SIN AS SICKNESS & CAPTIVITY

SIN AS SICKNESS

SOLUTION: HEALING & LIBERATION

Would you tell all your problems to a judge facing you in court?

Hell no. He’s just gonna use it against me.

You plead innocence, have a lawyer defend you, postpone courts, try to get off without punishment.

But when you go to a doctor?

Yeah, he’s gonna help me get better.

You tell a doctor the most embarrassing details about your body, even destructive behavior. Show him the wounds. Remove clothes if necessary. Get to the wound. Get better.

New Testament legal language? Yes. Holy Spirit is the Advocate (defense attorney) and Satan means Accuser. So when the Christian imagination uses legal metaphors, the spirit of God is aligned with defending sinful humans against the punishing spirit—which is the Adversary to God’s redeeming purposes.

This is the shift in Jesus away from the religion of his day. He healed diseases and forgave sins—as if they go together. Forgiveness is not a legal response, but a divine medicine for our condition.

Romans 7 - Not me, not what I want. The sin within me. As if it’s a spiritual disease.

Early church sees sin as sickness, and the oldest, Eastern Orthodox tradition Jesus’ movement, his church, is a healing institution to care for the spiritual regeneration of humans.

Saint Anthony

quotation

…why would a system responding to sin as crime (courts, prisons), may not be offering the solution aligned with God in Christ's healing power to address sin?

In the meantime, this quote from Ruben fits the conversation perfectly, below. It's from an article I wrote recently:

I wrote a few guys in prison, asking them if they had any advice for Americans out here who are trying to adjust to their confinement. Ruben wrote back first, telling me that, like lots of folks in their houses, that he watches too much TV. And too much news. “I tripped out on the wildfires. Then the impeachment stuff, all the evidence, the lying. And now this virus?? The way I see it, the planet is sick. And when I came to prison, I was a sick individual. My symptoms were anger, gangbanging, drugs, ego, lying, and selfishness. Oh yeah, and denial.”

I underline handwritten sentences in prison letters like these and pin them to my office walls.

“But getting locked up was a turning point in my life. Losing everything. That’s when it hit me: If I’m sick, there’s treatment, there’s a cure, right? I could change my whole way of life. That’s when I got some hope, bro. If a sick vato like me can change everything and learn a new way of living, the planet can too.”

SIN AS CAPTIVITY

SOLUTION: LIBERATION

THEOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Dominique Gilliard, author of Rethinking Incarceration, created a series of short video curriculum for churches reading his book. This is a simple video where Dominique names the bad theologies we’ve inherited that helped create a punitive—rather than restorative, healing or liberating—response to human sin.

FOR DISCUSSION

• Can you recognize some of these familiar ideas in your assumptions about God and sin and punishment? Where do you feel challenged?

• Where do you hear good news you’ve needed?

• How might this return to Christ’s restorative gospel change how Christians engage the justice system today?