An Anglican Compendium of Thoughts and Prayers: Freedom For All ! ...almost

For most of us this is the start of another routine week; we know what we will be doing in the next few days. But there is one group of people who haven't the foggiest idea what will happen tomorrow. Some of them don't know where they are or what they have done or when they might be free. They are the men detained without trial in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, under anti-terrorist measures. Some, it is alleged, are being flown around the world from one torture centre to another.

Now by the law of averages at least some of them must be innocent - the victims of faulty intelligence, malicious informers or mistaken identity. They exist in a limbo at the mercy of the fearsome power of the State.

This text isn't shared today as a result of trans-European liberalism, but because I feel there is a Christian principle at stake. It is a clash between two ideas of justice neatly summed up by one of the speakers in the recent debate on the terrorism legislation. It's the difference between what he called collective and personal freedom; the rights of the many as against the one. Collective freedom, he argued, means that one inevitable consequence of trying to protect the whole of society may be that, regrettably, a few are unjustly denied their personal freedom.

That may be a prudent policy, but Jesus turned such conventional values on their head. He emphasised the welfare of the one against the many - the lost sheep in peril, the single sparrow falling to the ground, the anonymous prisoner. Even Jesus' own family thought he was crazy for insisting that the first should be last and the last first; that you save your life by losing it, that it's better to die than to kill, that we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

Of course, there is no reason why the authorities should take any notice of the teachings of Jesus; they are hopelessly idealistic, except that the values and traditions of the very society we seek to protect have been decisively shaped by His impact upon it, so He's entitled to a hearing. Do the measures, which are proposed for our safety, make it less likely that an innocent citizen might suffer or will they create more victims of injustice?

And the clincher, which is hard to evade, is this: Jesus said that what we do to the prisoner we do to Him.

For the Christian, there's no way round that one.