Perhaps the most difficult of all of Christ's commands are
those which are expounded in today's gospel, from the Sermon on the Mount. You
have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I
say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right
cheek, turn the other also; and You
have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your
enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute
you[2].
All of us, beginning with myself, are inclined to think that
Jesus doesn't really mean us when we have been assaulted, or when someone
humiliates us or mocks us, or when someone pushes our buttons in such a way
that we are thrown into emotional turmoil. With the continual exploitation of
our emotions by the media, the non stop presentation of the terrors of life in
the news, we are tempted to think that certainly when the Lord says Forgive them or Love them he cannot be referring to the terrible people of the
world who commit heinous crimes.
Furthermore, with the amount of violence we are exposed to on the media,
we are inclined to feel a great gratification when the evil suffer injury. "What
goes around comes around" we are very satisfied in saying. Of course, we
are not so excited by the true meaning of this statement: Those who do evil
should suffer evil. There is something within us that believes that real
justice is in the law of talons: an eye for an eye. In reality, we would rather
live in an Old Testament world, a world without Christ, than live in a world
where we are expected to sacrifice our desire for vengeance to the Lord's
command to love our enemies.
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been tried and found difficult.
Perhaps it is for these reasons, perhaps it is for other reasons
that many Catholics have quite a bit of difficulty with the Church's position opposing
capital punishment. The popes have spoken out numerous times against capital
punishment. The Bishops of the United States voiced their opposition to Capital
punishment as a unified body over thirty years ago. It would be helpful for us
to recall this statement and the justifications for their arguments. Back in
November of 1980 the Bishops noted that Catholic teaching historically has
accepted the principle that the state has the right to take the life of a
person guilty of an extremely serious crime and that the state has the right to
protect itself and its citizens from grave harm. However, they wrote, in the
contemporary American society, the legitimate purposes of punishment no longer
justifies the imposition of the death penalty. The legitimate purposes of
punishment are deterrence, reform and retribution. The death penalty was
reinstated in 1967. The soaring
number of murders in our country since then shows that the death penalty does
not work as a deterrent. The criminal who is put to death, obviously, cannot
reform even if this reform were to be limited to whatever contributions that
criminal could make from a prison cell. Finally, retribution refers to the
repayment of stolen property. No amount of retribution can replace the life of
the victim.
It is right here that today's gospel hits home. People tend
to confuse retribution with vengeance. Most people, Catholic and non Catholic,
support the death penalty not to protect society, but to inflict vengeance upon
the criminal. Time and again we hear the arguments: this person has caused so
much pain to the victim and to his or her families that he does not deserve to
live. Or "I know my slain son or daughter will rest easier once the
criminal is killed." Or, "As long as the criminal is alive, I will
never feel that this matter is put to rest."
In this
highly charged emotional atmosphere, we have to stand strongly behind the
principle that all life is sacred, even that of a terrible criminal. The Church cannot at one moment mount a mammoth campaign
to respect life in the fight against abortion and at the same time ignore the
fact that here in the twenty-first century we are still eliminating life in the
name of justice. One of the great gifts of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the
saintly departed Archbishop of Chicago, is the doctrine of the seamless
garment. Basically, this doctrine states that we have to be consistent and
support all human life. There is no seam in the garment, no line where the
justification for eliminating human life changes[3].
I know that there are some who read this who are thinking
that I am taking a liberal position regarding capital punishment. No, I am
taking the position of the Catholic Church. The Church does not choose liberal or conservative positions. The
Church proclaims the truth and liberals or conservatives decide if this fits
into their own agendas.
Perhaps the most difficult words we pray today and every day
are those words found in the Lord's Prayer: Forgive
us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. That archaic
word, trespass, means to cross the line. When we say the Our Father we are
saying that we will forgive those who cross the line of common decency so that
we also might be forgiven for any ways that we have crossed the line. If we
refuse to forgive, if we demand the law of talons, an eye for an eye, if we
desire vengeance more than Christ's presence, then we are refusing to accept
Jesus Christ himself.
Christianity is continually reforming itself. Christian
society must continually scrutinize its actions to see if it is living up to
the standards set by the Lord. Consider slavery. It took almost nineteen
hundred years for Christians to recognize that slavery was incompatible with
Christianity. It will take many more years for Christians to eliminate the
various ways the law of talons has been embedded into our culture. But the
standard is there. The standard for what is Christian and what is not Christian
is the Law of the New Kingdom, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Word of God.
G. K. Chesterton certainly had it right: The problem with
Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting but that it has
not been tried. Christ never said
that following Him would be easy. Nor did he say that His followers would ever
enjoy the majority position. Jesus just said that He would be with us always. That
is worth every sacrifice, even the sacrifice of our deepest, darkest desires ■
[1] Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936)
better known as G.K. Chesterton, was an English writer, lay theologian, poet,
dramatist, journalist, orator, literary and art critic, biographer, and
Christian apologist. Chesterton is often referred to as the "prince of
paradox."
[2] 7th
Sunday of Ordinary Time (A),
February 23, 2014. Readings: Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18; Responsorial Psalm
103:1-2, 3-4, 8, 10, 12-13; 1 Corinthians 3:16-23; Matthew 5:38-48.
[3] Joseph Louis Bernardin (originally Bernardini) (April 2,
1928 – November 14, 1996) was an American Cardinal of the Catholic Church. He
served as Archbishop of Chicago from 1982 until his death, and was elevated to
the cardinalate in 1983. In the same year, Cardinal Bernardin developed the
"Consistent Ethic of Life" (or CLE) ideology, which expressed his
response to living in an age in which he believed modern technologies
threatened the sanctity of human life. Bernardin's CLE philosophy is sometimes
called the "seamless garment", a reference from John 19:23 to the
seamless robe of Jesus. The seamless garment philosophy holds that issues such
as abortion, capital punishment, militarism, euthanasia, social injustice and
economic injustice all demand a consistent application of moral principles that
value the sacredness of human life. In response to critiques from some pro-life
activists, Bernardin clarified that the ethic never meant that all threats to
life were equal, from a societal or political standpoint. One of his final
works was writing a book about his own dying, an excerpt of which served as a
Newsweek Magazine cover story, and which admirers saw as a lesson in dying.
