John the Baptist sculpture
When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples
and said to [Jesus], "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?"
Jesus answered them, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.
And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me."
Matthew 11:2-6 NRSVue
We get a heapin' helpin' of John the Baptizer, the forerunner of Jesus, during the Advent season, including this passage which may seem familiar. Yes, I included it yesterday on Human Rights Day because John's voice for justice and God's new regime seems so timely when people around the world, everywhere from Russia to Hong Kong to Nicaragua to Iran are imprisoned for speaking out against oppression. John was in the lock-up, awaiting execution, when he sent a message to Jesus asking if he is truly the one sent by God.
Today is the 60th anniversary of the last state sanctioned executions in Canada the double hanging of Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin on December 11, 1962, at Toronto's Don Jail. Capital punishment wasn't abolished in Canada until 1976 but these were the final two. While public opinion has at times leaned toward reinstating the death penalty the homicide rate, per capita, has trended steadily down through the decades.
At times I peer across the border to those states in America where killing people for a variety of reasons is still law, in company with China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other authoritarian regimes. We know that there are plenty of Christians and others who oppose the death penalty in the US but their efforts regularly go unheeded. This form of harsh retribution seems embedded in the culture, and Texas and Virginia lead the way in executions.
In 1961, a year before the last executions in this country, a committee of the United Church shared a report at our national General Council in 1961 which cited the reasons to abolish the death penalty, including the teachings of Jesus.
In the late 1980s the Conservative Party in Canada proposed reinstating the death penalty and a number of denominations opposed the legislation, successfully it would seem. Somewhere I have the button I wore on my coat which expressed the illogic of capital punishment.
I hadn't realized until now that there was controversy over the fairness of the trials of the two men executed in 1962, one of whom went to the gallows insisting on his innocence. There was a crowd of protesters outside the jail where the hangings took place.
When I was a chaplain intern at Kingston Penitentiary in the summer of 1979 I sat and talked with murderers, some of them penitent, as the name of the institution suggests. Others were in denial, or repentant. They were humans beings, not monsters, and those conversations will never leave me.
Would I want the death penalty for someone who murdered a loved one, or would I be tempted toward retribution? That could well be. Yet I feel that this sort of decision is not mine to make, and I don't believe that it's consistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Seaweed, Saving the Planet, & Praising the Creator in today's Groundling blog groundlingearthyheavenly.blogspot.com/2022/12/seawee
2 comments:
In my summers working at Old Fort Henry and then summers at McArthur College of Education, I don't know if I had this thought -- but I know that I had it when I visited Kingston in subsequent years:
Just go east on Union or King Street from the prison and you arrive at Queen's where young people are preparing themselves for the future, going to football games, meeting at the
pub. Back at the Pen, futures are a long way off and already burdened with a prison record and fractured families.
How much of this is luck, circumstances of birth, early environment? I'm sure these were things you pondered in your chaplaincy. KB
So well said Kathy! I did reflect on all these things, the "there but by the grace of God" reality of those who end up in prison. Even though it was more than 40 years ago research with the inmates revealed that many of them had learning disabilities which had been undiagnosed & made "normal" life challenging. I wonder how many McArthur students were aware that the land was the former highly productive prison farm which sadly gave way to development, including the college.
Post a Comment