Chris Campbell

“You have laid me in the depths of the Pit,
in dark places, and in the abyss.”

Beloved in the body of Christ,

Imagine prisoners, who all their lives are shackled in a cave such that their heads cannot move. Behind them is a fire, and they are facing a wall upon which shadows pass by. Now if one mans shackles were to fall off and he turned to the light his eyes would hurt and his vision would be blurry, and he would not believe the things he saw to be more real than the shadows he had seen before, he may even turn back to them. But if he were dragged by force out of the cave and thrown into the sunlight he would be blind at first and his eyes would burn. But as time goes by he would come to see the world around him, to see things as they truly are. Plato, in his allegory of the cave, says that these prisoners are like us, and says of the escaped man “Don’t you think that he’d count himself happy for the change and pity the others?” 

Plato continues, saying that if the man went down into the cave and tried to free his fellows and lead them upwards “if they could somehow get their hands on him, wouldn’t they kill him?” As we near the Passiontide we should know the answer to this question, as Christ states in today’s gospel: “now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God”.

With this in mind perhaps we may understand both the dark nature of Psalm 88 and why we should find it hopeful. Plato explains: “The visible realm should be likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the fire inside it to the power of the sun… interpret the upward journey and the study of things above us as the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm”. Remember that it is only through much affliction that one is dragged out of the cave. But once we escape it we surely would be like the escaped man Plato describes and “much prefer to ‘work the earth as a serf to another, one without possessions,’ and go through any sufferings, rather than share [the imprisoned peoples] opinions and live as they do”.

This is what Paul means when he says in his letter to the Romans “How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death”. We first die at baptism, but this death is long and filled with affliction as we are dragged out of the cave. However, as Paul reminds us: “we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin.”

As such Paul challenges us: “you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” We must not cling to the walls of the cave, and turn our backs to the light which burns our eyes, but remember that that everlasting life cannot be found in the shadows of the visible world, but in the burning light of the world above us. We must not fear death, but instead realize that it has already come, and that we cling not to true life but to a shadow of it.

May you live in Truth, Peace, and Love,
Chris Campbell