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Friends United Meeting |
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July 1998
Killers and Miracles
by Johan Maurer
Public reactions to Timothy McVeigh's death sentence for the Oklahoma City bombing were overwhelmingly in favor of the sentence. As newspaper reporters gathered comments from men and women on the street, it was a very rare person who was not out for blood. The same reaction seems to follow every death sentence in every notorious capital case. The most powerful approval comes from the actual survivors of the victims.
I can't help asking myself, "Why am I different?" Why have I never felt a desire to see my sister Ellen's murderer die? (I told her story in the March 1995 Quaker Life.) Is it because I loved my sister less than those other survivors loved their dead? Am I numb to her own final sufferings as she lay dying of her massive shotgun wounds? Am I weirdly soft-hearted about her killer, Tyrone King, or about the social origins of crime in general?
No, no and no!!! I loved Ellen and I miss her constantly, though she has been dead 28 years. Her birthday, June 30, is always a difficult day for me. I have often found myself contemplating her final minutes of life and hoping that in eternity she has been recompensed for that awful agony. And whatever the difficulties of Tyrone King's life might have been, nobody forced him to pull the trigger on a fourteen-year-old girl.
King killed Ellen; why should he not die? The fact is, he will die, at God's appointed time, and face God's judgment as we all will. If we lived in a theocracy under the direct government of God, we might find a direct way of carrying out God's will for Tyrone King through human agents, whether that involves redemption or execution.
We do not live in a perfect theocracy. The human agents and human government we have now are not trustworthy to make final judgments involving deliberate ending of life. I do not want people to learn to justify executions any more than I want us to learn to justify abortions or euthanasia or militarism: we find it too easy to adjust our rationales to match our convenience.
For example, Tyrone King was not created by God to murder my sister. What happened in his life path to make that awful crime possible? It was his crime, don't get me wrong; we cannot "blame everything on society" and forget about personal responsibility. However, we do have a responsibility to study how society contributes to limiting the possibilities and molding the outlook of its young people if only to reduce the number of future murders. It is just too convenient for society simply to "erase" its mistakes rather than having to confront them and attempt to reduce them. When we kill the murderer, we say with all the finality we can muster that all the responsibility for this tragedy will be borne by that one person; the rest of us are off the hook.
I'm simply unwilling to grant the power to kill to government institutions which are subject to all the temptations we see in human systems, temptations such as the willingness to rationalize our own convenience and denial and give inordinate influence to power, money and social prejudice.
Finally, in my own life, I have known the miraculous power of God, which
makes me bold to ask for even more miracles. For murderers to come to
know God personally in Jesus Christ and to repent fully may seem miraculous,
but let's pray and rejoice when it happens! This is why getting to know
Perry Warthan (page 8) has been a blessing. And every time I pick up a
newspaper and read about a victim's relative who does not demand the killer's
blood, I know another heart-sized miracle has happened.
Johan Maurer is general secretary of Friends United Meeting and editor of Quaker Life.
Copyright (c) 1998 Friends United Meeting
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