The God Who Touches Our Limits

To say that the library at the jail has an eclectic mix of reading material would be to put it mildly. Relying on donations, as we do, we get everything from Joyce Meyer books on the habits of a godly woman to decades-old biblical commentaries to Nick Vujicic’s biography to Paul Tillich. Throw in a smattering of stray Buddhist and Muslim resources and the inmates have a rather bewildering array of options.

Whenever the guys are late arriving to chapel, I often wander over to the bookshelf and thumb through one of the books to pass the time. This week, I was surprised to discover a book by the great German theologian Jürgen Moltmann called Jesus Christ for Today’s World. Moltmann is obviously a theological heavyweight and might have been somewhat surprised to see the company he was keeping on our prison bookshelf. A guy who was most well-known for his theology of the cross and of suffering might have felt a little out of place amidst all the “12 steps to this” and “how to have victory over that” manuals on either side of him.

I flipped Moltmann’s book open to a random page. I’m never really looking at the book so much as what paper fragments might be hiding inside or what notes might be scribbled in the margins. I’m endlessly curious about what the inmates make of what they read. The chapter I opened to happened to be on forgiveness. In the margins, in pencil, were the words, “Can I be forgiven by someone who has died?”

Later in chapel, the conversation also turned to forgiveness. We covered the usual terrain about how necessary it is, about how hard it is, about how sometimes those closest to us are the ones who wound us most deeply, about how these are the spaces where mercy and grace are often most desperately needed. We talked about how forgiveness might be one of the holiest, most God-like things a human being can ever do.

Our time was drawing to a close and I was trying to steer the conversation toward its conclusion. “Any last thoughts or questions?” I said, assuming (hoping) there would be none. A guy who had remained quiet with his head down most of the time looked up and said softly, “Can we be forgiven by someone who is dead?” The question hung in the air with a kind of holy heaviness until the silence was broken by a follow-up question. “Yeah, I wanna know the answer to that one, too. And what about the other way around? Can we forgive someone who is dead?” Maybe these guys had been reading Jürgen Moltmann. Or scribbling in his margins.

I don’t have to think very hard to imagine some of the scenarios that might be lurking behind these questions. I obviously don’t know everything about what the guys that come to chapel are accused of or what their records contain, but I’ve heard enough of their stories to know that many of them have endured terrible things and done terrible things. Abusive or absent parents, bullying and marginalization, cycles of addiction and pain, domestic violence, drug-fuelled violence, drug-motivated violence, casual violence.  The list could go on and on and on. There is no shortage of things in any story that walks through that chapel door that doesn’t contain much that needs to be forgiven.

And they’ve all experienced death. So much death. Very few of the guys haven’t lost people close to them at a young age. So many of them have open wounds on the other side of a grave. Can these be forgiven? Is forgiveness the kind of thing that can cross that last great divide? Or does death close the door, locking us into our unresolved guilt and anger and shame and pain and sorrow?

It is impossible, of course, to speak with any precision about the possibilities that might remain with those who have died and our connections to them. Do I think that we can speak to the dead or that they speak back? I would say probably not, but that could be just a statement of the paucity of my own experience or imagination. It’s a topic that I have largely avoided due to the prevalence of hucksters and charlatans only too eager to prey upon grieving and lonely people who are desperate for contact with those they’ve lost. But I do believe that, as a person I respect recently said, “For Christians, hopelessness is off the table.” Those of us who cast our lot with a dead guy who emerged victorious out of a tomb should be very hesitant to limit what’s possible on (or from) the other side.

The well-known Psalm 139 declares, “If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” God is, in other words, where things seem bleakest and most hopeless. And what could be bleaker and more hopeless than longing to give or receive forgiveness and being unable to do so? I love how Benjamin Myers puts it in his little book on the Apostles’ Creed. This comes from the section where he’s reflecting on the line, “He descended into hell”:

In Jesus, God has dwelt among the dead. God has touched the very limits of our nature, from birth to death, in order sanctify us and unite us to God. The Living has embraced the dead. Death has been subsumed by life.

If Death has been subsumed by life, perhaps we might also assume, or at least hope, that this includes all our little deaths as well. Physical death, certainly, but also everything that comes with it. The death of a relationship, the death of hope, the death of an imagined future, the death of possibility. Our deaths come in all different shapes and sizes, after all.

I didn’t talk about Jürgen Moltmann or Psalm 139 or the Apostles’ Creed with the guys around the circle in jail. There wasn’t time for any of that. The guards were on their way. I simply said that I don’t think there is any forgiveness that is off the table when it comes to Jesus. And then we said the Lord’s Prayer. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Forgive us as we forgive others. Again and again and again. The circle of life that might just reach beyond death’s divide to continue its healing, liberating, saving work. This is surely at least part of what, to borrow from the esteemed German theologian’s book title, Jesus Christ means for today’s world.