A recent piece of research into prisons has shown that they are securer places if prisoners know there is the possibility of escape. The governor of Durham Prison - one of five which can hold 'Category A' remand prisoners, and from which the last escape was in 1968 - made this comment: "To the best of my knowledge, my staff have identified all potential routes of escape we can imagine, but we also recognise that prisoners are imaginative and could have seen a route we have not worked out. If prisoners have the impression that escape is totally impossible, that is when it becomes dangerous. If you seal a pressure cooker you get an enormous explosion."

He rejected the American system of escape-proof jails, with armed guards patrolling electric fences, and to the dismay of local residents, added: "If you remove all possibility of escape, you also remove hope, and if you allow prisoners to feel that there is no hope, you land up with a very unhealthy position".

Now Christianity is often described in very similar terms. Life is a ‘prison’, in which we are trapped (through sin), but Christ offers us the hope of escape by bringing us salvation. This Sunday's 2nd. Reading is very much in that mould: "You were dead because you were sinners and had not been circumcised [i.e. were pagan 'outsiders', not the 'chosen race']; he has brought you to life with him."

It is of course true that forgiveness of sins comes through Christ, but the trouble with the above model is that for many people it just doesn't correspond to reality. The world is not a vale of tears, they are not wallowing in iniquity, and they are not 'neurotics trying to opt out of life'.

Fortunately there is another model to the 'prison model'. This is the opposite: the 'freedom model'. Christ is the one who makes sense of our freedom. We are all free to make a multitude of choices, both good and bad. Some choices seem good, and are made in good faith, but no good seems to come. Here is where Christ is the model; he faithfully and freely followed the Father's will, but it didn't always seem to bring good - notably in the Crucifixion. And yet because it did serve the Father's will, the Crucifixion was ultimately 'good'.