Exodus 20:13
I’ve done a lot of thinking this week about matters of life and death. Being in a hospital emergency room will do that for you. Watching my dad hooked to monitors, listening to him having a hard time catching his breath, noting his blood pressure rise until it got to 175/90. The list of tests seemed to multiply: x-rays, ultrasound, echocardiogram, bloodwork, EKG, CT scan. The number of doctors also multiplied: a cardiologist, a nephrologist, a pulmonologist, a medical team coordinator, medical students. There was fluid in his lungs, fluid in his legs and ankles, fluid around his heart. There was congestive heart failure. There was progression in his kidney disease that is likely to lead to dialysis when he gets home.
There have been text messages, emails and phone calls back and forth between me and my brother. What did the doctors say? What information do they need from California? What information will the doctors in California need from New Hampshire? How soon can he travel? How will we arrange for me to travel with him? Can I scan and email documents to him so that he can get things started with the medical team out there? Can he sign the release there to get my dad’s records from New Hampshire on their way out to his doctors in California?
Life is a gift, a blessing. Life is something that we work hard to preserve and to prolong, sometimes at all costs. The entire medical profession exists in order to extend human life and increase human health. We are such fragile creatures. It doesn’t take much to get our entire system out of whack (that’s a technical term, by the way). We are susceptible to illness and injury, and we are very vulnerable to germs, viruses, diseases, and physical attacks. It only takes 10 minutes without oxygen for brain death to occur. A person can bleed to death in just 5 minutes. Life is sacred, because we are made in the image of God. And yet, life can be taken from us in so many ways.
This morning we are talking about the sixth commandment: You shall not murder, or You shall not kill. Either way you translate it, this commandment is about the taking of one human life by another human. It is the most basic ethical or moral requirement in civilized human history. And you would think that in our current day and age, we would have learned to obey it. But the last century has been perhaps the deadliest period in all of human history. Over 100 million people have been killed in combat, plus millions killed in genocides. And there have been many victims of murder and mass shootings. So we begin to ask questions about the commandment. Is there a difference between murder and killing? Is killing ever okay? What about killing in self-defense? What about killing in war? What about abortion? What about capital punishment?
Well, this topic is so huge I decided to narrow it down to just three aspects this morning. I want to talk about war, capital punishment, and abortion.
First, what about war? Certainly, as long as there has been recorded human history, there has been war. The Bible is filled with stories of wars. But it is also clear that war is not God’s ideal vision for the world. The prophets are clear that God’s ultimate plan for the world is that there will be peace among all people, with no war and no violence. The weapons of war will be beaten into farming implements. But in the meantime, the world is not currently an ideal place. And wars will happen. And people of faith have come to affirm the necessity of just war, war that is entered into to protect one nation against the aggression of another. Leviticus 19:18 requires one nation or tribe to go to war to protect its own people or other people from a hostile attack. That would justify fighting against Hitler and Nazi Germany, and against Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor, in World War II, for example, or defending the country of Kuwait from aggression by Iraq in the 1990s.
We should never enter a war without carefully considering whether the number of lives we hope to save will outnumber the number of lives that will be lost if we fail to intervene. Anne Robertson, in her book God’s Top Ten, says, “To sign a declaration of war is to sign death warrants for, at the very least, thousands of innocent people … War may be necessary in a given instance, but it’s still not the way God intended the world to be. It might be the lesser of two evils, but it’s clearly not a ‘good.’”
What about capital punishment? What should Christians think about the death penalty?
First, it might be smart to consider some facts about the death penalty. The United States is the only Western nation that still applies the death penalty regularly, and only one of 54 nations worldwide. There are 27 states in which the death penalty is legal, as well as the federal government and the military. The method most often used is lethal injection. Only three other nations use that method: China, Thailand, and Vietnam. As of December 16, 2020, there were nearly 2,600 convicts on death row in the U.S. And as of May of 2021, there were 46 inmates on federal death row. Since 1972, at least 185 people who were sentenced to death have since been exonerated; that is, they were found to be not guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted. The juvenile death penalty was not abolished until 2005; until that time, juveniles as young as 16 could be sentenced to death in some states. African Americans make up 41% of death row inmates, while they only make up 12.6% of the general population. They also make up 34% of those who have been executed since 1976. Of those wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death, 54% were black. And there is strong evidence that the death penalty has not been found to be a deterrent to crime.
Anne Robertson writes in her book, God’s Top Ten, “The evidence appears to be that the death penalty doesn’t deter crime, has the potential to execute the innocent, and is tainted by racial prejudice.” So perhaps the question for Christians to ask ourselves is, “On what basis do we decide that a life is beyond God’s redeeming?”
The ancient Jews had no qualms about the death penalty. If you read Leviticus, you will find that capital punishment was proscribed for everything from adultery to teenagers disrespecting their parents. Many offenses that we would consider minor were a big deal to a people who were seriously concerned about ritual cleanliness, what types of materials could be worn, what types of animals could be eaten, and what bodily fluids could contaminate someone.
We see a perfect example of Jewish capital law being followed to the letter in John chapter 8, when a group of Jewish leaders brought a woman to Jesus who had been caught in the very act of adultery. (I always wondered where the man was, because in the eyes of the law, he was just as guilty as she was.) The law clearly stated that hers was a capital offense that was to be punished by stoning to death. The leaders were hoping to trick Jesus into saying something that contradicted the law, so that they could arrest him. The woman was almost of no concern at all to them. But Jesus’ response was unexpected: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And the leaders dropped their stones on the ground and left. Because the truth is that we have all sinned. As Robertson states, “the greater law of justice is threatened when we decide that the sins of others are worse than our own.” Jesus let this woman go, only advising her to sin no more. He showed her mercy.
Another question to consider when we talk about capital punishment is what carrying out the death penalty does to us as a society. I remember when Susan Smith rolled her car into the John D. Long Lake near Union, SC, in 1994 with her two little boys inside and drowned them. After she was arrested, people were overheard talking about how she should “fry” in the electric chair for what she had done, and one man suggested having a lottery to see who might get a chance to pull the switch and kill her. I couldn’t help wondering what the difference was between his desire to kill Susan Smith and her desire to kill her children. While I am sure that God was horrified by Susan Smith’s actions, I also think that God was horrified by the desire for vengeance that was expressed by so many people in the weeks after she was arrested and then convicted of murder.
Finally, what about abortion? This is a topic that has been much in the news since Texas passed a law banning abortion as soon as any cardiac activity can be detected, usually at about six weeks, before many women even know that they are pregnant. There are no exceptions to be made even in cases of rape or incest. The law allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone else who assists a woman in getting an abortion, including anyone who gives her a ride to the clinic or anyone who provides her financial assistance to pay for the procedure. Those bringing suits don’t even have to show any connection to the person they are suing. They can be awarded up to $10,000. The Texas Right to Life organization has set up a whistleblower website where people can submit anonymous reports.
I can understand people’s aversion to abortion. Personally, I believe abortion is wrong. But I also believe it should be legal. I used to think that women who had abortions must not care much about the “babies” that they were carrying. But I read about a study on abortions that included interviews with women who had terminated their pregnancies. Most of them actually considered it to be murder. The issue, at least for this group of women, wasn’t whether or not it was murder. The issue was whether, in their particular situations, murder might be justified.
I see things as a pastor that help me to understand why women might choose to have abortions. There are young women – girls, even – who are raped by their fathers or other family members and carry their babies. There are young women whose boyfriends threaten to harm them or even kill them if they do not have abortions, because they don’t want to be stuck supporting a child. There are situations where women did not have abortions, but their child died of neglect or abuse. And there are cases of women who are not fit to care for special-needs children that they chose not to abort, but are now unable to help, and who have been abandoned by the very people who convinced them to have the child because abortion is wrong.
I don’t want women to have multiple abortions because they see the procedure as a method of birth control. But neither do I want to see young women getting unsafe abortions because abortion is illegal; there should at least be a clean, safe place with a trained medical staff available for women who find that abortion is the best choice they can make in their circumstances. John Killinger writes in his book, To My People with Love, “Undoubtedly, there are times when a pregnant woman ought, for [some] reasons, to have an abortion … If one wrong must be committed in order to avoid another wrong, then so be it. Sometimes that’s the choice we have to make. But life is always sacred to God.”
I wish that people who are so adamantly prolife were also adamantly supportive of young mothers after their babies are born. But too often, these people oppose funding the very programs that would be the most helpful to these mothers. Anne Robertson lived for awhile in a community that was very strongly prolife, and an organization was planning a rally. She talked to them about doing more than just making a statement that abortion was wrong. And she suggested having adoption agencies and counselors there with booths set up to provide information, as well as locations for people to sign up to be foster parents or volunteers with agencies that helped mothers raising children in difficult circumstances. They looked at her like she was crazy, and of course were not willing to do any of those things. The rally turned out to be nothing more than people on the side of the street holding signs condemning abortions and those who have them and those who perform them.
You shall not murder. You shall not kill. In Hebrew, it’s just two words: lo tirtzach. But what a complex commandment to obey. All life is sacred. And we must treat life as sacred. But how do we do that in the complicated, violent world in which we live? We pray to God to teach us to love – to love our enemies; to love and not seek vengeance; to love and to forgive; to love and to see the image of God in every human being. Because only love can overcome evil. And the taking of human life, no matter what else it is, is surely a form of evil. Because all life is sacred.
