Diocese of Down & Dromore

At the beginning of this Advent there is a particular theme in my mind: a particular slant on the Advent message. It struck me first of all on Advent Sunday morning, when I had the rare opportunity of going to church and sitting in the pew. The preacher in passing mentioned the theme of ‘prisoners', and the fact that the New Testament letters often resonated with prisoners because a good portion of them were written from a prison cell.

Then, on Monday morning, one of the clergy of the diocese sent me a postcard with what he described as ‘an Advent thought from one of Bonhoeffer's prison letters' The quotation read:

            ‘A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes, does various

            inessential thing and is completely dependant on the

            door of freedom, has to be opened from the outside,

            is not a bad picture of Advent.'

Meanwhile, so many people were working and persuading towards the release of Gillian Gibbons, the English teacher in Khartoum, who had been incarcerated in a Sudanese prison for allowing her schoolchildren to call their teddy bear ‘Mohammed'. We felt for her in prison, and could only imagine what it might be like.

And to add to the list, I actually saw in the first day of Advent  at midnight in a police cell in Belfast!  I was spending a night with the PSNI, along with the Lord Mayor of Belfast, seeing how their ‘Get Home Safe' Campaign was implemented in the city.

So ‘prisons' is the Advent theme for me this year. Prisons are not pleasant places - they are not where we want to be. Sometimes they are of our own making, and sometimes they are the result of a mix of circumstances. To be un-free is an uncomfortable place for us humans. They have, however, the effect of making their victims appreciate the world outside; that is, unless people get used to them, and actually feel safer inside than out.

Interestingly, Jesus in Matthew 25 says that we will be judged on the last day by the way we treated prisoners, along with some other categories of disadvantaged people. Perhaps we sympathise better when we realize that we are all prisoners: prisoners to our past, to our fears, to our addictions, to the smallness of our world. Bonhoeffer is right. When we are in a prison, we cannot do much about it. Our only hope is grace from outside. And that is exactly what God gives us in the Advent of Jesus Christ, which unlocks the door to freedom.

One of our Advent hymns puts it in this biblical way:

            He comes the prisoners to release,

            In Satan's bondage held;

            The gates of brass before him burst,

            The iron fetters yield.

Now, which of us doesn't need that message of hope in our lives!?