Scripture: Matthew 26:59-75
This is a sermon I have been wanting to give and have been on the verge of giving for many years. It is also a sermon I have not given in the past because I didn’t feel I was quite prepared to give it or quite ready to give it, and I still don’t feel either prepared or ready, but I decided to give it anyway. Let me explain.
Every year when Palm Sunday comes around I find myself sort of overwhelmed. Not, you understand, because it’s a busy time, though it can be, but because of the density of the subject matter of the season. It is, of course, though arguably so for some, the centerpiece of the Biblical story for Christians, and there is lots to deal with in both a positive and a negative sense, lots to deal with for me in a personal and private way and also so far as what I might choose to say in sermons on Palm Sunday and Easter.
For one thing there is the theology, or theologies, surrounding Christ’s passion and death that speak of his dying for our sins, often with the implication that his suffering and death were necessary to pay the price due for the accumulated misdeeds of humanity, with the accompanying implication that God somehow requires payment or satisfaction or retribution or vengeance and that it shows God’s great love that God sent God’s own son to bear that punishment in our place, and that the more we focus on the horror of the crucifixion, the more thankful we will be for the greatness of God’s love, and therefore God’s goodness. God’s love gets all mixed in with the shedding of blood, which God wills as part of the divine plan…well, I won’t go on. All of those images and ideas come up for me when we come to Palm Sunday and Holy Week every year. I have, to put it mildly, real difficulties with all of that approach, and I have said so on a number of occasions, sometimes in connection with Palm Sunday, but whether I choose to preach directly on that subject or not, it’s always there as something I need to deal with somehow in myself.
Then there are the contrasting and conflicting parts of the story itself. All the praise and joy and thanksgiving and expectation that seemed to surround Jesus on Palm Sunday and then the gradual disappearance, the growing hostility, the abandonment and betrayal and desertion that follow in the story and the questions about where you and I might fit in to this story, if we do, raising questions maybe not only about ancient misunderstandings but about what expectations we may bring to God or to Jesus and whether they are false or genuine and in what way Jesus’ actions were saving actions and what we mean by salvation…again I won’t go on. There’s just a lot to deal with here, and a lot that I might choose to talk about in sermons.
There’s also the whole issue of anti-Semitism and how Holy Week has often been a time of horror for Jewish people who have been scapegoated as killers of Jesus sometimes, way more than we often allow ourselves to realize, violently and sometimes politely, sort of, if you can call it that, by reading without comment the passages of scripture that are translated, questionably, as “the Jews” being the people who condemned Jesus to death, demanded the release of Barabbas and shouted “Crucify him.” I am always burdened by that aspect of the season. All of these things just to mention a few of the things that run through my mind as Palm Sunday and Holy Week approach every year.
In addition though there has always been another thought in the background. I can’t help but be aware that the story has Jesus being executed as a criminal. He was not killed by a random assassin. Regardless of the details of how the Jewish authorities and the Roman occupation worked out their differing jurisdictions, Jesus of Nazareth was killed by judicial decision. His offense, whatever it was, was held to be a capital crime, and he was put to death by the state. I know that the purpose of the Biblical story of Jesus’ passion and death is not to provide a text in support of or opposed to capital punishment, but given that that is an issue for us, it has always seemed to me that the story of Jesus’ execution almost cries out for a response on that issue, as if the story just sort of stepped forward and said, “Here I am, a story involving capital punishment, right at the heart of the gospel. What do you have to say about it? Well…I’m listening.” Sometimes, for me, scripture is like that. It doesn’t step forward saying here’s what I have to tell you. It steps forward saying, in effect, “here’s a story. I’m interested to hear what you have to say about it. I’m listening.
But though I have thought about it for many years, I never accepted the opportunity to preach on capital punishment on Palm Sunday…until now. My conscience troubled me about it, but I didn’t for several reasons. One is all the other material there is to be thought about and preached about that I referred to—a lot of competition. Another is that although I have been opposed to the death penalty for a long time and have occasionally written letters, demonstrated, taken part in vigils, and tried with a few others to get Delegate Rob Bell to change his mind on the issue (we didn’t succeed), I have not, to be honest, invested a lot of time in studying the matter.
I’ve done a little reading here and there, but I haven’t made myself into an expert on research relating to the death penalty. I know in a general way that there have been various studies that show that the death penalty is not really a deterrent to murder or violent crime—no evidence that it is a deterrent, some evidence that it is not. I know in a general way that an alarming percentage of people who have spent some time on death row have later been proved to be innocent of the crime they were to be executed for, and that many others might have been had police been willing to follow up on leads or courts been willing to consider new evidence. I don’t know how many people that is who have been found to be wrongly convicted, but since one would be an alarming number to me, I feel safe in saying the number is alarming. I know in a general way that the death penalty is discriminatory, that rarely do rich people who can afford to hire their own legal defense receive the death sentence, that as always the poor are more vulnerable, in this case ultimately vulnerable, that it may be that people of color are more likely to be put to death than white people, but that in any case people who are convicted of killing a white person are much more likely to be given the death sentence than people who are convicted of killing a person of color. I say I know all these things in a general way. But I don’t have the numbers at my fingertips, and I know that some, not all but some, of my reading comes from biased sources that are opposed to the death penalty, and so I don’t feel like I can talk about the research with as much confidence as maybe I ought to have.
And finally I have not taken the Palm Sunday opportunity to talk about the death penalty because I haven’t felt like I’ve been ready, ready in the sense of being able to articulate exactly why I feel and believe the way I do. I know I have been opposed to capital punishment for a long time. I know it is a deep belief, not a passing opinion. I have not been sure I was able to give words to the belief, to explain myself adequately, so I waited until maybe another time when the words would be there.
But that time has never come, and I never did do the reading that would make me an expert on the literature of capital punishment and these reasons I have given for not preaching on capital punishment came to seem to me more like excuses, and for whatever reason I have decided this year, that it’s time, time to put a few things into words, time to say something out loud, whether or not it accurately describes all of my feelings on the subject.
One thing that has brought me to this point is the realization—I’m not quite sure why it took me this long, but it did—the realization that all those issues I was referring to that have to do with different aspects of the issue—the possibility of mistakes, the lack of a deterrence effect, the discrimination built into the system toward poor people and people of color, the seemingly higher value placed on the loss of a white life—I came to the realization that all of this was not really where it was at for me. Not that I don’t care about those things. Of course I do. It is a good argument in itself against the death penalty that there will almost certainly be mistakes, because the people deciding to sentence someone to death and carrying out those sentences are human and humans make mistakes, and therefore the only way to guarantee that we wouldn’t ever execute anyone by mistake is never to execute anyone period. And yes I care that there is discrimination in the system against poor people and people of color, and I don’t care how much a person might be in favor of capital punishment, it should be stopped, there should be no capital punishment, until fairness can be firmly established, firmly established.
But what I just said is just the point. You can be concerned about all such things and still be, theoretically, for the death penalty. And I, even if I could be convinced that there was a way to be as certain of legal guilt as is humanly possible, even if I thought capital punishment was a deterrent to further crime, even if the elements of bias were done away with, the thing is: I would still be against the death penalty. So I don’t need to be an expert on the research. The research, even if it turned out to be different from what I think it is, would not determine my belief. And as for whether I’m able to find words to talk about what the real issues are for me, well however inadequate they may be, they will be better than silence, so they will just have to be the best I can do for now.
Let me start with something simple, sort of. I have never been much of a fan of the “what would Jesus do?” approach to Christian ethics or decision-making. It seems rather simplistic on the surface, and way too subjective, most often not very helpful…well, I don’t want to argue that point. I’ll just say that I have never been a fan of the “what would Jesus do?” approach.
But you know what? It does make a difference to me that I cannot imagine Jesus, not in my remotest dreams, pronouncing or carrying out a sentence of death on another human being. Jesus was all about, at every step along the way, bringing life, bringing new life, to people. Sometimes by bringing the dead back to life. Sometimes by giving a new lease on life to people who had been judged guilty by others or who were overcome with guilt themselves, by bringing a word of forgiveness. Sometimes by touching the untouchable, by healing people which sometimes meant to be given new life physically but also being restored to the community of the living as in the case, for instance, of the healing of lepers. There is scarcely anything Jesus did that could not be interpreted one way or another as bringing people back to life or offering them new life in some way.
I don’t care whether you think the story of Jesus in the gospels is literal, actual, historical fact or whether you think it is a story much more of spiritual truths than of factual ones. I don’t care whether you interpret the story literally, symbolically, metaphorically, or any other way you can think of. It is a story of the giving of life, in all of the rich meanings of the word, it a story of the giving of life. And if that story means anything to me, or makes any claim on me, and it does, it cannot be reconciled in my mind or heart with the intentional, deliberate, premeditated, rationalized taking of life.
Furthermore, and this gets back to what I was saying earlier about my difficulties with Jesus dying supposedly as a sacrifice to pay for the sins of humanity, I cannot read this story as though the death sentence inflicted on Jesus was somehow God’s will and that it was the means to bring about something good in the world. Not even Christ’s death sentence brings about good in the world. What I do think the story has to say of a saving nature is that the violence stopped with Jesus, that if there is to be salvation for us human beings, it will be because we have found a way to break the endless cycle of violence. To me that is what the story of Jesus death signifies. Another preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor, puts it this way (referring to the crucifixion): “ Meanwhile, (while the violence of the world continues) Jesus hangs on the cross, stubbornly refusing to fight at all. He has taken into himself all the violence flung against him and he will not give it back. Abused, he will not abuse. Condemned, he will not condemn…The violence stopped with him. It caused his death, but it got none of his life.”
For me, the story of Jesus is about breaking that cycle of violence. Whereas when we in our time carry out death sentences, we are giving in to repeating that cycle of violence. We do more than give in. We resolutely refuse to break that cycle where the only way to deal with violence is through more violence. We have an option here. Some may argue there are situations in our broken world where the only option is to fight violence with violence. I’m not prepared to deal with all of that this morning, but at least in this case that is not the case. We do have an option and continuing the practice of capital punishment is an outright refusal to take the option of interrupting the cycle of violence.
And that brings me to forgiveness, which I said I was going to talk about in connection with capital punishment today, but it turns out I’m not. I got started writing this sermon and it got too long too quickly, so as far as today is concerned, I’m going to have to talk about forgiveness mostly by asking yours. I will need to come back to this next week. It is, after all, not such a bad subject for Easter either–forgiveness. I do have more things to say about capital punishment, and there is a lot more to say about forgiveness because the one thing I will say today is that forgiveness is worth more careful consideration than a few platitudes about what a good thing it is tacked on at the end of a sermon would allow. So let me not rest my case so far as capital punishment is concerned. It may be just as well, because I think to try to say the rest of what I have to say, I need to be more open than I am today to the spirit of Easter. May we all be in that place a week from now, that is open to the spirit of Easter. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 5, 2009