion in these verses. They're right after he talks about hospitality, but right before he talks about the usual selfish distractions people like to preach about, like sex and money. It's a good place to bring the topic up, right between what's not in our nature and what is.

It's not an automatic instinct for us to be hospitable to people we don't know. We have to be reminded to do it. We have to be trained to be polite. It takes our whole childhood to learn the basics. Some of us are still learning how to behave properly, even as adults! It's not natural behavior for us as human beings.

And when we act according to our own nature, we commit atrocities. We lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, etc. Very few people fantasize about doing acts of kindness if they were invisible; remove accountability and people turn into monsters. (This has also been shown in studies of war crimes, where people in uniform without name tags were much more likely to be brutal towards prisoners than people who had them.)

So, in Christ we have a lot of freedom, but our nature pulls us down the dark path. Why does Paul have to keep bringing up greed, and sexual immorality and all of the other things? And why do we need to be told over and over again to be nice? This is the unfortunate context that Paul wraps this week's verse in.

Making things more complicated in Paul's time was the fact that Christians were a persecuted minority. People were being bullied, snatched up off the street, and thrown into poor prison conditions, basically for nothing. This stuff is still happening today, but we in the West are disconnected enough from it that it's not really part of our daily lives in the same way that it would have been to a Christian in Paul's circle.

Paul's question is, what do you do with that information, if you find out that someone is suffering like that? People are often afraid of suffering. When someone is diagnosed with terminal cancer, they often find that some subset of their social circle starts to avoid them. It's easy to try to distance ourselves from others' pain. "Oh there's nothing I can do anyway. And maybe they were being careless. Or maybe they sinned, and that is why I haven't gotten picked on and they did. Who knows? Not my problem, thank God." We pray and say a few spiritual-sounding things and call it done.

But Paul answers the question differently. He says that we should treat those Christians being persecuted as if they were us. As if we were also in prison. As if it was us getting rocks thrown at us and being cornered in dark alleys. He's saying we shouldn't treat that sort of thing as someone else's problem but as a problem that affects us directly and personally.

Do any of us actually do that though? When we hear about the guys getting thrown in jail in China for having Bibles, is it as important to us as it would be if it was us getting rounded up by thugs in black vans? Or if we see reports of Christian girls getting raped in the Middle East, are we as outraged and humiliated as we would be if it was us or our own sisters and daughters? I don't know of anyone who lives like that.

It's emotionally exhausting to care that much about people who are not us. That's why we have the defense mechanisms we do. And yet Jesus managed to overcome those mechanisms and care about all of us as if we were him and he was us. Like we were brothers and sisters, not just random sinners.

Can you imagine yourself being trapped in the way that someone suffering is trapped? Can you imagine being as poorly treated?

Next time you find yourself distancing yourself from another person's suffering, stop yourself. It's not some random stranger; it's you. What would you want someone else to do for you if you were in those circumstances? Put a sign in their front yard and go back to watching Netflix? Post something nice on social media and then move on? It's not an easy answer. Maybe the only thing you can do is pray and ask God to help them where you are not able. But maybe you are able to do something.

Jesus remembered us and felt our suffering, and entered the prison of our world to be alongside us and to experience our torment with us. If we're meant to follow him, and to demonstrate him to a suffering world in bondage, we may find that we have to do that too.