Today's Scripture Reading (July 5, 2020): Ezekiel 33
George Perry Graham, a Member of the Canadian Parliament from the province of Ontario, made this argument during a debate on Capital Punishment in 1914.
We can argue all we like, but if capital punishment is being inflicted on some man, we are inclined to say: 'It serves him right.' That is not the spirit, I believe, in which legislation is enacted. If in this present age we were to go back to the old time of 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' there would be very few honorable gentlemen in this House who would not, metaphorically speaking, be blind and toothless.
It is a fundamental problem with Capital Punishment. Capital punishment, and really all kinds of discipline, work best when delivered without emotional bias. But, unfortunately, emotional bias is present in everything that we do. Graham is right. Whenever a person is executed in the name of the state, there is always someone standing on the sideline cheering the event, when the reality is that there are no innocent people living on the earth. We are guilty of some sort of wrong. All of us are worthy of some kind of punishment. And since Graham's quote arose out of a debate on Capital punishment, I might add that the Canadian statesman might have left out the word "metaphorically" from his statement. It would not have been a stretch, in such a discussion, for Graham to have argued that "there would be very few honorable gentlemen in this House who would not, 'literally' speaking, be blind and toothless." There is a penalty that has fallen on all of us that, in an equal and just society, we need to repay.
Ezekiel argues that even in the day of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," the idea of punishment inflicted on someone was always a concept of last resort. The problem has always been that there is a spirit inside of us that celebrates the sentence of someone who has done us wrong. At the same time, there is a competing spirit inside of us that begs for mercy in the times when we have committed the wrong. The truth is, at least in our minds, that we are much more likely to make a mistake, while our neighbor is guilty of an outright sin against God.
But God has never rejoiced at the punishment of the wicked. God has always favored repentance over a reprimand. We have always preferred taking the easy way, rather than the right way, out of our circumstances, and in the process avoiding repentance and begging for God's chastisement on our lives. It doesn't have to be that way, except that we continually choose death over repentance, even in the ordinary circumstances of our lives.
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 34
No comments:
Post a Comment