Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

November 10, 2009

The Execution of John Allen Muhammad

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 11:21 pm

Barring any last-minute clemency or accepted appeals, the man known as the “D.C. Sniper,” John Allen Muhammad, will be killed tonight for gunning down 10 Washington-area citizens and holding the Beltway in terror for three weeks in 2002.

The victims’ families will talk about “finding closure,” the media will talk about his final statement, if he chooses to make one, and speculate on his choice not to have a spiritual advisor present, and his family members will be asked, Larry King-style, “how they feel” about having their murderous father/husband/brother executed. And, just as certainly, the tailgating rowdies who descend upon State executions will conduct their righteous and rowdy vigils outside the prison gates, grunting about “justice” and waving placards that capture the entirety of a nation’s moral compass on foamboard and paint stirrers.

Most of them will call themselves Christians, and most of them will utter — and butcher — solemn portions of the Bible that they insist call for John Allen Muhammad’s “ass to be fried,” as one moralist phrased it. The more uncouth among them might paraphrase the Scriptures just that way; the more refined, if “refined” people are those who swoop down on prisons to celebrate executions, will explain that “the Bible says” an eye for an eye, or vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. They might even remind breathless newscasters that Romans 13 promises that God wants the State to wield the sword, and they’ll opine that this is what the Apostle Paul meant, just this very thing — the State killing a man who killed 10, avenging a tenth-fold on earth what the Holy One will avenge tenfold.

I think they’ll all be wrong. They do, however, unlike anti-capital punishment evangelicals and Bible teachers, make for great copy and exciting “color.” I’ll grant them that, but nothing else.

The Old Testament undoubtedly, indisputably, calls for execution for willing, wanton, murder. But we Christ-followers are people of the New Testament, disciples of the One who had, according to the Old Testament, every right to call for and participate in — with a holy alacrity, even — the stoning of the adulterous woman in John’s Gospel. We uphold not the Law of the Moses, but the Way of Christ Jesus, and that Way is more often than not studiously opposed to the easy settling-for of the quick read, and much more often than not subverts it with an approach to evil that, in Divine wisdom, results in more justice even as it offers more mercy. This is the character of a reconciling God. We just don’t want to see it, once we’ve determined that God has graciously reconciled us.

“An eye for an eye” doesn’t really leave the whole world blind, Gandhi’s life notwithstanding; it was the Old Testament regulator that ensured that retaliatory responses to violence never exceeded the initial offense. If, for example, the shepherd’s donkey kicked out my tooth, only the value of that injury could be extracted from him. I couldn’t send my cousin to beat him to a pulp. Quoting that “vengeance is mine” requires not only the completion of the sentence — “sayeth the LORD” — but also a recognition that God does not share that prerogative’s ultimate expression with mortals. Even the ones who foam at the mouth. And the correct exegesis of Romans 13 says much more about proper respect for and submission to governmental authorities; the swordplay therein is hyperbole that illustrates the allowed breadth of civil authority, not a call for State head-shopping, literal or otherwise.

The fact that the United States’ legal system is replete with bias, weakness, and injustice — that the poor are virtually guaranteed to suffer from the unrighteousness inherent in its makeup — means that calls for the widespread, or even occasional, implementation of capital punishment are nothing more than dangerous invitations to abuse and sin far more offensive to a Holy God than allowing a murderer — as John Muhammad surely is — to live. The only response the Christian can make in the face of the impending death of a human being by the State is grief, sorrow, and hope: Grief for the pain he visited upon other people, sorrow at what we might guess could be the state of his soul, and hope in the mercy of our righteous God, extended in infinite grace to each one of us and, perhaps tonight especially, to those who, by celebrating the death of a murderer, pretty up only just a little the evil they abhor.

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