Philippians 1:3–11
It is sometimes easy to forget that Paul wrote while incarcerated. As a citizen, he had access to many privileges and rights that were not on the table for Jesus or John the Baptist, or any of the apostles or most of the people who came to listen to Jesus preach the good news. But even with all his legal privileges, Paul was a prisoner for five or six years. His “sharing in God’s grace” with other Christians was in two senses: That they all “defended and confirmed” the gospel, and that Christians in the cities in which Paul was imprisoned attended to his physical needs.
Imprisonment is, following Orlando Patterson, “social death”: an incarcerated person is cut off from friends and family, from physical or material care from others, and from voluntary meaningful work. Yet during Paul’s imprisonment, this death was absolutely refused. Christians carried and copied his letters, part of his life’s work; they visited him and attended to him; and Paul himself knew himself to still be fundamentally in community and communion with other Christians and their Lord, in a position to encourage, teach, and exhort them. Paul was known to be alive, as we all are alive in Christ; neither his bond of love with those he wrote to, nor his life, nor his faith, nor the worth of his teachings or perspective were in question.
How can we live in this way today? Paul wrote from prison not as a supplicant or one to be pitied but as a teacher and a brother. Yet how easily those of us who are not incarcerated make appeals for incarcerated people based not on siblinghood but on pity. The good news of God’s liberation and the kingdom brought near to us by Christ is not that God has felt sorry for people worse off than us, but rather that death is over and we are all and will all be freed, restored, healed. Prison is become a nothing as sin is become a nothing: this is the foundation upon which Christ works the good work being done in us. We can live this way now.
Bailey Pickens is a Presbyterian pastor who lives with her wife and dog in Nashville, TN.