Continued from 10/4/07...

But still many common objections can easily put the brakes on compassion. One of the objections is that prisoners are just getting what they deserve. After all, as the saying goes, “You do the crime, you pay the time.” Or as Paul puts it in the book of Galatians, “A man reaps what he sows” (6:7).

While this is true, the connection between crime and punishment shouldn’t necessarily short-circuit compassion. In the book of Hosea, chapter 11, despite Israel’s sin, God is still moved with compassion for His people. He asks how He could give them up and He concludes by saying, “All my compassion is aroused.” Or as Jesus looks out over Jerusalem, you hear the compassion in his voice when He says, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing” (Mt. 23:37). Christ has compassion on sinners and longs for them to change. Even while criminals serve their time and deal with the consequences of the sin in their lives, we can have compassion for them and long for their total restoration.

I’ve also discovered that quite often the situations offenders have lived through would have certainly hardened any of us. While backgrounds do not excuse the real choices that are involved in committing a crime, understanding an offender’s past can give us compassion for him or her. In interviewing Greg, a man who had robbed a home, I found out a bit about his background. Greg’s father was a drunk who often physically abused his family. Greg remembers a few occasions when his father put the family in the living room and tried to burn the house down with them in it, or the time his father gave him and his brother knives and told them to fight, wanting to see them kill each other. Greg’s dad also taught him to hustle and to steal and would often put him up to small robberies. While Greg’s past doesn’t negate the choice involved in his own crimes, it did give me compassion and cause me to realize that had I been put in the same situation, apart from God’s grace, I likely would have made similar choices.

Another roadblock in the journey of compassion is often the mistaken notion that people, or at least certain people, can’t change. Yet in my time interviewing ex-offenders I’ve seen men and women of all kinds of hardened backgrounds transformed at the foot of the cross. Seeing a former prostitute now giving back to her community, a once-hardened drug-dealer now serving as a deacon at his church, and a cold-blooded murderer now yearning to turn troubled teens around has given me hope that God can truly change anyone.

I know my journey to gain compassion for criminals is not over. About a year ago, a drug-crazed man robbed and beat a friend of mine as she walked home from work. Angered, frightened, and saddened, I listened to the details. Then just recently, I got a phone call: a relative’s home--looted and ransacked. The closer crime circles to you personally, the more difficult it is to find compassion in your heart for the offender.  But the source remains the same: knowing and growing in our understanding of Christ, who forgave and loved even while hanging on a cross, who taught us that all have sinned, and who modeled compassion for others even in the midst of His pain. Even today, Christ stretches out his nail-scarred hand and clasps ours, asking us to join Him in this journey of compassion to seek and save the lost. I want to know Christ more deeply by taking His hand and joining Him on this road, no matter how difficult the trek ahead.

This article originally appeared in Inside Out, Prison Fellowship's online ezine. You can sign up for this free electronic publication here.