ON BEING LOCKED UP TOGETHER

My experiences in being “locked up” in terms of incarceration are rather limited, one night in fact, which is hardly enough to write home about. Since my one lowly night in jail was in the most Church of Christ town in the world (for its size), Henderson, Tennessee, and at the invitation of Freed-Hardeman College, the most obsessive Church of Christ institution, and the circumstances unique, I did more than write home about it. I wrote an entire issue of this journal about it, an issue long unattainable by the most avid collector. But that was long ago, and that is not what I am talking about by being “locked up” this time around, except in one respect.

There is a kind of bond between those who share the ignominy of being stashed away in the slammer, such as I enjoyed with one of the town drunks. He was in for several days, working out a fine for public drunkenness by working on the county roads. He was then both sober and magnanimous, assuring me that it was the first time ever for him to be in jail with a preacher. In spite of his sobriety I had difficulty explaining to him why the town’s Christian college would put one of their own graduates in jail. He seemed content to accept it as one more of life’s mysteries, but I think he might have taken a drink if it had been available. He probably felt for me more deeply than anybody in town when they took me out to eat under armed guard.

Our common bond was enhanced by our sharing a potential danger. He told me of old “Bad Eye” that the police were looking for, and if they find him, he warned me, they’ll throw him in here with us and he’ll whip both of us. As I lay down to sleep that night in my clothes, topcoat and all, I found myself pulling for “Bad Eye”!

My new friend and I had a very special relationship, even if but for a day, for there is something special in being locked up together. And that is what this piece is about.

But one further illustration. Being locked up together has its unique bonding power even when it is not completely authentic. I once arranged with the police chief of Denton to “entertain” the boys in my special philosophy class of our local high school. They rode in the police cars, one or two with each unit, during the late night patrol. One of them got into a 90-mile an hour chase with a malefactor, and I listened in on his excitement from the protective confines of the police station. Others witnessed arrests and stood by while the police checked on robbery suspects. Only then could they understand that their unique experience was made possible not only by an innovative police chief but by the affidavits of their parents, releasing the city of any liability.

Then came the unexpected. Once the excitement was all over and they were back in the station, the police put all twelve of them in jail! Turning away from their startled faces; the officer told them that he wanted them to see what it is to be in jail, so that “We’ll not have to lock you up for real sometime.” And he left them there for awhile, allowing the boys to bunk in and talk it over, two or three to a cell. Even that created a bond between those boys. It was talked about the rest of the school year “Marvin and I were locked up together!” It really does something for you — the kind of thing the kids will recall when they gather for their 25th class reunion.

But it is not the same when you are locked up alone. That same night I rode with a unit that patrolled the campus of NTSU and we got a call that a “peeping Tom” was looking in on a girl’s dorm. The lad was arrested and I watched as they locked him up, alone. I have seldom seen such a shocked, startled, and surprised face. He obviously did not suppose his alley-side visit to the girl’s dorm would end up in the city cooler. It is no way to go to jail. Go with someone else and with dignity or don’t go.

I thought of some of these things when I read this exciting line from the renowned Baptist scholar, A. T. Robertson: “This is our security, Christ is locked in the bosom of the Father. We are locked together with Christ in God.”

He was commenting on those living words of Col. 3:3: “You have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” It is a matter of being locked up together, the scholar tells us, and that is our security.

The false securities constantly dog us. A psychologist friend of mine who is a devoted believer told me recently that it is estimated that 80% of the people have already sold their souls and bodies to “security” of some description, that only 20% stand up against the false values in an effort to be authentic, and it is only the 20%, who end up bloodied and battered by the struggle, that psychology has any hope of helping.

If we choose, we can hide in all sorts of “secure” places, whether a sect, an obsession, or an ego trip, and we can lose ourselves in the most fatal peril of all, self-deceit. The human race has long since learned that there is no real security in things, money, fame, position, or “marrying well.” Not even in good health, social security, or the praise of our fellows. The Romans were wise men when they placed a soothsayer behind the conquering general as he rode in his chariot through the imperial city, who whispered in his ear amidst the adulation of the crowds, “All earthly glory is but for the moment.”

Evil has its source in lies. Satan started it all with a lie. And the lies we tell ourselves may be the most damaging. But if evil has its source in lies, its only cure is truth. The church today suffers from the same failure that caused Jeremiah to censure the priests and prophets of his day, crying out: “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jer. 8:11). If we are declaring unto our people their sins, as God urged Isaiah to do, it is only lightly. The church today, like the world today, must hear the truth about itself. It is only when we face up to our sins that we can be healed through and through.

Security! It is surely Satan’s craftiest deception. If all earthly glory is but for the moment, so are all the world’s assurances. The painful truth is that there is no security in this world. That is what makes Col. 3:3 so comforting. Your life is hid with Christ. The New English Bible renders it: “Now your life lies hidden with Christ in God.” That is the only way one can “hide” and find security — to be “locked up” with Jesus.

This does not mean, of course, that we have a kind of escape hatch and no longer have to deal with the world. It means that while we face up to the realities of our troubled world we have a peace and assurance that cannot be taken from us. In this verse, as always in the Christian faith, the end is fellowship with God. We are locked up with Christ in God. Jesus always points to the Father. He came to reveal the Father to us, and when we “die” to our sins and to the deceitfulness of this world he locks us up in the enfolding love of himself, which is in God.

Here we have the essence of unity in Christ, however diverse the elements. No two of us are likely to be as different as old Matthew Levi, a despised tax collector, and the stubborn zealot, Simon, whose greatest longing, at one time at least, would have been to put a knife in the back of a turncoat publican. Levi and Simon, a zealot and a publican, both chosen as disciples of Jesus! It confirms the authenticity of the Story. No one would have fabricated such an unlikely occurrence. Jesus took them both and molded them into the likeness of God. He “hid” them, locked them up, in himself and in the fellowship of God.

If Simon and Levi could be locked up together, why not all of us who are followers of Christ? When we are locked up together in Christ, we are also locked in, but never locked out, so that we know where we are and who we are. We are persuaded that if Christ carries the key no one will be locked up with us who should not be there. Thank God, preachers and editors do not carry the key! Since they can’t lock anyone up, they can’t lock anyone out.

Unlike so many oppressed people of the world who are locked up and locked in against their will, we are willing prisoners of the grace of God. We serve not by constraint but willingly. And it is the bond of love that joins all those who are united and locked up in Christ.

There is a crucial antecedent in the apostle’s liberating declaration. It is only those who have died that have the hidden security with Jesus. “You have died . . .” he says to them. Do we think of our relationship to God in such terms? Dead?

It is one of those dynamic antonyms of Scripture. We become wise by becoming fools; we gain life by losing it; we are strong when we are weak, and we live only when, like the grain of wheat, we fall into the earth and die.

We die to sinful pride, to self-conceit, to all the confetti of this world, to carnality. We walk away from it all — counting it as refuse — so that’ we might be locked up with Christ and all those who heed the call, “Come, follow me.”

If we have died, then of course we are buried, and at last raised up. And that is where Paul begins his argument, with the grandest If ever: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (verse 1).

That is the meaning of Christian baptism. We are raised with Christ in baptism only because we have died with him. Then we are locked up. Robertson is right that there is our security, nowhere else. And there also is our unity — locked up together, locked in together, but never locked out. —the Editor