“If Looks Could Kill”

Exodus 20:13

Eugene Peterson: “We do not simplify our lives by getting rid of other lives no matter how inconvenient or disgusting or impossible they seem to us.

[prayer]

What is murder? In terms of Commandment Six murder is the violent, unauthorized, irresponsible, or arbitrary taking of human life. In terms of Jesus’ commentary on Commandment Six in the Sermon on the Mount murder is an act of violence that arises out of feelings of anger and hatred.

Exodus 20:13 tells us that murder is absolutely forbidden by God. It doesn’t matter whether the act is premeditated or not. Furthermore, the Law of Moses did not differentiate between murder as an act of commission and murder as an act of omission. What we call manslaughter was considered murder. Whether, after much planning, I shoot you dead, or in the heat of the moment I stab you to death, or I drive after drinking and accidentally run over a child, it’s all murder.

In today’s Gospel Lesson Jesus is more concerned with the kind of hot rage or simmering resentment that moves us to kill somebody. The New Testament as a whole regards such anger, whether it leads to murder or not, as sinful. Anger is to be dealt with in terms of forgiveness and reconciliation. We are never supposed to let our anger simmer. The Apostle Paul’s admonition that we not let the sun go down on our anger is a really good piece of advice.

Back to Commandment Six: The verb that is translated as murder is totally different from those describing killing in war or capital punishment. Killing someone as part of participating in just, righteous, and sanctioned warfare is not murder according to Commandment Six. Neither is capital punishment that is sanctioned and carried out by the covenant community.

Back to the New Testament: Paul is very clear in Romans 13 about the state’s right and responsibility to carry out capital punishment. He, of course, was working under the assumption that those authorized to do this were doing so only by the authority of God. We have to remember that when Paul wrote those words the Empire was not an enemy of the church. I doubt that he would have understood the Empire’s murderous persecution of Christians as an act blessed by God.

Jesus’ emphasis was on forgiveness and reconciliation. He advocated turning the other cheek, forgiving seventy times seven, going the extra mile and forgiving one’s enemies. Violence for whatever reason is not valued in the Sermon on the Mount.

How are we to interpret all of that? Quite simply, murder as defined by Commandment Six in any form is prohibited. We don’t go around killing other people without a biblically sanctioned reason. Furthermore, in order to avoid such killing we must deal with our anger in healthy and appropriate ways, being always ready to forgive and striving always to achieve reconciliation.

I think that it’s safe to assume that we all have a pretty good idea what murder is. Killing your spouse in a fit of jealous rage, fatally shooting someone in the commission of a crime, or going on a murderous rampage because you want to get even with somebody over some real or imagined hurt: those are all murders. And biblically speaking, getting drunk and plowing your car into a school bus full of children, fatally injuring one or more of them, well, that’s murder too.

That brings us to the big three ethical conundrums of our time: capital punishment, abortion, and war. When and why are they wrong? Let me start by saying, that all three of them can only be sanctioned as an act of absolute last resort, and some sincere and faithful Christians believe that one or all of those things are wrong no matter what the circumstances.

Capital punishment is, for most of us, a mostly academic exercise. We know that it happens. We’ve heard most of the pros and cons. Some Christians cite Romans 13 as the biblical mandate for it. Others, taking seriously Jesus’ words about forgiveness, reconciliation, and turning the other cheek see it as an act of state-sponsored vengeance.

It’s easy to argue both sides of the debate when we are far way from and emotionally uninvolved in it. But what if you’re the parent, brother, sister, or spouse of someone who has been murdered? Or the parent, brother, sister, or spouse of the murderer who has been condemned to death? What if you are a judge, prosecutor, or jury member who has to make real life decisions about whether or not the death penalty is acceptable? For such folks capital punishment is no longer an academic exercise. It’s real. It’s difficult, even more so when you are a faithful Christian. When and what do we forgive? When and why do we punish someone to the extreme?

And it’s all complicated by the fact that we’re all sinners. And the fact that we cannot righteously put ourselves in God’s place. Ultimately only God is sovereign over life and death. If, after a fair trial in which there is overwhelming evidence of guilt, and the crime is defined by law as capital, and furthermore we know that people have been mistakenly put to death, what do we do? My personal belief is that it’s better to be safe than sorry. While we are capable of taking a life, we are not capable of restoring one.

Moving on: For some Christians, and I’m one of them, abortion is almost always murder. A life is taken, often violently. I would hypothesize that 99 times out of 100, or maybe even 999 times out of a thousand, abortions are simply used as a form of birth control. In such cases, having a baby is at worst a hardship or at best an inconvenience. The timing is wrong. The finances don’t add up. It will interfere with one’s education or career. There is the threat of losing a boyfriend, fiancé, or husband if you don’t abort. Your parents will kick you out of the house for being pregnant.

In response to the last two, I can only say that any man who puts that kind of pressure on a woman isn’t worth having around anyway, and any parents who kick an unmarried and pregnant daughter out of the house are pretty lousy parents. Thank goodness there are places for such unfortunate young women to go. And as an editorial aside, any church that deems abortion a sin had better be ready to provide viable options for those who need them.

And what if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest? What if the girl or woman involved is severely retarded? What if the baby will never be able to live outside the womb? What if saving the baby means letting the mother die? Is abortion then a viable Christian option? Probably, but that is a heavily qualified probably. Again only God is sovereign over life and death. Again, taking this step must be an act of last resort. It must be done thoughtfully and prayerfully and with the full knowledge that a life is being taken.

And then there’s war. That long-ago Civil War general was right: war is hell. War is destructive. War is expensive. War kills people, often innocent people – let’s call collateral damage what it is, the death of innocent civilians. No matter how noble one’s reasons are for going to war, war is itself not a noble thing. Atrocities are committed, sometimes by the so-called good guys. Deadly mistakes are made – friendly fire can be just as fatal as the unfriendly kind.

In the Christian tradition going to war is one of those “we-have-no-other-option” choices. In the Christian tradition of just warfare unprovoked wars of aggression are unjust. We do not fight them for profit. We do not fight them for national pride. We do not fight them as a matter of revenge. We do not fight them for political or economic advantage.

We do not fight them to expand our territory or sphere of influence. We do not fight them to display our racial superiority. We do not fight them in order to impose our will on another nation or people. We do not fight them in order to spread any “ism,” be it communism, socialism, fascism, or dare I say it, good old American style democracy. And we sure don’t fight them for oil.

We fight them because doing so is the lesser of two evils. And when we go to war we do not do so in an atmosphere akin to some sort of national pep rally. We go to war knowing that people - real people, not caricatures - are going to die, some at our hand. In today’s world we Christians who go to war must realize that some of the people we kill may very well be our brothers and sisters in Christ. And when we do so it is never a matter of killing them all and letting God sort them out. That is a despicable notion.

War, like capital punishment and abortion, is a horrible thing, a thing we never enter into lightly. And when we do, we must be as sure as is humanly possible that what we’re doing is God’s will. Otherwise we’ll be committing murder. Amen.