I wrote this in 1999 on the occasion of Tennessee about to commit a convict to death for the first time since 1960.
John 8:3‑11
3 The teachers of the law and the
Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the
group
4 and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this
woman was caught in the act of adultery.
5 In the Law Moses commanded us to stone
such women. Now what do you say?”
6 They were using this question as a
trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and
started to write on the ground with his finger.
7 When they kept on questioning him, he
straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be
the first to throw a stone at her.”
8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the
ground.
9 At this, those who heard began to go
away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the
woman still standing there.
10 Jesus straightened up and asked her,
“Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
11 “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither
do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
Coe deserves to die for what he did.
Coe’s original execution date has come
and gone. He is still alive due a temporary stay of execution during which his
attorneys are asking for more reviews of his case.
Tennessee has not executed anyone
since 1960. Several years later, the Supreme Court struck down all existing
death sentences as unconstitutional. But in so doing, the court laid out
conditions under which the death penalty would meet constitutional requirements.
Subsequently all but a handful of states revised their criminal codes to meet
these conditions, and executions resumed in 1977 with the firing squad death of
Gary Gilmore in Utah. In 1979, Robert Coe brutally murdered Cary Ann Medlin.
The death penalty is one of the social issues which finds Christian people on all sides. Christian churches have wrestled with it throughout their history. As early as the second century, executioners, magistrates and judges could be denied the Lord’s Supper because of their part in state executions. In late medieval times Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote against harshness in judicial sentencing. Yet both Catholic and Protestant churches either carried out or condoned death penalties until modern times in America and elsewhere.
In the passage from the Gospel of John
of the woman caught in the act of adultery, the teachers of the Law and the
Pharisees who bring the woman to Jesus accurately state that the law of Moses
requires her to be executed for her adultery. Leviticus 20:10 says, “If a man
commits adultery with another man's wife – with the wife of his neighbor – both
the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.” This code is repeated
in Deuteronomy. Let us note that the Law required that both the woman and
the man be executed, but the scribes and the Pharisees, all men, somehow
avoided taking the guilty man into custody. (The double standard was no less
alive then as now.) Even so, the woman was indeed guilty, having been caught in
the act, and according to the Law she deserved to die. “What do you say?” the
men asked Jesus.
Jesus signals he won’t accept the
question on the terms it is offered by crouching to write on the ground with
his finger. “When Jesus does speak, he speaks to the situation of the scribes
and Pharisees as well as to the woman. . . . Jesus treats the woman and the
scribes and Pharisees as theological equals, each as human beings to whom words
about sin can be addressed” (NIB).
Jesus offers all of his listeners an
opportunity to break from old ways of justice, determined by the power of
condemnation and death, to enter a new society where grace can endure even when
punishment is called for. This new society with its new standards is the
Kingdom of God.
At its core, this story in John is not
really about the woman or her sin. Nor is it primarily about the self-righteous
certainty of the men who accused and convicted her. The story is about how
Christ challenges both crimes and punishments that contradict what Christ
stands for. Jesus was certainly not sympathetic to the sin of adultery. He
pointed out elsewhere that only adultery justified divorce. Jesus did not try
to excuse her adultery to the men. In fact, Jesus didn’t seem very concerned
about the woman at all – his directed all his attention toward the men who
wanted to take her life. Faced with this unmistakably severe transgression of
the law, Jesus questioned the cut and dried, hard-hearted manner in which the
authorities sought to impose justice. Perhaps Williams Shakespeare was thinking
about Christ’s words when he wrote in The Merchant of Venice–
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from
heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice
blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him
that takes.
'T is mightiest in the mightiest: it
becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
...
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of
kings,
It is an attribute to God himself; ...
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice none of
us
Should see salvation: we do pray for
mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all
to render
The deeds of mercy. (Act iv, sc.
1.)
Jesus condoned neither the crime the
woman committed nor the violence the men wish to do. He recognized that they
were both gripped in the sinful cycles of their past. If both the men and the
woman are to be freed, they must all renounce their former ways. Jesus final
words are spoken to the woman but are also addressed to the men with stones.
The woman did deserve to die according to the Law, but all her accusers finally
realized they did not deserve to kill her.
Jesus challenged both the woman and
the men to peer into their own souls and stare in brutal honesty at themselves.
By doing so they all, actually, received a blessing from the Son of God – ‘I do
not condemn you’ – followed by a command, “Go and sin no more.”
There is no denying that the Law of Moses lists a large number of offenses for which death is prescribed. Exodus lists murder as one, but simple assault on one’s parents is also a capital offense. Then, a few verses later we discover, “Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death” (Exod 21:17). And we are also informed, “Observe the Sabbath, because it is holy to you. Anyone who desecrates it must be put to death. . .” (Exod 31:14a). How many of us would like to plead for our lives against that charge?
As far as I know, Christian proponents
of the death penalty cite only the Judaic Law to support their position, never
the Gospels. Yet Jesus said that love is the heart of the Law, and that God is
a God of life, not death. If there is any theological support for the death
penalty to be derived from the testament of the Good News of Jesus Christ, I
have yet to see it, and I have done a great deal of reading on this subject
over the years because I used to support the death penalty. What turned me from
supporter to opponent of the death penalty finally was realizing that the Law
of Moses is not the ultimate revelation of the nature and character of God or
of God’s will. God is most fully revealed in the person and work of Jesus
Christ, whose fate was to be executed by the state. Luke twenty-three records
that even as the Romans nailed him to the cross, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive
them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).
Robert Glen Coe is no Jesus Christ,
and American justice is more fair than Roman justice, but Christ’s prayer still
calls us to reflect whether we really know what we are doing when we push the
buttons that cause lethal chemicals to flow into the veins of a man strapped to
a gurney.
There is an organization called, “Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation.” Its executive director is Renny Cushing, whose father was murdered. These are Renny’s words:
“At about 10 o’clock at night, there
was a knock on the front door. My mother was lying on the couch watching the
Celtics playoff game. My father was at the kitchen table reading the newspaper,
and he got up to answer the door. As he did, a couple of shotgun blasts rang
out, ripped his chest apart, and he died in front of my mother. From that day,
from that moment, I became the survivor of a homicide victim. And in the
aftermath of that I had reason to contemplate – on numerous occasions and in
some depth – how we deal as a society and individually in the aftermath of
murder.”
We talk a lot about victims’ rights in the legal system. And we should, because for a long time the victim of crime was seen mostly as a witness to the crime rather than someone whose life has been shredded by violence. Relatives of murder victims feel emotions that others cannot comprehend. Bud Welch’s daughter, Julie, was killed by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. Welch wrote:
“All my life, I had always opposed the death penalty. My entire family
has, even going back to my grandparents. Well, after Tim McVeigh bombed the
Oklahoma City Federal Building, the rage, the revenge, the hate – you can’t
think of enough adjectives to describe what I felt like. I did change my mind
about the death penalty. After McVeigh and Nichols had been charged – I mean,
fry them. We didn’t need a trial, a trial was simply a delay. That was my
feeling, that was my emotion. You no doubt saw McVeigh or Nichols being rushed
from an automobile to a building, bulletproof vests on, and the reason that the
police do this is because people like me will kill them. The police presence
around Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols was the very deterrent that kept me from
being on death row in Oklahoma today. Because had I thought that if there was
any opportunity to kill them, I would have done so.
“For about the next eight months, I struggled with the thought of what’s
going to happen to [McVeigh and Nichols], how am I going to get some peace.
[The death penalty] sounded so wonderful to me at the time. I thought about
that over the next eight months. I also remembered the statement that Julie had
made to me driving across Iowa one time in her junior year. We heard a newscast
on the radio about an execution that had happened in Texas the night before.
Julie’s response to that was, “Dad, all they’re doing is teaching hate to their
children in Texas.” I didn’t think a lot of it at the time, but I remembered
her saying that. Then after she was killed, and after I got past [the] initial
period, this kept echoing in my mind. I had this anguish about what was going
to happen. The trials hadn’t even begun yet, and I went to asking myself, once
they’re tried and executed, what then? How’s that going to help me? It isn’t
going to bring Julie back. I asked that question for a period of two weeks
probably. I realized that its all about revenge and hate. And revenge and hate
is why Julie and 167 others are dead today. After I was able to get that
revenge and hate out of my system, I made a statement to an Associated Press
reporter one day that I did not believe in the death penalty.”
Renny Cushing wrote that survivors of
homicide victims want three basic things.
1.
They
want to know the truth, how it happened that somebody that they loved could be
taken from them. They need to know the truth just to help them get back some
control over their lives.
2. The second thing they want is justice. With murder, said Cushing, the only real justice possible would be to exchange the life of the murdered person with the life of the murderer. But no exchange is possible because we can’t bring the murder victim back, no matter what we do to the killer. So we have to do the best we can to secure justice. One of the ways to do that is to restore the sense of security that’s been lost by families and society by the murder. And that means killers need to be separated from society. Both the surviving families and society need the security of doing that, to hold offenders accountable.
3.
The
third thing survivors want is healing. Healing is not an event. The death
penalty focuses upon a single event, raising the expectation that if you simply
extinguish the life of someone who took a life, the execution itself will be a
healing event. It’s a mistake, says Cushing, that if you just kill the killer
it will all be better, and you’ll feel better, and you can just go on. The
reality is, though, that healing is a process that goes on all the time. It is
part of the burden that homicide survivors come to grips with, that healing is
a process that will go on for the rest of their lives.
Cushing wrote, “I came to realize that
those who were affected by his killing were not just [my] family, not just the
people in the community. It also involved the families of the people who killed
my father. The idea that I would be healed, that any murder victim would
be healed, by inflicting pain upon the family of a murderer” is not true. Grief
is not a zero-sum game. “My pain doesn’t get eased by inflicting pain on
[them].” The death penalty just creates more victims. “One thing with the death
penalty, there’s a kind of finality. When we kill people who kill our loved
ones, we forever preclude the opportunity for those of us who want to figure
out how to have an interactive forgiveness. The existence of the death penalty
in and of itself becomes a barrier to victim healing. I don’t want to live in a
society where, in the aftermath of murder, policy prevents people from
healing.”
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said,
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I
tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:38,
44). Gandhi put it this way: “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”
In the movie Saving Private Ryan, set in World War Two, Tom Hanks plays Captain Miller, who is assigned the mission of finding Private Ryan to take him out of battle because all three of Ryan’s brothers have been killed in action. With a squad of men, Captain Miller sets forth. Before they find Ryan, two of Miller’s men are killed. One of Miller’s men rebels because he can’t make the math come out right – two of his friends dead before they even find this one faceless Ryan. He demands Captain Miller tell him why Ryan is so important to him.
Miller’s answer surprises them all. “I
don’t know Ryan,” Captain Miller says. “I don’t care anything about him. I just
want to go home. And if finding this Ryan makes that happen sooner rather than
later, well then, that’s my mission.” With that Captain Miller walks to the
body of their medic, who was killed shortly before, to pull it into a newly-dug
grave. After a few moments the others join in to help. There is no more
dissension. They will save Private Ryan, not for Ryan’s good, but for their
own.
I don’t know Robert Coe. I don’t care
anything about him. I have practically no sympathy for him. I won’t even try to
argue that he does not deserve to die. I oppose his execution not for his sake
but for mine. My call as a Christian disciple is to reduce violence, not
condone more death. To the powers and principalities that seek to take life for
life, I say, “Not in my name nor in the name of the Lord I serve.”
Some night soon Robert Coe will be
strapped onto a gurney and wheeled into the death chamber. There will be a
group of selected witnesses there, of course, but you and I will be there, too,
because we are the ones who finally make our laws. We will be there, and in
each hand we are holding stones to throw at him. I pray that we will someday
soon reach the spiritual maturity of the scribes and Pharisees whom Jesus faced
down, so we can drop our stones like they did. Perhaps we will finally realize
that although Robert Coe may well deserve to die, not one of us deserves to
kill him. _____________________
Statements by Renny Cushing and Bud Welch are found at http://www.mvfr.org. I have minimally edited them for length and clarity for hearing.
