Set This Woman At Liberty

I was struck by the power of a scene from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables that I listened to this week. Fantine was arrested by Javert because she had attacked a man in the street who provoked her, and she was at that point destitute and in despair. She had been fired from her job working for the company of Monsieur Madeleine (Jean Valjean) who was also the mayor, but he knew nothing about it. Others had put her out because they found out about her shady past, and her life had spiraled downward to the point of her arrest. She tried to tell her story to Javert who had no mercy for her, and he condemned her to six months of prison with these words: “I have heard you out. Have you entirely finished? You will get six months. Now march! The Eternal Father in person could do nothing more.” At that moment Madeleine walked in and said, “One moment, if you please.” Upon recognizing that it was him, the man she blamed for terrible condition, Fantine cried out, “Ah! so it is you who are M. le Maire!” The story continues, “Then she burst into a laugh, and spit in his face.” It was his immediate reaction to this that struck me as so powerful: “M. Madeleine wiped his face, and said:—'Inspector Javert, set this woman at liberty.’” He stood there with spit on his face from this woman who despised him and pleaded for her release. It takes a true Christian heart to live these words of the Savior: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Javert was wrong—the Eternal Father in person could indeed do more, and Madeleine showed exactly what that looked like to imitate Him who “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good” (Matthew 5:44-45).

               This scene was especially powerful to me based on an experience I had this week in which I did not respond in such a Christlike way to this kind of treatment. I thought, though, of this powerful description of the Savior: “And the world, because of their iniquity, shall judge him to be a thing of naught; wherefore they scourge him, and he suffereth it; and they smite him, and he suffereth it. Yea, they spit upon him, and he suffereth it, because of his loving kindness and his long-suffering towards the children of men” (1 Nephi 19:9). The Savior was spit upon, and He suffered it with loving kindness and long-suffering because of who He was. To follow Him is to reject the inclinations of the natural man when others wrong us and instead plead for a blessing upon them. It is to totally forget one’s self in order to help another. This was so foreign to Javert, to whom only justice mattered, that he simply could not understand it: “Javert felt that he was on the verge of going mad. He experienced at that moment, blow upon blow and almost simultaneously, the most violent emotions which he had ever undergone in all his life. To see a woman of the town spit in the mayor’s face was a thing so monstrous that, in his most daring flights of fancy, he would have regarded it as a sacrilege to believe it possible…. When he beheld that mayor, that magistrate, calmly wipe his face and say, ‘Set this woman at liberty,’ he underwent a sort of intoxication of amazement; thought and word failed him equally; the sum total of possible astonishment had been exceeded in his case.” Madeleine was in that moment like the Savior who likewise suffered for all of us and yet still pleads with the Father, “Set this woman at liberty” or “Set this man at liberty.” He put it this way in modern revelation: “Listen to him who is the advocate with the Father, who is pleading your cause before him—Saying: Father, behold the sufferings and death of him who did no sin, in whom thou wast well pleased; behold the blood of thy Son which was shed, the blood of him whom thou gavest that thyself might be glorified; Wherefore, Father, spare these my brethren that believe on my name, that they may come unto me and have everlasting life” (Doctrine and Covenants 45:3-5). Despite all that we have done wrong—all the times that we did “crucify unto [ourselves] the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame”—He still stands there pleading for us, “Spare these my brethren” (Hebrews 6:6).