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The cross I remember best was almost invisible. It was drawn on the outside pane of the glass brick that served as the window in my prison chaplaincy office. It was just a simple smudge of a vertical line, slightly crooked, divided by a shorter horizontal one, rendered in fingertip when there must have been moisture on the window, and it was now dried there. I could not look out my little window and see the prisoners in the prison yard without looking through that silent cross.
A prisoner put that cross there. Think of it. The cross was an engine of execution. Imagine a prisoner doodling, reverentially, the thing most contemptible to any prisoner, a gallows or an electric chair. Yet that is what the cross was, and that is what a prisoner did. He drew a despised gallows of death as a symbol of hope and life.
Then think of who died on the cross. When God in Christ dies on a human gallows, that death baptizes the gallows from an engine of death into a tree of life. And if a dead gallows is so transformed, how much more will human lives be changed by the redeeming touch of Christ crucified for us?
Brian Inkster is Executive Director of Prison Fellowship Canada. This article is adapted, with permission, from the Spring, 1995 issue of The Insider.
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