The Great Escape

A few years ago, Allie and I took a trip to San Francisco. While we didn’t make it to Alcatraz itself, we did go to the gift shop! They had some real cute stuffed bears in prison clothes.

Built in the 1930s, Alcatraz was surrounded by frigid water and strong currents, and it was marketed as an inescapable prison. For decades, it lived up to that reputation. Dozens of prisoners tried to escape, and every one of them was either caught or died trying.

But in 1962, three men, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin, attempted the impossible.

For nearly a year, they schemed. Using spoons, they dug tunnels through the concrete walls of their cells, hiding the holes with painted cardboard and masking the noise with music. But escaping their cells was only half the battle. The real problem was the bay. No one had ever made it across.

So they improvised. They stitched together more than fifty raincoats into a makeshift raft. On June 11, 1962, they escaped and disappeared into the darkness. The guards didn’t realize until the next morning because they had, get this, made dummy heads and placed them in their beds to delay detection.

To this day, no one really knows what happened. Some believe they drowned, but family members insist they made it (And The Myth Busters proved their escape was plausible). Honestly, we may never really know. But we’re drawn to stories where someone escapes the unescapable.

Christianity makes a far greater claim. It says that Jesus Christ walked out of the one prison no one can escape: death.

Colossians 3 takes it even further: “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” The claim is that if you belong to Christ, his story becomes your story!

This week, we’ll look at what that means. Not just that Jesus rose, but what it looks like to start living the escape story Jesus died and rose to give you.