The Imprisonment of Freedom

I finished reading Crime & Punishment this evening. I must confess, had a friend with excellent literary taste not raved about how good it is, I may have been tempted to stop in the first chapters.

The book does not make good bedtime material. The intense internal struggles begin as depressing, move to desperate, and then weave amongst mystery, suspense, intrigue, discovery, despair, and hope.

Fyodor Dostoevsky is a master at storytelling with depth. He does not just tell you the state of human affairs, he causes you to experience the enslavement to such a point that you suddenly realize the mirror you are peering into.

The murderer mentality appears as a foreign thought process to most readers or at least on the surface. Character Raskolnikov's rationalization of his crime, his belief that his only mistake was in lacking the nerve to carry his plan to fruition, and that the end would justify the means if he had succeeded...these thoughts are much closer to the views expressed on the news for varying degrees of crimes.

If these ideas are unfamiliar to you, perhaps you might relate in diverse extents to Svidrigailov. Passion drove Svidrigailov. Not passion for life but for lust. Addiction dictated his life, strangled any chance for love, and left him without hope.

The worst criminals in the story fluctuated between great acts of kindness and terror. The great acts flowed from need within themselves, but stopped miles away from being instigated by love. They needed to alleviate guilt, felt a compulsion or had an ulterior motive. The good they did never wiped out the evil for which they were capable. They knew that. That knowledge eventually lead to the drowning or birthing of hope.

Lest you think this book was 629 pages of depression in ink, Dostoevsky ends the tale with hope. He doesn't tie everything up with unrealistic rosy bows, but he shows the key that frees us from the imprisonment into which we are born; the imprisonment of slavery to passion, pride, greed... An imprisonment that destroys not just those enslaved, but everyone we touch. Slowly, sometimes imperceptibly, our own natures erode other people like water wearing away at rock.

The Apostle Paul sums in his letter to the Roman church:

For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.

For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.

Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.

For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

(Rom 7:18-25a)

There is only one source for freedom. Freedom from Jesus means slavery to sin. Slavery to Jesus means freedom to live.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free, Paul tells the Galatians (5:1). Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

Who are you living for? You or Jesus? It is a matter of death and life.