This reflection originally appeared in the Huffington Post

The Advent Spirit in a Detroit Courtroom

By Mark Osler

Twelve years ago, it was a particularly bad day in Detroit. A storm came through as the temperature hovered just below freezing, and the precipitation switched between freezing rain and snow, making any outdoor movement treacherous.

At the time, I was a federal prosecutor. Ours was a tight office, and when something interesting happened in the courts, we all found out about it almost instantaneously. We were fascinated by the judges we appeared before, so any rumors about them were especially flammable.

On the day of that storm, a particularly intriguing story blasted through our offices. As I heard it, one of the magistrate judges had presided over a detention hearing, in which he considered whether a defendant should be held in jail or released prior to trial. The magistrate heard evidence and argument, and finally ruled against us: He held that the defendant should be released on bond. The man likely was not a big-time criminal, but a drug addict involved in low-level crime to support his habit.

That was not the end of the story, though. It was a quiet day in the courthouse (storm days often are), and because there was not much going on, the magistrate inquired more than he usually would into the circumstances of the defendant. Apparently, the man had been rousted out of bed and arrested early in the morning, and had only jeans and a t-shirt to wear home upon his release. Upon hearing this, the magistrate slipped off to his chambers and returned with his own wool overcoat, which he gave to the defendant to stave off the elements as he took a bus back home.

As this story passed from person to person, it was invariably told with an incredulous tone to reflect the lack of impartiality the magistrate had shown. He had gone soft, he was in the hands of the defense bar, he thought he was a social worker … there were one thousand and one condemnations. I was torn, though. His actions seemed too much like those Jesus urged upon us to be too terribly wrong. At the same time, though, there was something about it that made me uncomfortable. It felt like a religious act in a secular place, perhaps, or didn’t seem very “professional.” I certainly could not see myself doing the same thing.

That story has come back to me many times, and with the same conflicting thoughts. It did this week, again, as I sat in the balcony of Colonial Church in Edina. There was a time of silence, and I looked out the window at the snow coming down soundlessly.

It was in that Advent silence that the story changed for me, that the magistrate became more of a hero to me and less of an unprofessional softie. There were two things that pushed me there in those few moments of silence, one a thought and the other an image.

The thought was this. There was very little I remembered about that Magistrate other than the day he gave away his coat. I had appeared before him dozens of times; he had ruled for and against me and probably often told me that I was wrong about something, but time had sanded all that away, leaving only this story I did not even witness. There is power in that. It could be that the least popular thing we do may also be the best, and it is the wisdom of time that carves out that truth while whittling off everything else.

Finally, then, there was the image, a picture in the story I had not thought of before, and which changed everything. To me, the story had always stopped in that courtroom with the grateful defendant taking the coat. But for the magistrate, that would not have been the end.

At the end of the day, the magistrate would have gone to his closet and found that his overcoat was gone. Making do, he would clutch his suit coat and braved the cold wind and freezing rain, trudging to his car parked in the battered lot across the street. Once there, he would find his car encased in ice, and have to use a credit card to scrape off enough of the muck to get into the car while the cold rain froze to his own bare skin and hair. It would have been miserable.

Or, perhaps, the world is not so cruel.

The temperature may have been a few degrees colder, and the freezing rain been snow. He may have clutched his suit coat with one hand, stepped into his car and seen a world transformed — those big fat early-season snowflakes coming down to cover the wounds of the world and that damaged city with God’s own hand.

Mark Osler is a Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis and a member of the Friends of Justice board.  Professor Osler is the author of Jesus on Death Row: The Trial of Jesus and American Capital Punishment.