Recently someone had buttons made showing prison bars and the words “In jail for Jesus.” A priest saw the rather large button for the first time when a well-tattooed motorcycle rider came up for communion on Sunday morning. Afterwards he mused out loud that “another nutty group like the Baysiders of New York” must be getting started in the Church.
Actually, the button is worn by some pro-lifers who have participated in an Operation Rescue or who have picketed or demonstrated against abortionists and have been arrested for doing so. As more abortionists obtain court injunctions the chances of going to jail have improved greatly.
The justification for defying laws and courts which contradict God’s law in matters of life and death has been explained in the editorials of the four previous issues. The basic reason for civil disobedience, as it is called, is the duty and need to witness to the truth. This can be grasped by any honourable person inspired by the brotherhood of man. For religious people this duty and need flows above all from a love of God’s commandments. For Christians, moreover, it means following those commandments as taught and completed by Jesus Christ, the son of God.
The determination to physically witness to God’s truth has led to a renewed awareness of the early Christians’ attitude towards repression by civil authority. After the Apostles were jailed and then flogged on orders of the Sanhedrin for witnessing to the name of Jesus, they left the presence of the Sanhedrin “glad to have had the honour of suffering humiliation for the sake of the name.” (Acts 5:42) “You will always have your trials,” St. James states, “but, when they come, try to treat them as a happy privilege” (James 1:2). Suffering “when embraced as the Cross of Christ,” says St. Paul, “becomes the power and wisdom of God.” (1 Cor. 1:24)
One of the final recommendations of the Letter to the Hebrews asks “to keep in mind those who are in prison.” The reference is to fellow Christians jailed for witnessing to Christ. When St. Paul reluctantly “boasts” of his suffering for preaching the gospel of God, he begins with what he received from the hands of the authorities: five times thirty-nine lashes; three times beaten with sticks, once stoned. (2 Cor. 11:24-25). All this, as well as the time he spent in jail, he regarded as nothing for one so insignificant as himself, yet so privileged to serve so glorious a God.
Finally, Paul offered his own life as a witness to truth, a martyrdom he was to share with his fellow apostles, except John, and with a host of others who followed after, including the first 30 successors to St. Peter: Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus…
If more of us learn to look upon service to the Lord with the same spiritual eye and adopt the same joyful attitude as the early faithful, then “In jail for Jesus” will no longer sound strange and the killing of the unborn will come to an end. Farfetched, you say? Well, during the last year over 30,000 men and women in the U.S. and almost 1,000 in Canada have risked arrest and jail for that very purpose.
