Shin Dong-hyuk was born into the slavery of a North Korean prison camp. The paranoid regime of dictator Kim Jong Il imprisoned Shin’s father for having two brothers who defected to the South, and imprisoned Shin for being his father’s son. He knew no other life and no other world.
While working in the camp’s garment sweat-shop, Shin met Park Yong Chul. Park was also a prisoner, but not a born slave. He had once been abroad. He knew another life and another world, and he told Shin what he knew. The two men made up their minds to escape.
On New Year’s day 2005 they bolted from their work detail and scrambled toward the electric fence. Park arrived first and in attempting to slip through the lowest two strands made contact with the bare metal. The current, designed to kill rather than repel, fried him. The weight of his corpse yanked the wire low enough to allow Shin to scramble through. He crawled to freedom over the sacrificed flesh of his friend.
John insists on the physicality of salvation. This is the Jesus whom our hands have handled. That heavy-handed verb means to grip, grasp, paw and prod. In Genesis 27.22 it describes how blind Isaac palpates the backs of Jacob’s hands like a text in Braille. In Luke 24.39 Jesus double-dog-dares the doubting disciples to grope his resistant flesh and confirm that he is no ghost. Doubtless John refers primarily to experimental proof of the Lord’s resurrection, but the text also hints at the physicality of Christ’s crucifixion: The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
Park Yong Chul and Jesus Christ: the analogy is as inexact as it is inescapable. The dead body of a friend bridges the barrier between our birth into sin’s slavery and a world that we could not even imagine until another came to tell us. We crawl to life on the cross that covers the burning current of our condemnation.
Cross Over!
Doug
(To learn more about Shin Dong-hyuk’s pilgrimage to freedom, see http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702304724404577295463062461978-lMyQjAxMTAyMDIwNTEyNDUyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email_bot.)
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