Seventy Times Seven

The scribes and Pharisees brought a woman along who had been caught committing adultery; and making her stand there in full view of everybody, they said to Jesus, "Master, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery, and Moses has ordered us in the Law to condemn women like this to death by stoning. What have you to say?" They asked him this as a test, looking for something to use against him. But Jesus bent down and started writing on the ground with his finger. As they persisted with their question, he looked up and said, "If there is one of you who has not sinned, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." Then he bent down and wrote on the ground again. When they heard this, they went away one by one ...

-- John 8:3-9

THE GOSPEL EXPLAINS IT all. Capital punishment was the rule of the land. Everyone was in on it. Death held final sway over the poor and the rebellious. If Jesus was to speak for love of life, at some point he had to speak against their love of death.

The religious men of his time brought to Jesus a woman whom they were going to stone to death, legally, for committing the crime of adultery. Her male companion, who also would have committed the adultery, was not to be killed; he was not even brought forward. When Jesus was pressed for his opinion, as they were about to stone her, he began to trace on the ground.

What he traced there has boggled the thoughtful for centuries. But it is not so much what he traced that matters but the fact that he stopped to trace on the ground at all. His calm, childlike response must have taken the scribes and Pharisees totally by surprise. It changed the center of their attention from their fury and anger to his scribbling on the ground. Once he had their attention, once they were listening and trying to figure out what he was doing, then he proceeded to give an answer, knowing they could hear it and a life might be saved.

"Let the one without sin cast the first stone."

Jesus not only condemned the death penalty, he poetically chastised the scribes and Pharisees for considering themselves sinless and able to pass judgment on others. Jesus' words made them realize their own sinfulness and filled them with shame.

His words should have the same impact on us today.

A FEW MILES SOUTH OF ATLANTA, Georgia, just off the main interstate highway, past the McDonald's, across the street from a 200-year-old cemetery, lies the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center, otherwise known as death row. The grounds are maintained as well as those of an elite country club. After a half mile of travel, past the blue lake on the right, tall white towers appear in the distance, connected by white walls and chain fences that enclose a mammoth, white, windowless building. Up close, the scene is unusual and disturbing in the extreme. It immediately reminded me of Dachau.

In 1981 when I visited Dachau, the infamous Nazi concentration camp, I could not help noticing that it was situated in a typical, suburban German town. Behind all the green trees loomed a large compound cornered by tall, imposing towers, which in their heyday had been guarded by soldiers 24 hours a day. At Dachau business as usual meant death as usual. Suburban German life proceeded normally.

It is the same in Georgia and across the United States at every death row. Killing takes place inside these massive structures as a matter of routine; outside, the routine of daily life proceeds as usual. Currently, 107 people live on Georgia's death row, waiting to be killed -- legally -- by their government. More than 2,100 people sit on death rows in 37 states around the country. More than 5,000 people have been executed in the United States in this century; 109 have been put to death since 1977.

From atop a five-story white tower a voice yelled down, "What are you doing here?"

"I've come to visit a friend," I shouted back, straining to be heard.

After 30 minutes of negotiations, interviews at various security checkpoints, and a maze of long hallways and cell doors, I came upon the visitation room. I had come to Jackson, Georgia to visit my friend, Billy Neal Moore, who has been on death row for 15 years, longer than anyone else in the United States.

BILLY GREW UP IN A POOR Georgia family, married early, fathered a son, enlisted in the Army, and saw his marriage break up. He had always struggled financially. One day, after he and a friend named George Curtis had been drinking, they planned to rob the home of George's uncle. After running from the scene with George, Billy returned alone to the home of the elderly uncle. The uncle approached Billy, apparently shot at him and missed, and then hit Billy's leg with the handle of a shotgun. In a panic, Billy shot and killed him with the gun. On July 17, 1974, after waiving trial by jury, Billy was sentenced to death.

Billy was granted a stay of execution in 1978. A few years later he was baptized in a prison bathtub, resulting in Billy's feeling "for the first time in my life an experience of total acceptance and love. God's love cut through and washed the scales from my heart," he reflected afterward.

In 1984, Billy was granted a second stay, just seven hours before his scheduled execution. Petitions on Billy's behalf included pleas for clemency from six relatives of the man Billy murdered. During his first six years in prison, Billy was never allowed outside; now, he is allowed outside briefly twice a week. Over the years Billy has corresponded with more than 100 people from across the country and the world. He acts as a counselor and convener of prayer groups on death row. The courts will make a final decision regarding his life by the end of the year.

Billy and I have become good friends during the five years that I have known him. From the time I received his first letter, after I had written to offer a word of friendship and consolation, I have been struck by his faith. He wrote: "Your letter was appreciated and I do thank you, but know that the Lord Jesus Christ is in full control of my life."

Over the years, Billy's insights, reflections, and prayers have touched me like the letters of Paul, who Christians tend to forget was a notorious murderer before he converted to Christ and became an apostle for the faith. Billy has become a person of the Spirit and the Word, of nonviolence and love, an apostle of Christ for many of us.

Ironically, Billy Neal Moore, a death row inmate, has become a teacher and model of Christian nonviolence for me. He prays with the strength of knowing that someone is listening. Rarely have I encountered such faith. "Here, on death row," he wrote to me one day, "I try to live a Christian life in ways that will get others to desire the life of Christ.

"My whole life has become a vow of nonviolence, as much as I can live," he continued. "The greatest wars and battles are in each of us, and it's only by the Holy Spirit that we can maintain peace ... I want to be nonviolent, so I respond kindly and respectfully to the guards and other prisoners," he told me on a recent visit. "I know God forgives me," he said.

"If churches really knew that the death penalty was adverse to Jesus Christ, then they wouldn't support it," Moore wrote. "So many Christians accept the salvation and forgiveness of God for themselves, yet for the people on death row there is no forgiveness at all, only death.

"People have to be reminded about the times when they did something wrong and realized it and changed," Moore wrote. "Christ is the changing agent in us all. If it can happen with them, why can't it happen with inmates on death row? The loving spirit of Christ, that changing agent, is at work in us all." No one should be killed, he concluded. We should all be given the chance to change, the chance to live.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS A SIGN of a deep sickness in our culture. Our culture is addicted to violence and is desperately ill. The plagues of abortion, war, racism, sexism, consumerism, apartheid, torture, and nuclear weapons are all signs of that illness in the world. The death penalty, like these other signs of society gone awry, is immoral, evil, unethical, and un-Christian.

Contrary to what its supporters claim, capital punishment -- as many studies have shown -- does not deter people from committing violent crime. Rather, it is used by the powerful to maintain the illusion that violent crime is under control and being disposed of. In reality, capital punishment "disposes of" the poor, primarily the black poor. Rich people who commit murder can hire lawyers to get them off death row. The poor are the ones who are killed on death row, and the government spends millions of dollars killing them. As Moore explained: "Since I've been on death row, the government has spent more than $1 million preparing for my death. If I had just a fraction of that money originally, I wouldn't be here. That's what I was looking for when I was young."

The death penalty is racist. According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, in a six-year period in Georgia, 39 percent of capital murder cases involved white victims, yet 84 percent of the death sentences imposed were in those cases with white victims. During that same period, black defendants were charged with 23 percent of murders of white victims, yet blacks received 46 percent of the death sentences imposed in those cases. Black defendants charged with killing white victims were 11 times more likely to be sentenced to death. Such discrimination exists not only in Georgia but everywhere the death penalty is used. Ninety percent of those on death row are there for killing white people, although each year almost half of homicide victims are black.

The death penalty is a slow form of torture, culminating in murder -- the premeditated, meticulously legal killing of a human being by another human being -- and by the entire society.

Capital punishment, like all violence, is inconsistent and illogical. In this case, society justifies capital punishment to set an "example" for those who kill. Approximately 20,000 people are murdered each year in this country, and 4,000 are convicted of murdering others. Out of that group, slightly more than 2,100 are sentenced to death.

AS CHRISTIANS, WE MUST recognize in every human being the presence of God. The scripture is explicit about this: God is in each one of us. We are all children of God, all redeemable. Particularly, Christ comes to us in the distressing guise of the poor, in our enemies, in the unborn, in prisoners. Followers of Jesus are therefore a pro-life people who side with any victim of violence, always resist death, and promote human life for all through steadfast mercy and compassion.

The challenge for us today is to take seriously Jesus' words on death and sin and forgiveness. The challenge is to hear the voice of God in the death row inmate saying, "Killing is wrong. Christians should not kill."

Our word is a word of forgiveness and life. We are asked to forgive and offer hospitality to the murderer, as Ananias was asked to accept Saul -- the notorious murderer -- into his house, where Saul became the beloved apostle Paul (Acts 9:10-19). Unfortunately, as Martin Luther King Jr. observed, "Capital punishment is society's final statement that we will not forgive."

Jesus' retort to capital punishment speaks to our common sinfulness. "Let the one without sin ..." challenges those of us who think we are not sinful. In reality, all people are sinners. This is part of our original sin. Even if we have not actually killed someone physically, like Billy Neal Moore has, we are guilty of participating in and supporting a system that has murdered thousands, indeed millions, of people in more than 100 wars during this century.

From God's perspective, we are all guilty. Not one of us is without sin. Like the crowd wanting to stone the adulterous woman, we should simply walk away from the idea of killing someone on death row, ashamed of ourselves. Jesus breaks the limits set by society on how much we are allowed to forgive others -- by forgiving everyone.

Capital punishment is as legal today as it was 2,000 years ago when Jesus was legally executed. Today we have the choice to stand with the executed, as Jesus did and Paul learned to, or the executioners, as Pilate and Herod did.

FOR FOLLOWERS OF JESUS, the only consistent ethic of life is the nonviolent ethic of the cross, the way of life that chooses to side with victims of injustice. Jesus taught his followers that true discipleship to him means not only not inflicting the penalty of death on others but risking the death penalty for oneself. The symbol of discipleship in the early community became the cross, which translates today into the electric chair.

The nonviolent ethic of the cross is a way of loving our enemies and all those whom the state condemns to death: the poor, the unborn, those on death row. We are to offer the healing hand of redemption to everyone, including those who the state says can no longer be redeemed.

We have to question -- peacefully, respectfully, nonviolently -- the people who have the power to kill others. Jesus questioned those who held the stones in their hands. We are asked to do the same, to confront the people who enforce this policy of death with the words, "Let the one without sin be the first to throw the switch."

The photos of cheering crowds at the places of executions are signs that our society lacks the desire to rise above such barbarism and violence. As long as people cheer and mock the murder of any human being, as long as they pay for it with their tax dollars, as long as they continue to do business as usual while the government executes people in prisons across the country, the killing and brutality will never end.

We are called to see Billy Neal Moore and everyone else on death row as Christ present in the world. We are invited to a radical forgiveness and healing, to forgive as God forgives others, to allow others to live. We are called to forgive 70 times seven times, not just those everyday small annoyances that others do to us, but cold-blooded murder as well -- even the murder of our loved ones. We are called to forgive the murderer as Christ forgives the murderer, as Christ forgives us. We are called to be reconciled with those who have injured us (Matthew 5:43-45) and to pray for forgiveness for our sins "as we forgive those who have sinned against us" (Matthew 6:12).

We must offer sympathy and support for the victims of violent crime and their families; we must also offer the compassion of Christ to those on death row and prevent their murder.

My visit with Billy Neal Moore ended with a prayer that God would enter into the hearts of us all and help us to choose life. Billy Neal Moore and others on death row continue that Gethsemane prayer vigil and invite us to undergo the change of heart that Billy has already undergone.

John Dear, S.J., was the coordinator of a church shelter for the homeless in Washington, D.C. when this article appeared. He is the author of Disarming the Heart: Toward a Vow of Nonviolence (Paulist Press, 1987).