Jesus and the Escape from Alcatraz

Alcatraz is never far from the mind of San Franciscans. Behind Coit Tower and the TransAmerica building, it is one of the most recognizable silhouettes of the City by the Bay. A craggy, wind-swept rock jutting up from the cold Pacific currents, it lords over the bay on clear summer days.

A GHOSTLY GLOOM

Notorious gangster Al Capone was once held there. So were George “Machine Gun” Kelly and Robert Stroud. On grade-school tours growing up, I used to stare into the small, decommissioned cells, stacked two tiers high, where notorious criminals lived for decades at a time. The tour guide described the maddening environment the prisoners endured: On foggy days, mists from off the bay effaced all color and warmth from the world, burying the prison in a ghostly gloom. On clear nights, the wind carried the raucous sounds of merriment off the piers. The prisoners used to be able to hear free San Franciscans enjoying themselves, while they could feel their own lives wasting away in cruel isolation.

Contemplating such confinement and separation never failed to excite my pity. While abhorring the crimes that landed them in Alcatraz in the first place, I could easily imagine why prisoners would spend hours plotting—and sometimes attempting—outlandish escapes from “The Rock.”

ISOLATED FROM GOD

Alcatraz has been closed for decades, an empty skeleton of a prison, serving mostly to remind us that crime and punishment are perennial problems we must confront; but, across America, millions of prisoners continue to languish in minuscule cells, fantasizing about the joys of life in the free world, wondering about the possibility of escape from the walls and bars that confine them …

While we may pity prisoners’ isolation, and while it is proper to ensure that prison conditions are safe and rehabilitative, it would be unwise, unjust, and unsafe (not to mention criminal) to aid and abet their physical escape from prison. But prisoners suffer from another form of isolation yet more dire: Shackled by their own sinful tendencies, they—just like you and me— are separated from God, bound to a perpetual term of spiritual bondage in a prison more inescapable than Alcatraz.

Outside of Jesus, there is no escape from prisoners’ “spiritual Alcatraz.” But once they have been found by Him, they can no longer be taken as spiritual prisoners. Have you found freedom in Christ?