Release
“He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives” Luke 4:18 from Isaiah 61:1
Release – Powerless! That’s what I felt standing in front of the young man in the jail. He was only a few years older than my youngest son, but he faced 35 years in prison. 35 years in a cell. What does the word “release” say to this man? What does God’s grace and freedom offer him? Because if it doesn’t work here, it doesn’t work.
We are used to “spiritualizing” all this. Jesus sets us free from sin, as though the only real prisons are the invisible walls of Satan’s deception. Oh, those walls are real. No doubt about that. But what does the Gospel, the Good News, have to say to a seventeen year old who will spend the next 35 years behind bars? Does it offer him hope? Does it release him? What could I say to this man that would show him the heart of God?
The word in Isaiah is de ror. It means “liberty” or “emancipation”. Those who are captive long for one thing: liberty. This word is translated into the Greek word aphesis, a word that means, “to cause to let go” or “to cause to set aside”. It has shifted just a bit from “liberty”. Now it is closer to “forgiveness”. The shift is important. Did you notice that Jesus (and Isaiah) does not say, “to proclaim freedom to the captives”? Freedom is left for the next class of people, the downtrodden. In our minds, we might imagine that captives want freedom. But the Greek suggests something else. These captives need someone to set aside the verdict. They need pardon. That is true liberty. If I am imprisoned, simply opening the doors of the jail will not give me what I really need. I might be “free”, but I will still be in bondage to my crime. What I need more than anything else is pardon. Then I will be free even if I am still behind bars.
How will this young man ever be able to live through the next 35 years without pardon? How will he survive if all he has every day is guilt and sentence? Sin has consequences. Some of those consequences are visible in this life. Sometimes sin puts us in visible jails. But every sin makes us captives. And what we need is pardon.
Until Jesus pardoned me, I faced a life sentence. I think we forget that. We come and go from place to place. We act as though we have liberty. But the truth is that we stand in that jail cell facing life without parole unless we are pardoned. The truth is that if this young man receives Jesus’ pardon, he will be the one released while we go on our way toward a prison without doors. The truth is that his reality has stripped away all the pretending, all the phony nonsense. He knows that life is all about pardon.
So, how do I show him what it means to serve a God who pardons? How does my life exhibit release from captivity?
