“Jesus the Convict”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, March 30, 2025
Reading: Mark 15:1-15
Today we hear about one of three historical figures who appear in the Apostles’ Creed. One is our Lord Jesus. Two is the Virgin Mary. Three is a bit different: Pontius Pilate, Roman governor of Judea. Think of a powerful but vicious politician. Go ahead, any petty thug will do. I’m not naming names. Now, imagine that person as part of the content of your faith. Hard to do, isn’t it? But when we baptize folks on Easter in a few weeks, we’ll include the confession that our Lord Jesus Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” A Roman governor with blood on his hands, including Jesus’ blood. That’s odd. In the story of Jesus’ trial today, Pilate is Jesus’ judge. The true judge of the world, who will judge us all, here is judged in our place.
Ever had a legal proceeding take aim at you? If so, you got a friend in Jesus.
We have a lot of lawyers in here. Everyone likes to tease lawyers—especially lawyers themselves. Tom Hanks’ character in Philadelphia on his deathbed, asks a fellow lawyer ‘what do you call 100 lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.’ But if you’re in trouble, a good defense is everything. At his trial Jesus has no lawyer, no advocate, and he makes no defense for himself.
One of our lawyers in this church pointed out at Bible study Tuesday that Jesus is silent. He is accused and makes no reply. Pilate is amazed. That’s not even allowed in our courts. If accused, one has to indicate they understand the charges, and also to make a plea. Jesus, so talkative his whole life, won’t speak here. Makes no defense. Asks no questions about the validity of the proceedings. Asks for no mercy. He says nothing. Those of us who do words for a living, take note—silence is divine.
We’re in a series at our church called “The Stuff in the Middle,” about Jesus’ talkative career. Specifically, about the saving significance of his life. His teaching, healings, exorcisms, miracles, and soon, his death and resurrection. Today we look at Jesus the convict. Jesus not only had a day in court as a defendant he was also pronounced guilty and sent up for punishment. In Canada today, we have just over 35,000 people in our prisons. It costs an average of $115,000 a year to incarcerate one person here. We spend some $4.6 billion a year on our prison system. And every single one who hears they’re guilty as the gavel sounds and is led away, also has a friend in Jesus. Or even is Jesus. That’s stunning. Whatever else we say about Jesus: that he is Lord, Saviour, Son of God, we also must say this. He is a convict. A bearer of guilt. He is tried, convicted, and sentenced. However else we might imagine him, an image like this would be just as accurate.
If you want to find Jesus, you can find him in jail. This worries me: Jesus promises we will be judged by how we treat those in prison. In Matthew 25, it’s Jesus who is judge, not Pilate, and he sends those on his right hand to their reward because “I was in prison, and you visited me.” He promises those on his left condemnation, because “I was in prison, and you did not visit me.” Both are confused. When was that? “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” Jesus, entirely and without reserve, identifies himself with those behind bars. And downright threatens us: no prison visits, no paradise. Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of recommendation from someone with a record. What are we doing sitting in here? We should all be at the nearest jail, right now, there’s not a moment to lose!
I know we all have our favourite ways to meet God. Many are in nature. Some are in service to the neighbour. For me, it’s in sermons (not for most people, I realize). For all of us, it should be in practices like the Lord’s Supper and baptism. We’re used to hearing of the challenge to love our neighbour as ourselves, even to love our enemies. Jesus says something even harder to us this morning: you want to meet me? Get to know me? You know exactly where I am. Your nearest detention facility.
There are many theories why church attendance has declined in the wealthy west. In the United Church of Canada, we lost 40 percent of our membership between 2011 and 2021. That’s not excellent. But we’re not alone. Mainline Protestant churches all over North America and western Europe are declining. In the Church of England, some 10 million people went to worship each week in 1950. The number in 2021 was just over 700,000—an impressive 93 percent decline. Catholics would be declining too except immigration patterns have replenished their ranks. I asked a Catholic leader once what the United Church could learn from Catholic growth: he said find another country with lots of people from your denomination and get them to move here. Without an influx of Filipinos, Latinos, Poles, and Koreans, Catholic numbers look exactly like ours.
Why such decline? Lots of theories. The bad ones are that church isn’t liberal enough or isn’t conservative enough—the decline is consistent across the spectrum of theological and political conviction. Sociologists have better theories: the main one is that as people become more prosperous, they see less need for faith. Who needs heaven when this life is good enough? Another is that technology and education push out belief. A third is that as people become more prosperous, they have fewer children. If you have 10 kids and three of them go to church as adults, you’ve grown your church’s rolls, well done. If you have 1.2 kids and 30 percent of them go to church, you have not.
There’s truth in all these theories, I think. But here’s my favourite. Borrowing from a scholar I admire. When mainline churches invest in prison ministry, we grow. When we do not invest in prison ministry, we shrink. Every denomination has some bureaucrat who puts pins on a map for areas expected to grow—plant churches here. Well, our prisons are growing. Put a pin on that map. They’re a captive audience, in the most literal sense. And when you get there, they’re bored and glad to talk.
The earliest Methodists took Jesus seriously and visited people in jail. Helped prisoners coming out to get sober, get a job, and join the Methodists. The New Testament church visited those in jail. They bragged about it: see, pagans, we don’t just visit our own prisoners. We visit yours too. In that age, prisoners weren’t fed unless someone came from the outside with food. We’d bring food not just to fellow Christians but to the whole lot. And even the church’s critics agreed. Yep, most people avoid jail. Christians seem to want to break in, not out. Lots of our best literature is written from jail, from the New Testament itself to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. See, we’re at odds with our world, and prisoners can see that better than the rest of us: when Henry David Thoreau was in jail once, his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson visited and demanded to know “what are you doing in there?” His friend replied, Waldo, what are you doing out there?
The reason the church grows when we’re in prisons is this. If you’re crazy enough about Jesus to go to the people no one else wants, you’ll grow. If you’re not crazy enough about Jesus to go to the people no one else wants, you won’t. And you shouldn’t. Our Muslim cousins have figured this out. 35,000 people behind bars, disproportionately indigenous, some 30-40 percent First Nations. Muslims have said, ‘let’s go to where they are.’ When I do meet prisoners interested in faith, Muslims have usually been there first, God bless ‘em. And some prisoners find Islam liberating: it gives me discipline and clear rules; it gives me brothers and family. What’s stopping us from doing the same?
I talk about this a lot because it’s so strong a theme in the Bible. And I’ve been delighted that sometimes people listen. When I preached this way at the seminary in Vancouver, students would come up to me and be like “Okay, when are we going?” What? “You know, we want to meet Jesus in jail, where do we go? What time?” Uh, right, I’m going back to my office now. I’ve preached this here before and been delighted that our men’s group has taken up the challenge. They meet weekly Thursday mornings at 7:00 for Bible study and prayer. Monthly they cook a meal for the men in Keele Correctional Centre in the Junction in the west end of Toronto. And they love it. If you’re worried about those in prison, and you should be, our brothers in the men’s group are feeding them on our behalf, in our name. And they’d be glad for your help.
Here's a difference between the New Testament church and us—the New Testament is written either by people in jail. Or people just out of jail, or people on their way to jail. So, the more time you spend in jail, the more you can understand the New Testament. I don’t spend near enough time in jail to read Jesus’ book yet. The Bible is full of the incarcerated—Joseph the dreamer, Paul the apostle, Jesus himself. In our world, if you have a prison record good luck getting hired. But in Christianity it’s not having a prison record that looks suspicious. As I’ve read about prison ministry (not particularly practiced it—just encouraged others to), I’ve learned this—the reason people volunteer to go serve those in prison is a kind of blessed selfishness. You do the work to go to jail, get security clearance, go somewhere designed to be unpleasant—because you like it. To meet Jesus there. To be his follower and friend. It’s a cliché to say you get more out of it than the do, but people swear to me up and down it’s true.
Wise people say you can judge a whole society by how we treat our prisoners. You may have even noticed that prison language overlaps with church language. Prisoners stay in cells—like monks or nuns. They’re called penitentiaries sometimes—place to repent. We expect them to show remorse and better themselves. That’s all because evangelical do-gooders get involved in prison ministry to try and make it better. Quakers in Britain and North America in the 18th century thought if we make people be monks, sit in silence, reflect on their sins, they’ll improve morally. It backfired entirely. Monks and nuns are called by God to solitude and silence. If you force solitude and silence on someone not called to it, that’s actually torture.
Bryan Stevenson is a favourite source of wisdom on this. He works to reopen death row cases in the US and has helped thousands of people. Reliable estimates say that for every 10 people the US sentences to death, one is flat out innocent. This is one reason countries like ours don’t have the death penalty anymore. Stevenson asks, would anybody fly if one in ten planes came down? Now, that does leave 90 percent more or less guilty, but if they weren’t poor, they’d have had good enough lawyering to avoid the needle. Stevenson says this thing so full of mercy I can’t hardly stand it: no one should be reduced to the worst thing they’ve ever done. No one. That’s gospel talk. Learned in the black church. If the church created the modern prison system, maybe it’s on us to create something better.
So, the church is already bound up with the prison and vice-versa. If you can judge a whole society on how it treats its prisoners, well, what’s that mean? I imagine we need to check on how things actually are there. Chuck Swindoll was imprisoned for his role in Nixon’s Watergate scandal. He spent the rest of his life trying to encourage churches into prison ministry. The moment prisoners leave, is when they’re most likely to reoffend, right away. Swindoll suggested if every church adopted one newly released prisoner per year, the whole fabric of our culture would improve. Swindoll died convinced he’d failed. He couldn’t get his fellow American evangelicals interested in actually making America more godly. They just wanted to troll for votes. What about us, TEMC? This is a way we can make Canada better, more godly, more just, and more safe.
Now, watch out for preachers going all moral. No one goes to church to have a finger wagged in their face and be told a lot more stuff to do. We all have too much to do already and feel too much guilt. So, here’s the other half of this passage. The Barabbas story. What does this say?
Pilate, like all tyrants, likes to think of himself as not-a-tyrant. He releases a prisoner a year. No mention here of how many Pilate executes or arrests or imprisons, we’re just distracted by the spectacle of him releasing one. Well, perfect for Jesus right? He’s innocent. Let him go Pilate, and you’ll be a hero forever, maybe a whole religion will remember you as a positive example. Doesn’t happen. The crowd wants blood. And asks for Barabbas to live.
Barabbas, we’re told, is a violent insurrectionist—a rebel against the power of Rome. Jesus is an insurrectionist too, without the violence. Crucifixion is a penalty reserved for non-Roman citizens who threaten Roman power. Barabbas is waiting to be nailed to a tree and left to die of shock or dehydration or asphyxiation, and instead he sees the light of day, is told he’s free, and he walks out dazed into the sunshine. Now ask yourself: does Barabbas do anything good to earn this release? Nope. Does he go and make good on his life? No story anywhere in the Bible or anywhere else says that. This is Barabbas’s one appearance: he gets sprung from jail through no good deed of his own, just dumb luck, being in the right place at the right time. Jesus goes to his cross and Barabbas goes back to his poor excuse for a life.
In some of our stories Barabbas is called Jesus Barabbas. He has the same first name as our saviour. One Jesus saves the world. The other Jesus tries to destroy it, suffers no penalty, and is quickly forgotten to history. Vanishes from all our maps.
The church has long seen in Barabbas a figure of humanity. We do nothing to deserve salvation. We deserve death. But our prison door opens. We’re baffled as we blink into the light. We ask, why are you letting me go? Someone named Jesus is dying in your place.
People often think salvation is a matter of being rewarded for living a good life. Going to heaven on our own merits. I’m struck how many funerals I plan, especially for high achievers, that the dying one treats like a job interview. Here’s my resume, all I accomplished. Let’s see, did I make partner in 87 or 88? But none of our accomplishments matter one bit on our death day. Most of us think we’re good enough to deserve heaven. Okay, well what about monsters? Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin. Yeah, sure there are wicked people out there, but that’s a low bar to clear. Most dogs go to heaven. Because God is nice, right? And we’ve never been to jail or slaughtered anybody.
That’s not the gospel. The gospel says this: All humanity is lost. Good and bad alike: are undone. Ruined. Unredeemable. Without hope or God in the world. If we look down our nose at any prisoner, any houseless person, anyone at all, we’re just as bad or worse. I know we’re very nice people here, online out there: I love y’all, you’re great, I’m happy to make our lives together. Canada is full of nice people in general. But some of us have been in jail involuntarily. And because we’re one in the body of Christ with Christians behind bars, we are all there now. Stuck in prison no way out.
And Jesus comes for us. Goes to death for us. Unpicks our lock and sets us loose. We rub our wrists from the chains, stretch a little and say, ‘well, what now?’
We could live for ourselves and our own. Most people do that. Barabbas seems to have done that even with his second chance. Life is about the accumulation of happiness and possessions. That way lies misery. Don’t do it.
And if anybody wants to head to jail where Jesus sits unvisited, let’s go. But we won’t get saved by that or any good deed. We are already saved by Christ’s cross—his hard work. To meet him, and thank him, let’s go see him in jail, love him more, live, and make our whole world better. Amen.