The Reagan family on Blue Bloods are my people, my almost-family. When Jamie worked undercover, I worried like a big sister. I celebrated when he and Edie got engaged, and I’m still mad at the writers for the tragic death of Danny’s wife, Linda.
And the daughter’s name is Erin, so that makes us practically family, right?
Now,they are very different from my real family. We live in Mississippi, they live in New York. We have relatively safe jobs, they are in law enforcement. But the bond between them reminds me of my family, the way the siblings are all so different, and the way they love each other deep down, even when they don’t agree.
I also love how this show uses the power of story to show both sides of real situations that can’t always be solved before the end credits.
In Season 8, episode 9, a man was released after serving his time in jail. He moved into an apartment building, ready to re-start his life, but no one wanted him there.
You see, he had been in prison for molesting children, and the apartment building he moved into had many children. He ends up being severely beaten by one of the dads in the building, and at the end of the episode he tells Erin and Danny, “I did my time, but I’m still guilty. There’s no absolution for what I’ve done.”
The years he spent in jail fulfilled the consequences the justice system deemed appropriate. But those years did not replace what he had taken from those children. It didn’t free him from guilt in other people’s eyes, or even his own. The court said he was free, but he was more trapped outside of jail than he had ever been inside.
The law uses the words guilty and free, but our hearts carry the weight of those words. In reality, the world offered him no hope, no solution. He was ruined, stuck, and helpless to change that status.
And this is exactlywhere the enemy of our soul wants us. He dangles temptation in front of us, promises that we will be liked, respected, found worthy if we listen to him. He is called the deceiver of the whole world because he gets us to this stuck place and offers no way out from the weight of our sin.
Satan deceives us, traps us, and leaves us there.
There is a weight to sin. Guilt feels heavy on our shoulders and in our gut. We want to feel clean again. We want to erase the guilt, to undo the things we’ve done. But we can’t. We are like a kid with muddy hands trying to wipe mud off of a clean sheet. No matter how hard we try, we just keep spreading the mud around.
We need a refuge from the weight, we need a safe place, protection from our accuser.
The world can’t offer us refuge.
But God can because He is our refuge.
The world can’t offer us a way to erase our guilt.
But God can, because He sent a Person to remove our guilt.
The world can’t offer forgiveness or redemption.
But God can, because he sent a Redeemer.
The character in Blue Bloods was right. There is no absolution apart from Christ. In Christ there is forgiveness, there is absolution, there is moving forward.
The Gospel is called the Good News because it breaks the sin cycle we are stuck in. The only action that offers forgiveness and accomplishes absolution is the work of Jesus – His perfect life, His death on the cross that paid for our sins. The Gospel is the answer to our entrapment. It is Good News because it sets us free – the way we were meant to live.
“Jesus Christ was born into this world, not from it. He came into history from the outside of history; He did not evolve out of history. Our Lord’s birth was an advent; He did not come from the human race, He came into it from above. Jesus Christ is not the best human being; He is a Being Who cannot be accounted for by the human race at all. He is God incarnate; not man becoming God, but God coming into human flesh, coming into it from the outside. ” – – Oswald Chambers, The Psychology of Redemption
