As prisoner number 999513 in the state of Texas, Ramiro Gonzalez is a forty-year-old inmate on death row. He’s been there for sixteen years, ever since he was convicted of murder. Indeed, Gonzalez is only alive because his execution, which was originally scheduled for July 13, was stayed at the last minute. Over the course of sixteen years on death row and its torturous anticipation of the inevitable reality—waiting and waiting for an end with no mercy—Gonzalez seems to have had a spiritual transformation. While in prison, he decided to become a kidney donor, a way of enabling someone to live as a reversal of the life he took away.
Gonzalez’s situation came to the attention of Dr. Rachael Bedard, a physician who had served for five years as a palliative care doctor at Rikers Island in New York. In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, Dr. Bedard wrestles with the relentless denial of mercy to the worst offenders and the ironic reality that some of these worst offenders often experience the most surprising grace while in the least forgiving of places, that is, prisons.
As proof of her point, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has still not approved Gonzalez’s attempts to donate his kidney. In other words, a needy person is being deprived of a new chance on life. As Bedard eloquently puts it, “[t]he sanctity of that person’s life must seem, to the department, theoretical or abstract; or, to put it another way, it must seem less real than the risk perceived in allowing Ramiro Gonzales this opportunity for grace.”[1]
While acknowledging that there must be legal and spiritual accountability for heinous crimes such as the one committed by Ramiro Gonzalez, we must also ask why we can be so afraid of extending mercy to others and even to ourselves. Is the world outside the prison cell really freer than the world behind bars? Do people who walk about without orange jumpsuits and tracking devices attached to their persons really live as if they are free? Or is it shockingly possible that those who are identified by prison numbers and are staring death in the face are freer in some ways than those of us on the outside? According to Ramiro Gonzalez, “[f]reedom is not a place. Just because you’re out there doesn’t mean you’re free. Just because I’m in here doesn’t mean I’m locked up. I’ve learned the true sense of freedom internally, that that’s where it comes from.”[2]
When I stumbled across Dr. Bedard’s article, I immediately thought of John the Baptist in prison. Of course, John the Baptist’s scenario is in many ways quite different from that of Ramiro Gonzalez. John the Baptist was unjustly imprisoned because he was perceived as a threat to the political and imperial forces of his day. We are told later in Matthew’s Gospel that John was locked up by Herod Antipas because Herod caved to the desires of his step-daughter, known as Salome. Her dancing, of opera fame, had pleased Herod so much that he promised whatever she wanted, which happened to be the head of John the Baptist. John the Baptist had had the temerity to criticize Herod’s marriage to Herodias, his brother’s ex-wife. John told the truth, no matter how difficult it was to take. The historian Josephus tells us that John was put to death because his popularity was a threat to Herod’s power.[3]
For a moment, let’s join John the Baptist in his prison cell. It’s where we meet him today in Matthew’s Gospel. John is probably wondering whether his prophetic ministry was simply a waste. If John had really prepared the way for the Messiah, why was he in prison? Something was not adding up.
And so, John sends his messengers to Jesus with the loaded question: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” How can we fault poor John for wondering whether his whole ministry had been worth it, especially as he stares his own impending death in the face? From John’s point of view, his imprisonment is a fearful power play, a profound indictment of corrupt worldly forces who can’t deal with the truth and who bend like a reed in the wind to every whim of human emotion. No wonder John questions whether the real Messiah has come. If the Messiah has already come, how is it that John looks out through the prison bars and still sees the same injustice, the same sin, and the same disorder as before? Has anything changed?
But in his prison cell, alone with his doubts and questions, John is greeted with the surprising grace of Jesus’s response to his incisive question. In his inimitable fashion, Jesus doesn’t answer John’s question directly. He doesn’t overtly proclaim that he is the Messiah. He points not to himself but to the works he has done. In those incredible works of healing, preaching, and raising the dead, Jesus unlocks the prison gates and sets us free. And by virtue of the Holy Spirit and our identity as living members of his Body, Jesus gives us the key to the prison gates. When the world locks the prison doors on us, Christ helps us let the grace in.
None of Jesus’s contemporaries understands him. Even John is questioning whether Jesus is indeed the Messiah. Everyone is expecting a king who will exert earthly power in the way they’re used to such power being exercised. Everyone wants a king who will make them feel good and affirm the status quo. Everyone wants Jesus to announce his kingship with great might, sit on his royal throne, and reign. They expect a king who will lock up the enemy, but this king is different. He reigns through gentle liberation, rather than enslaving others to demonstrate his power. He shows his power by unlocking the prison doors and unleashing true freedom, which is available to all.
When Ramiro Gonzalez and other death row inmates look out from behind their prison bars, what do they see? Do they see a society in bondage to retribution? Do they see people who are still imprisoned to their own resentments and anger? Do they see the reeds of Christianity shaken by the winds of politics, power, and earthly mammon? Do they see Christians who profess belief in forgiveness but withhold it from some? How many have the spine to speak truth to power and name the hideous injustices that are clothed in soft robes? Is the world outside the prison bars really free, or is it enslaved by an inability to speak the Gospel truth, especially when it’s hard to hear?
Ramiro Gonzalez may be justly accused and rightly held accountable for his actions, but could it be that from within the direst and least hopeful of places he has discerned something that many can’t see? Could it be that despite the locked doors of his prison cell, Jesus has let the grace in for him, too? As Gonzalez himself says from behind bars, while staring death in the face, “Freedom is not a place. Just because you’re out there doesn’t mean you’re free.”
When the gates appear to be bolted shut all around us, maybe we ask, like John, “are we still to wait for the one to come?” How can things be the way they are? From which side are we staring through the prison bars? But all around us, perhaps even behind bars, there are visible signs of Christ’s reign. And though there are some who stew in their resentment, there are those who are yet breaking the cycle of resentment. When the prison doors lock us in, Christ yet gives us the key to open them. Even when the doors are shut, his surprising grace can get in.
This Gaudete Sunday, we rejoice that Jesus has already loosed all that chains us to sin and death. Freedom is precisely what the Messiah has brought to earth. When the prison gates are unlocked, illness, sin, death, poverty, injustice, and anger can no longer hold us in their grip. And Christ has given us the key to unlock the gates and let him in.
The most pressing question facing the Church right now is whether we will be content in our soft robes while others have no clothes. Will we let ourselves be shaken by the winds of spineless fickleness? Or can we face what imprisons us, even though we like to think we are free? What is keeping us locked up? Who is visiting us in our prisons to let Christ’s surprising grace in? And whom do we need to visit behind bars? What are we waiting for? Why are we making excuses? The door has already been unlocked. Christ is beckoning us to step through and be free.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday of Advent
December 11, 2022
[1] “On Death Row He Is Grasping at Grace” by Rachael Bedard, in The New York Times, December 9, 2022 (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/09/opinion/death-penalty-texas-ramiro-gonzalez.html)
[2] Ibid.
[3] The HarperCollins Study Bible, Harold W. Attridge, ed. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2006), annotation, p. 1693.