Prison Break

We have said that believing means sharing in what Jesus sees, relying on Jesus; St. John, who leans on the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper, is a symbol of what faith as such signifies. To believe is to communicate with Jesus, freeing oneself thereby from the repression that is contrary to the truth, freeing my own ‘I’ which is shut up in its own self, and making my “I’ a response to the Father: a response to the Yes of love, the Yes pronounced over our existence, that Yes which is our redemption and which overcomes the world.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 113

Reflection – As Holy Week draws near, it is good to ponder these essential things. We are coming into a time of intense Christo-centric focus in the life of the Church. Over Holy Week and the Easter Triduum, the Church invites all of us to really put everything else away, just for a week, and direct our gaze very directly and exclusively on the Lord Jesus, and his ‘Yes’ to us, which is the Father’s ‘Yes’ to all his Creation.

It is a question of breaking out, busting loose, going over the wall, tunneling out—a prison break in the most radical sense. Have you ever noticed how popular that genre of literature and movie is? Even when we know the escapees are actually criminals and probably really should be locked up for their own and society’s good, there’s something about escaping a prison that stirs us deeply.

It’s the story of humanity, actually. We are all prisoners, not of the state or the system or some external force, but of our own selves. Locked up in our own desires, our own egos, our own minds and their (to say the least) limited understanding—we crave release, even if we hardly know what that means.

And salvation is liberation, precisely from this bondage. God comes into our prison in Jesus, and breaks us out of it. And this is the faith Ratzinger describes here—that God in Christ has penetrated into the very depths of our humanity, the deepest recesses of our souls and minds, and has shed the light of truth and love there.

So we are not prisoners anymore, not lost, not limited by our own poverty. And this is the great mystery we are invited to contemplate over this coming week or so. The chains have been broken, and we have escaped, and there ain’t been no prison built since that can hold us. Happy Holy Week (coming!).