Living in the Spirit
June 3, 2018
Scripture Reading: Mark 2:23-3:6
Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, ‘Come forward.’ Then he said to them, ‘Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?’ But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. –Mark 3:1-6
What rules are more important to us than the life of another person? An immediate response to that might be, “What an absurd question? No rule is more important than a human life?” Do we support capital punishment? Our federal laws and the law in Oklahoma says that the lives of certain people who have committed certain crimes are worth less than the rules they broke. I fundamentally do not believe that such final judgment is the job of any human. If anything, we should hope that such criminals live long enough to take advantage of the opportunity to seek salvation through Jesus Christ. At the least humans are robbing them of that opportunity by ending their lives prematurely.
There are other good reasons not to use the death penalty*:
- The primary one is that the death penalty does not work as the deterrent it is supposed to be.
- As of May 17, 2018, since the death penalty was reinstated in the USA in 1973, 162 people found guilty and sentenced to death have been exonerated. There is no good count of the number that was innocent but executed anyway. Well-intentioned humans make mistakes which can never be rectified if the defendant has been executed.
- There is much racial inequality in the application of the death penalty that has no justification.
- The cost of enforcing the use of the death penalty is much higher than a sentence of life in prison.
We do now well one innocent person who was executed, Jesus. He upset religious rulers by breaking their laws that they deemed more important than life itself, although I doubt the laws were as important to them as Jesus’ challenging their power to enforce them.
How hard are our hearts when it comes to making life and death judgment on another human being?
Prayer: Father, forgive us for we do not know what we do. Amen.
*For more information see https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf
**Derived from Luke 23:34