Repay no one evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all ... Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:17, 21)
Repaying evil for evil -- an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life -- is neither new nor peculiar to U.S. society. In terms of secular justice in this fallen world, the unusual element in John Spenkelink's execution in Florida's electric chair on the morning of May 25 was not that he was killed against his will. The unusual element was that he was the first such prisoner in 12 years to become the victim of premeditated murder by a U.S. state.
In terms of God's justice in a world redeemed through the body and blood of Jesus Christ, however, there are a number of unusual, if not shocking, elements in Spenkelink's execution.
Foremost is the fact that, from all reports, two-thirds of the people in nominally Christian America applauded his execution in the name of "justice" and "deterrence."
People appeared to be more shocked and grieved by the deaths of 274 persons on American Airlines flight 191 that same day. But one wonders if God might bear a different and deeper kind of grief for the cool technological success in Starke, Florida, than for the fiery technological failure in Chicago.
Capital punishment has returned. It would be redundant to say with a vengeance. The doors are now open for the execution of as many as 40 others by the end of the year; there could be 100 executions a year in the 1980s, taking us back to the peak years of capital punishment in the U.S. -- the post-lynching, Depression years of the 1930s.
The doors are also open for our judgment before a God who alone gives life and takes it away, and before a Lord who, in his own execution, broke the power of the state and taught us the meaning of God's mercy and grace.
We know human retaliation better than we know God's love. Unlimited retaliation is part of our nuclear war scenarios: if someone knocks out your tooth, you knock out all of her teeth. It is the basis for mutual self-destruction.
Limited retaliation is not only another Pentagon term but also the most frequent basis for capital punishment: if someone knocks out one of your teeth, you knock out one of his. It's called do unto others as they do unto you.
Limited love is the basis for racial and class hatreds, which may explain why most of the nearly 500 death-row prisoners today are black and nearly all are poor: if a neighbor knocks out a tooth, you forgive her; but if an enemy knocks out a tooth, you let him have it. The rule here is love someone of your own race and class (your neighbor) and hate everybody else (your enemy). This is the form of "justice" practiced by most well-heeled, white Americans in their attempts to be upstanding, law-abiding citizens.
Unlimited love is what God gave us in Jesus Christ, and it is what is meant by Jesus "fulfilling the law": If someone knocks out your tooth, do not retaliate in kind, but go the extra mile in love and prayer, even with enemies and those who persecute you (Matthew 5:38-43).
This is the new order, the call to be a new people in a new society. But we resist. Impractical, we say. Loving the Russians is next to coddling criminals on our hit list. We'd rather go only so far as limited love -- and meanwhile trust in bigger nuclear arsenals and in dispatching many more John Spenkelinks.
Even the first murder in the Bible was greeted with more mercy: God protected Cain from those who would threaten him (Genesis 4:15). But some people prefer to quote Genesis 9:6: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image."
Only by taking this verse out of context -- and ignoring the last half of the verse -- can we read this as requiring the death penalty. In context, God's intention is more clearly to limit the vengeance and countervengeance that were pervasive in Noah's time. Also, the Hebrew word translated as by in "by man shall his blood be shed" could more accurately be translated as for; God is not assigning countervengeance to man (or the state) but rather is reserving that ultimate power for God.
But doesn't Romans 13:4 say that God has granted the state the right to bear the sword against wrongdoers? Yes, but the "sword" referred to by Paul is not the means by which the Romans executed criminals; rather the sword (machaira) is the symbol of judicial authority.
Similar attempts at English-language biblical literalism can raise problems even for capital punishment die-hards. When Jesus says "He who speaks evil of mother and father, let him surely die" (Matthew 15:4), he is not exactly calling upon governments to execute millions of recalcitrant children tomorrow morning.
Under the Mosaic code, which should be understood in the larger biblical context of the progression from unlimited retaliation to unlimited love, death is prescribed for 18 crimes including not only murder, kidnapping, and fornication, but also striking, cursing, and rebelling against parents. If this sounds harsh, scholars have noted that the legal procedures under Mosaic law often did more to protect defendants' rights -- and lives -- than any of the penal codes currently in effect in any of the 50 states.
"I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live" (Ezekiel 33:11) is the precept underlying the meaning of the new order: redemption, not retribution. The practical significance of this new ethic is clear in the account of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. The adulteress in John 8 is not only spared execution by stoning but is told to "go, and do not sin again." The law is fulfilled, and the message of unlimited love is to first stop casting stones.
Even if we ignore the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and Christ's death and resurrection, we would have to say that the Bible is clear about the value -- potential if not actual -- of each human life.
We Christians say that we believe in the gracious, restorative, renewing power of God -- not even for sinners, but for the sinners that we all are. We say we believe that no one among God's children is beyond the possibility of restoration and renewal, even one convicted of a capital crime. By the grace of God we trust in human contrition and forgiveness. We praise God's redeeming love.
Yet, out of fear or anger or vengeance, we decide to play God and to exercise the decisive human judgment: that another man or woman should die. Far from following a Lord who came to fulfill the law, we trust ourselves and our laws and our more barbarian instincts.
For centuries, Christian churches more often than not have sanctioned capital punishment -- a sad commentary on both our understanding of God's word and of God's new order in Jesus Christ. One cannot imagine Christ wanting his followers to participate as citizens in the dispassionate killing even of a murderer. Nor can one imagine Christ urging silence as the state does the dirty work for us.
We don't want to go so far, or to be so biblical, as to risk love, to overcome evil with good. But the problem involves not just our refusal to trust God's love and mercy. The problem is that instead we trust the state. Knowing all that we know about racist police, politically-motivated prosecutors, incompetent judges, indifferent lawyers, prejudiced jurors, and all the other frailties demonstrated by human beings in the act of judging one another, we still trust the machinery of government to carry out something so irrevocable as a death penalty.
The same frailties accompany lengthy legal appeals of death sentences. And moral appeals are not admissible in most U.S. courts.
Why is the death penalty so popular today? Perhaps because we trust our impulses to fear each other more than we fear God. Perhaps because of the totally unproven notion that killing criminals will cut down on criminals killing. But most research shows that the certainty of punishment does considerably more to deter crime than does the severity of punishment.
If killing murderers were a deterrent, why not advocate sexually assaulting the rapist or stealing from the thief? In fact, we already encourage these things in U.S. prisons. Rape and economic slavery are built into the dehumanizing prison system. Prisons institutionalize vengeance and countervengeance. If capital punishment is sudden death, life in most prisons is intended to be only a slower form of death. Both punishments today have the same result: to deny all that is life-giving.
In 1965, with the first major escalation of the war in Vietnam, only 38 per cent of the people in a Harris poll said they favored capital punishment. Now the figure is close to 70 per cent. One would think that the intervening years had provided the U.S. with quite enough killing.
But Vietnam apparently does not explain the increased interest in the death penalty. Historically, there appears to be a close correlation between economic uncertainty and appeals for the death penalty. As fears of recession grow, apparently we can expect more people to work out their insecurities on death-row victims.
There are many ironies involved in the current wave of support for capital punishment. Most of the people who want it done wouldn't volunteer to do it. Most of us would probably plead for mercy if we directly knew the accused and not just indirectly knew the crime. An execution is supposed to be a bloodcurdling example to all of society, but scientific, bloodless means are used to kill the people in antiseptic rooms far from the public eye.
Other ironies abound: Once again the "free world" is resorting to a form of punishment that we decry in every totalitarian state (and most recently in Iran). Capital punishment has a finality, but few government or court officials really want the final responsibility for signing death warrants. People oppose mercy killing but favor no-mercy killing. We argue that premeditated murder is the most heinous crime, but we premeditated Spenkelink's murder for more than four years. Those people most distrustful of government's role in society (welfare, corporate regulation, etc.) are often the most willing to trust the government with the ultimate power of taking a human life. Those who oppose government funding for abortions tend to support government funding for executions.
The final irony for Christians, however, is that each time we pray we invoke the name of an innocent man executed by a cruel society.
John Howard Yoder writes: "The cross has wiped away the moral and ceremonial basis of capital punishment -- if we believe [Christ's lordship] we must proclaim that killing criminals is not God's will even for a sub-Christian society. We must make this testimony real to the men who make and who execute the laws, not leaving it to an occasional request for mercy."
Jim Stenzel was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!