This is the first Lenten post in our continuing series of meditations on readings from the Revised Common Lectionary.
As we enter into Lent, the Old Testament lesson tells the story of the fall of humankind in the garden of Eden, and the epistle brings the response to that from the letter to the Romans:
5:15 But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.
5:16 And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification.
The beauty of this passage is the all-encompassing nature of Christ’s free gift of forgiveness: the gift of justification rather than condemnation.
Our current criminal legal system is a system of condemnation. The fact that the only response we can envision to crime and harm is one of punishment and prisons is an effect of the “one man’s trespass”—it is a feature of a fallen reality. Judgment itself, following the one trespass, has been perverted in our reality and our understanding, so that judgment is seen as something always to do with punishment.
But the promise of Christ is that the free gift turns judgment into justification. This does not mean that those who do harm are left unaccountable, or that no amends are made! It means that our view of judgment and justice should be one rooted in love and restoration.
Fleming Rutledge translates the term “justification” as “rectification,” making right. Our current paradigm for “criminal justice” does not make space for rectification, but replaces it with retribution and punishment. Yet the promise of the free gift of grace is the promise that the appropriate, godly, redeemed response to crime and harm is a response of rectification: of making the situation as right as possible. The story of the gospel, the rectification promised by God and effected by Christ, is about the transformation of our conception of justice from being primarily about punishment to being primarily about restoration.
Prisons, in other words, are an effect of the fall of humankind. Prisons are one of the many brokennesses of our reality from which Christ came to redeem us. Prisons, in other words, cannot be redeemed in the service of justice. Rather, in the kingdom of God that is already appearing around us, they are being abolished so that human justice can be redeemed, transformed and rectified into the healing, compassionate reality intended by God. The free gift of Christ is the end of retribution and incarceration!