Some stories are as devastating as they are hopeful.

Take the story of Nico, the prisoner endowed with an unspeakably beautiful voice. Every year he appears before the board of the prison and sings for them yet all they can do is weep at the splendour of his voice and then send him away with the empty consolation to ‘keep doing what he is doing’… for his sentence provides no possibility of parole.

He has been inside for as long as he remembers and has worked hard virtually the whole time to be the model prisoner, yet all his hard work and all his prodigious gifts are in vain, for only the governor can commute his sentence.

All the other prisoners who view his behaviour and hear his heavenly voice have demanded the board for his release, for he truly is a ‘saint’ with a heavenly voice. Yet both they, the board and the prisoner himself are hoping in the wrong things, for it is the mercy of the governor, not the virtue or beauty of the prisoner, which will make the difference between freedom and incarceration at the end of the day.

This is the story of your and my life. We, like the prisoner, are captives – slaves to sin without possibility of parole. Some of us react to life in gaol by joining one of the gangs/tribes on the inside and continuing our rebellion, cursing the other prisoners, the authorities and our own selves on a daily basis. Some of us curl up in a bundle of depression and try to block everything out. These are the ‘obvious’ stories of pain and sadness.

Yet there is also the story of Nico, the model prisoner who doesn’t ‘seem’ to belong on the inside and works day and night as if to demonstrate what everyone is thinking. Yet he is inside and nothing that he does (in terms of behaviour) nor anything he has (in terms of gifting) can make the slightest bit of difference to his status when he has already been sentenced and condemned.

What will make the difference is understanding that the law courts might be the dispensers and administrators of justice but they are not the final arbiters of justice. There always exists a supreme ruler who can show clemency and free a prisoner.

The mistake we make is that we appeal to the wrong authority (ie. one another, the administrators, the black market) and/or on the wrong basis (our good works, our gifts, our beauty). Clemency is never based on any quality or work of the prisoner. It works by ‘covering’ a misdemeanour with mercy based purely on the goodness and grace of the governor.

What no one – not even Nico – has realised, is that all the while he has been working hard at his behaviour and at cultivating his wonderful gifts, a tidal wave of resentment as been fermenting inside his soul as he sees his continual appeals rejected. This then explodes into an uncontrolled rage and hate-filled fury as he then begins to see all around him prisoners being released who are nowhere near as well-behaved as he, nor as attractive as persons. He looks around and sees how obviously superior he is to these other prisoners who are being released and resolves to work as hard as possible to unseat this ‘unjust’ governor (even if he has to resort to unsavoury means) at such a time as he should be released. He should be singing for heads of state and campaigning for the position of governor himself but here is stuck in jail while the scum of the earth are being released. The governor has got to go…

Nico’s story is devastating because there is actually a solution to his incarceration: simply to appeal to the governor for mercy. Those ‘scum’ who are being released are not being released because they are good or attractive people but simply because the governor chose to show them mercy. Yet Nico has demonstrated to our omniscient narrator how unfit he is for release by continuing to reject the only source of mercy and goodness. The scum will love and serve the governor upon their release, turning them into good citizens; Nico will loathe and seek to destroy the governor upon his release, turning him into a unscrupulous rebel.

All Nico has to ‘do’ is realise that this is one situation that he cannot sing his way out of. He must abandon his hope in his performance and realise that his crime that landed him in prison is truly heinous, his heart is still just as set against the governor as the day he entered and the only thing that can possibly change him as well as secure his release is to accept that the governor is truly a ‘good guy’.

To put it another way, our appeal to God for release from the captivity of sin, death, judgement and hell, can never be based on our moral performance or outer beauty and gifting, for this would be to perpetuate our self-exaltation which landed us in prison in the first place. It can only be based on the fact of his goodness shown towards us, of his moral beauty not ours.

And this is why Nico’s story (and ours) ends with a note of hope. For once we have realised that Nico’s stance will get us nowhere and we give up on our rebellion (evidenced just as much by our good behaviour as our evil behaviour)… then we are finally free to see exactly how God has shown us mercy already.

He showed us mercy by entering our prison personally and by subjecting himself to the full force of our condemnation so that we could stand before the governor as people who truly don’t deserve to be in prison any longer.

When we see this and see ‘in this’ the goodness of the governor, then we are finally free of the pride that kept us in jail, perpetuated our hate for the good governor all this time and which put us there in the first place.

Like Nico, we have all been given wonderful gifts by God and we are called to use them. But our ‘song’ is always a song of rebellion, always an attempt to sing our way out of trouble… until we hear the song of the Beloved – the one who entered our prison and paid for our passage to the outside because he ‘placed’ worth in us, not because he ‘saw’ worth in us.

My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Look! There he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattice.
My beloved spoke and said to me,

“Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, come with me.
See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone.
Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land.
The fig tree forms its early fruit; the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling; my beautiful one, come with me.”

This is the song which sets us free…