Blessed Are the Guilty Who Have Nowhere to Go

Many Mondays as I make the short drive to the jail, I listen to a song by Jon Guerra called “The Kingdom of God.” It’s a beautiful song by a gifted songwriter (Guerra’s most recent album, “Jesus,” has been a mainstay in my headphones since it was released during Lent). The song is basically a creative version of the Beatitudes set to music (with a bit of Psalm 23 mixed in). I listen on Mondays primarily because of one line that hit me like a freight train the first time I heard it and almost never fails to leave me with a lump in my throat: “Blessed are the guilty who have nowhere to go.”

My reasons for playing this song on Mondays are obvious enough. I am about to spend a day with the literal “guilty who have nowhere to go.” I want the time we spend together to be blessed and to be a blessing, to somehow together tap in again to the astonishing reality proclaimed by Jesus that blessing is to be found in unlikely and undesirable places, even among the despised and forgotten. Guerra’s song, like the Beatitudes, anchors me in these bedrock truths of Christian faith, redirecting my heart away from the “blessings” it is more naturally drawn to, reminding me that the kingdom of God bears little resemblance to the kingdoms I so often prefer to seek.

But of course, it is not simply behind literal bars that we find “the guilty who have nowhere to go.” On the deepest level, this is the human condition. To be guilty and to have nowhere to go. This is Adam and Eve covering themselves in the garden. This is Cain with blood-stained hands despairing at his banishment. This is Joseph’s jealous brothers after selling him into slavery. This is Moses on the run after murdering an Egyptian slaver. This is David after he is confronted by the  prophet Nathan. This is Peter weeping in the courtyard. This is Judas flinging his guilty change on the temple floor. This is all of us.

There was a time when guilt was assumed to simply be an unfortunate part of the inheritance of religion. Once upon a time people lived in terror of God or the gods, the story went, but once we finally put all that primitive nonsense behind us, we would stand up strong and proud, breathing in the guilt-free air of our emancipated and enlightened state. Except it hasn’t really turned out that way. By many metrics, we in the late modern West are the least overtly religious culture on record, yet we are also the most anxious, judgmental, guilt-ridden, ashamed and depressed. There are many reasons for this. The rise of the smartphone and online culture more generally play a huge role, obviously. But it would also seem that guilt is not so easily eradicated from the human experience. The (allegedly) irreligious among us may not agonize over the inscrutable verdicts of a severe God, but we sure obsess about how we measure up to the constantly shifting and wildly incoherent moral demands of our peers (online and in real life). As Samuel James puts it in his book Digital Liturgies, “Morality, guilt, and punishment have not disappeared. They’re just under new management.”

And when it comes to this new management, it is manifestly not the case that it’s, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” The old boss at least offered atonement, forgiveness, absolution, the possibility of redemption. The new boss demands moral perfection (without ever feeling the need to articulate from where or from whom it derives its moral absolutes) but offers no mercy. We may confess our sins, to be sure. Indeed, we must. But instead of words of absolution we will simply be exhorted to “be better” or commit ourselves to “doing the work” or to somehow perform our guilt and sorrow for an unspecified period of digital self-flagellation. The penance is elusive and open-ended. Increasingly, the guilty have literally nowhere to go. The (allegedly) righteous require their guilt for the maintenance of their own fragile identities.

The old boss was a loving and heartsick father. The new boss is a zealous HR director armed with a list of problematic people and positions. The old boss was the friend of sinners. The new boss demands safety and distance from the unclean and incorrect. The old boss was nailed to a cross by a righteous mob and with his last breath said, “Forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” The new boss is a righteous mob.

My favourite line of the Jon Guerra song is that “blessed are the guilty” line. But not because there is any inherent blessing in being or feeling guilty, whether that guilt comes from transgressing the righteous and true commandments of God or the merciless and often misguided judgments of one another. The only reason we can even imagine such a line as truthful and beautiful and hopeful is because the kingdom of God is one where the guilty can have their guilt truthfully named, but where they can also be pardoned, redeemed, and transformed. The guilty can be called blessed because they recognize they do indeed have nowhere to go but to Christ and to his kingdom.

Blessed are the guilty who have nowhere to go
For their hearts have a road to the kingdom of God.
And their souls are the songs of the kingdom of God.
And they will find a refuge, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

——

As in my previous post, the feature image above is taken from Elizabeth Bruenig’s beautiful essay on spending time with the guilty who have nowhere to go.