The Cross and the Death Penalty

St. Nectarios Lenten Lecture Series:
The Holy Cross and The Sacred Call to Abolish the Death Penalty

St. Nectarios Greek Orthodox Church
Palatine, Illinois – Wednesday, March 3, 2010

offered by:
His Grace, Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos

Chancellor, Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago

 

During this week of Great and Holy Lent, we are presented with the image of the holy and life-creating Cross of our Savior Jesus Christ.  Right in the middle of the great fast we are confronted with this image—a symbol that simultaneously reveals the tragedy and gruesomeness of death, and the joy of life.  At every Sunday matins or orthros, following the Gospel, we hear the beautiful announcement of the mystery of our salvation:

Having beheld the Resurrection of Christ, let us worship the holy Lord Jesus who is alone without sin.  We venerate Your Cross, O Christ, and we praise and glorify Your Holy Resurrection.  You are our God; we have no other than You, and we call upon Your holy name.  Come, all you faithful, let us venerate the holy resurrection of Christ. For behold, through the Cross joy has come to the whole world. Always blessing the Lord, let us praise His Resurrection. For enduring the Cross for us, He has destroyed death by death.

The sacrificial death of our Savior is always balanced in our sacred tradition with the victory of life over death, the transformation of the Cross from a sign of a tortuous death into the sign of a new foundation of life—eternal life.  During the Lenten season, we rightly focus on the transformation of our own lives, a life touched by mortality, sin and corruption, into the everlasting, blessed life of God’s Kingdom.  Yet there is also a need for us to expand the horizon of our vision during this season, for our own life is not lived in isolation from the human beings around us, and our relationship with God cannot be privatized in such a manner that we exclude from this relationship anyone else.  

Indeed, the contemplation of the Cross of Jesus Christ in the middle of Great Lent can be a reminder of our need to react against the powers of death, even—as some would call it—the “culture” of death that insidiously pervades our society which we often take for granted as the most advanced, the fairest or most just.  This evening, I would simply note that one of the more challenging aspects of this is our reaction or inaction regarding the death penalty and capital punishment that still has the support of perhaps a majority of Americans, Christians and Orthodox Christians among them.

Having beheld the Resurrection of Christ, let us worship the holy Lord Jesus who is alone without sin.

A few years ago, a certain radio personality (who shall remain nameless) asked me a most interesting and important question.  "What business," he asked, "does the Church have involving itself in issues like the death penalty?" 

Calmly but firmly, I replied, "We are simply reclaiming our historic role." I might have answered, however: “What business did the Hebrew prophets have involving themselves in the unjust treatment of orphans and widows?  What business did the “matriarch” Esther have interceding for her people when they were a minority group in Persia?  What business did the Apostles Paul and James have decrying partiality and discrimination?  What business did St. Athanasios the Great or Saint Nicholas have advocating for those condemned to death before the fury of the emperor?”

The answer, of course, is that it is the business of us all to respond to Christ as He is found in the myriad needs of “the least of His brethren.” St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians tells us “if one member [of the body] suffers, all suffer together” (12:26). 

The many ills of society - warfare and hatred; racial and ethnic intolerance; poverty and hunger; that great evil I address here today, capital punishment -- these ills and others afflict the entire human family, for all human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. We are all immersed in these evils, the bitter fruits of our darker natures, which are the results of our baser instincts. The scandal of their existence is not that we are fallible; what is scandalous is our failure to redress these wrongs.

Our Greek Orthodox Church is determined to move from theoria to praxis in our ministries of outreach.  The time has come for us to be true to our traditions and to reclaim our historic identification with those who suffer.  Indeed, during this season of Great and Holy Lent, with its emphasis on almsgiving, charity, forgiveness and repentance, make this an imperative so that we may truly appreciate and celebrate Pascha in spirit and in truth.

 Our religious and moral teachings demand of us a higher standard of human and humane interactions. Each social ill is, in fact, an invitation to spiritual renewal, an opportunity to make compassion, humility and fervent prayer the hallmarks of our humanity once again.  Even when - or perhaps especially when - one of these social ills doesn't seem to affect our own community directly, the call to minister is still there. The question that we must ask ourselves is how willing we are to proclaim love in the face of hate for our neighbors and for the strangers in our midst. Indeed, it is easy to be compassionate and reach out to those whom we know and love and who are most like us.  It is when we reach out to those whom we do not know, those who are unlike us, that we are living the Christian Gospel’s message of love.

Never is this truer than when we encounter the human face of capital punishment.  For us – for people of faith, servants of redemption -- understanding and being one with a person who has been convicted of heinous crimes against helpless victims is an enormous challenge. Let me share my own experience with you.

I met the “notorious” Andrew Korkoraleis at the Pontiac Correctional Institution, just weeks before his scheduled execution.  Although I had visited inmates before, this was the first time I was to meet with a death row inmate.  After encountering the institutional and callous prison personnel as well as enduring a body search, I passed through several gates, which seemed to close out the world behind.  I was then taken to a cold, concrete visiting room and was instructed sit in one of four chairs around a bare table. All of them were bolted to the floor.

Andrew, with his hands shackled together, was escorted to my table by a prison guard.  Of course, I will not reveal the details of our discussion. However, I need you to know that instead of encountering a monster I found Andrew to be a person of great faith, who was at peace with himself as well as with his accusers.

For all the 17 years he had been imprisoned, Andrew had maintained his innocence. On the basis of that first visit, and many other direct experiences I had with Andrew, I firmly believe that he was indeed innocent of the crime for which he was ultimately killed.  I cannot communicate to you what it felt like to have bonded so deeply with a person who had spent all of his adult life imprisoned.  

Nor can I describe what it felt like to have seen Christ face to face in prison, shackled, alone, with no family or friends.  His only remaining family was his Church.  His Greek Orthodox Church stood by his side as his family and galvanized the wider religious community in the face of the great social evil of capital punishment.  We felt it incumbent upon ourselves to stand decisively for clemency for Andrew and to stand in opposition to the death penalty in general.  Even though our pleas fell upon insensitive and even deaf political ears, we knew that we had to do what was Christ-like. 

And we tried - with letters, with demonstrations; with all the moral authority we could bring to bear.  We publicized the fact that not a single shred of physical or scientific evidence existed that tied Andrew to the crime for which he was to be executed - no fingerprints, no DNA, no eye witnesses.  In fact the only evidence against him was a confession obtained by police that Andrew almost instantly recanted. 

As the fatal day of his execution approached, we gathered many religious leaders in our Cathedral to offer the then-governor our collective wisdom and prayers in his struggle.  Former Governor Ryan, as you may know, had turned a deaf ear to the religious community in general, and in particular to the religious community of which Andrew Kokoraleis was a part.

On March 17, 1999, our brother-in-Christ Andrew was put to death by the state of Illinois.  Two days later I returned home from a very emotionally draining and difficult day at my office and received an ominous letter in the mail.  It was from Andrew.  With great care I opened the envelope. The I read the enclosed card and hand-written note.  I absorbed every word into my being.  I took what Andrew told me to heart and I clearly heard his every word as a personal calling.   Andrew's correspondence gratefully asked and hoped that somehow by his execution others might be spared a similar fate and that all executions might be terminated.  He thanked me for the support I had provided him and told me that we would certainly see each other again in the Kingdom of Heaven. 

I live everyday with the prayer that Andrew's dying wishes will be granted. In the meantime, two weeks after Andrew's state-sanctioned homicide, Former Governor Ryan indicated a reduced obstinacy toward the religious community by making a public appearance at a Prayer Breakfast. Later, as we know, he publicly announced he regretted the various decisions he made in regard to the implementation of the death penalty in Illinois and placed a moratorium on executions, a moratorium that remains, although in theory it is temporary until reforms for “fairness” and to ensure “just” executions occur—in other words, so that innocents not be put to death mistakenly, as so many in Illinois almost were, and perhaps—as I believe—actually were.

It is one thing to be an advocate for the unjustly accused or convicted.  There is generally recognized nobility in such a struggle.  It is another thing—more difficult—to be an advocate for the guilty.  Inevitably, this is what those who work for the abolition of capital punishment are—in part.  And in our society, there is usually only scorn for those who seek to prevent even the guilty from being put to death by the state.

In Orthodox sacred tradition, every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. We are each of us an icon, an image of Christ and a mirror to one another of God’s living presence in the world. No human being - no murderer, no governor who in essence flipped the switch, nor the citizens whom she or he represents - no one is a “monster.”  And every human being, including Andrew and every other death row inmate, is of value and worth as a person. This is true even for those who seem most evil, and this is a mystery and perhaps the ultimate challenge of our Faith.

This is not as outrageous as it may at first sound.  As people of Faith, we cannot in good conscience divide the body of humankind into categories of any kind, unless we place everyone but Jesus in the category of the guilty: He is the only one without sin and, strictly speaking, the only one who does not deserve death which is the consequence of all sin.  When we announce that “He endured the Cross for us,” we are precisely saying that He endured the Cross for each of us.

And this brings us full circle as to why we focus on ministries of social justice for all, making the context of our activism not just our own faith-community, but also the entire society in which we live. We do this because we are always in danger of sophistry if we live only in the light of our intellectual traditions. We risk the spiritual hypocrisy of contriving flimsy, intellectually convenient excuses for our IN-activism against such culturally-advocated means of death such as the death penalty (though we could also include abortion on demand, euthanasia and medically-assisted suicide).  We always run the risk of this hypocrisy - of keeping the external observances of 'the law' but forgetting the absolute commandment to serve others with mercy and justice, for this is the natural response of those who fulfill the greatest commandment, to love God with all our heart, and that commandment the Lord Jesus equates with it: to love our neighbor.  

Not long before He went to His public execution, Christ spoke these stinging, sobering words to all religious leaders of every generation.  “Woe unto you” He exclaimed, “for you tithe mint, dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy and faith.  It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others” [Matthew 23:23]. 

Our own society that professes a great sense of justice and is proud of its Bill of Rights neglects the “weightier matters” of justice and mercy and faith. We bask in our self-absorbed sense of nobility of high ideals and then react with a visceral anger to those who have been accused or convicted of crimes. This anger leads to our society’s inability to listen to its own pain and inconsistency in the matter of the Death Penalty. We can see this in society’s reaction to Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ”. It amazes me, and defies easy understanding when one sees conservative Christians so moved by such graphic and intense scenes of violence when reliving the death penalty pronounced upon Jesus. They are evidently not able to juxtapose these images against the self-satisfaction they feel when they encourage the state to execute those accused of “capital crimes.” How can one cry at suffering and death and still relish a feeling of revenge at the same act done in your name?  

Many of us may recall former Governor Ryan's speech announcing the commutation of death sentences to life sentences in prison for 167 condemned prisoners. Soon after that announcement was made, the then religion reporter for the Sun-Times, Cathleen Falsani, called and asked for my response. “With this step,” I told her, “we are now on the threshold of a new moral awakening in this state, and I am interested to see where it goes.” I am fascinated, as I know you are, by the vital question of how and when our civil leaders will learn to address the weightier matters of the law that Christ mentioned.

Since the commutations (and four pardons granted by Gov. Ryan), the judicial branch of the state of Illinois has reaffirmed its resistance to reinstating the death penalty. The Attorney General of Illinois, Lisa Madigan and attorneys from across the state filed suit in Illinois Supreme Court to reinstate the death penalty in 32 of the commuted cases. Their principle claim was that they were trying to clarify the limits of the Governor’s constitutional power to grant clemency and to commute sentences imposed by the judiciary. The state Supreme Court refused to reinstate the death penalty upon those cases. It ruled that the power of the Governor to grant clemency with a wide authority in a variety of legal configurations was constitutional. While there is still much ground to cover before we realize abolition, this decision begs a question for those of us in the abolition movement. How can we assure that elected officials have a moral compass that guides them toward a more humane attitude toward crime and punishment? The court’s decision makes it incumbent upon us to examine the moral and ethical position of every person who runs for Executive office in our state. Therefore, we too must orient our moral compasses and encourage our fellow citizens to see and find what St. Paul called “a more excellent way” regarding criminal justice.

All of us who work to dismantle the barbarity of capital punishment stand at the threshold of a new moral awakening. All of us remain personally and passionately interested in seeing where the commutation decision may lead. All of us await a moral and ethical decision worthy of a great civilization and noble principles.

But in the meantime, all of us are challenged to "rise up and cross the threshold of a new moral awakening.” Of course, there are reasons to abolish the death penalty other than those evoked by a new “moral awakening.” 

Rather than righting the wrong of murder by convicting the guilty, the death penalty repeatedly sends the innocent to death row.  

Rather than executing only “the worst of the worst,” the death penalty is imposed upon the poorest, the darkest-skinned, and the most shoddily represented among us.  

Rather than saving the state the expense of life imprisonment, the death penalty costs more -- at least three times as much to execute a person as to sentence him or her to life without the possibility of parole. 

Rather than acting as a deterrent, the death penalty prevails in states with higher homicide and overall crime rates. 

Rather than giving families of victims any kind of true closure, the death penalty forces them to obsess on vengeance, to continuously open old wounds. It draws them into the sinfulness of complicity in state-sanctioned murder.

And finally, rather than addressing the complex social problems that provoke violent crime in the first place, the death penalty actually contributes to the worsening climate of violence.

These are all compelling reasons, and all proven beyond a reasonable doubt - but they are practical, “death penalty as consumer fraud” issues. At a higher level, an awakened moral consciousness moves us beyond retribution to restoration.  At a higher level, an awakened moral consciousness of the greatest love exhibited by the Crucifixion of Christ for us would move us to heal rather than injure one another, to give life and nurture those broken by life rather than simplistically to take it for any reason. At this higher level, we must revisit the possibility that an enlightened and advanced society may find ways of intervening in the cycle of violence and abuse that diminishes human beings to the point that they value life so little as to threaten and destroy it.

Rising up to meet a new moral challenge means that healing, deliverance, recovery and liberty begin to govern our society’s ethical choices, not retribution.  Rising up means standing up not only for the “innocent,” but for those judged or presumed to be “guilty” as well. When we rise up and cross the threshold of a new moral awakening, we realize that people cannot be divided into dehumanizing categories of any kind. We cannot characterize some lives as innocent and therefore valuable, while others are guilty and therefore dispensable. We cannot affirm the shallow sophistry underlying a position that pretends to uphold the value of human life by imposing the death penalty on those we think may be guilty of killing. And no amount of reform can fix this fundamental flaw in the death penalty.

When distinctions are made between which lives have value and which lives do not, some lives are inevitably relegated to a status that makes them less human than others.  Some are deemed deserving of clemency; others are not. Some lives, so-called “innocent lives” are found to be worth sparing, while so-called “guilty” lives are treated as dispensable. Tragically and shamefully, this reality has become ingrained in the institutionalized bias, bigotry and racism that pervade the use of the death penalty in the United States. And no amount of “reform” can fix such flaws either. All of us are called to rise up as often as we must to tear down these deadly biases.

The value of one life is not upheld by the destruction of another. A family grieving a violent loss is not healed by the state's unleashing of that same violence, the ultimate violence, upon an assumed perpetrator. Indeed, no “debt to society” is “paid” by executing a human being. As Valparaiso University Law Professor Richard Stith has put it so succinctly, capital punishment “doesn't pay a debt, it kills the debtor.”

Ultimately, the death penalty as an instrument of justice - beyond clemency and beyond commutations and beyond reforms – tragically fails to deliver the justice that it trumpets. Certainly, the combined moral awakenings regarding the value of human life and the awareness of capital punishment's complete and utter failure have led to its abolition throughout the world.

To this point I have been speaking at a level that seems to be somewhat of a common denominator among those seeking abolition of the death penalty for what I have been referring to as practical and moral reasons.  And certainly, what we commonly call morality, justice and ethics are grounds for our common witness to the injustice of capital punishment.  But let me expand on one point—that of our own faith tradition as an Orthodox Christian, for here I feel that the Eastern Christian perspective actually rises above these categories in its commitment to the dignity and value of every human life no matter the circumstances in which that life is lived—“rich or poor, king or soldier, righteous or sinner” as the Orthodox funeral service phrases it.

I have referred to the “more excellent way” that Saint Paul mentions in his letter to the Corinthians.  This is the way of love.  In the Bible and in theology, love is not a sentiment or feeling or emotion.  It is a manner of existing.  The Greek word in the New Testament for love, agape, means etymologically “not me.”  Thus, to love means to live in such a manner as to not be concerned with the self, but only with the one we love.  Of course, the teaching of Jesus Christ is that we love everyone, and this without condition.  It means to be concerned with the life of the one we love, and this of course precludes ending that life.  Love is always an act of freedom, a choice we make: to love or not to love.  And the New Testament is clear, that if we love, we love because God first loved us (1 John 4:19).  In other words, the capacity to love—and we each have this capacity—comes from God.  

But as an act of freedom, love brings us to a place that is really beyond our conventional morality (what is considered right or wrong) and our commonly shared social ethics (what we ought to do or not do).   Love is not about ethics, but is all about our ethos, our way of being in the world.  The simple text of the Bible is that we should love our neighbor (and this really means everyone as the Parable of the Good Samaritan shows, or the parable of the sheep and the goats that we heard on the Sunday of the Last Judgment, or “Meat Fare”).  But Jesus of Nazareth takes this one step further: as you do to the least of these, so you do to me.  And this means precisely that we must treat each and every human being as we would treat Christ.  This sounds rather simple, but is in fact the most difficult of teachings.  For if we truly love, there is nothing that we would not do for our beloved.  And this moves us beyond what “ought to be” done.  It moves us beyond categories of right and wrong into the realm of self-emptying for the sake of the other person.  It is sacrifice of our life, plain and simple, for another—whoever that may be.  

Obviously, such a calling, such a vocation and ethos is simply impossible to legislate and is, as Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon writes, “inapplicable in a justly, that is, morally, organized society.  It would be inconceivable to regulate social life on such a basis [of unconditional love for our neighbor], for there would be no room for law and order.”  Love is not a law (an infringement or limt on freedom) nor can it be “ordered.”  

The prescriptions of the Sermon on the Mount, such as the one to turn the left cheek to someone who strikes you on the right (Mt 5:39) is certainly a far cry from our society’s sense of justice.  The call to love our enemies in the Christian tradition is another example of an ethos that is largely inapplicable in the American justice system.  But then the problem, from an Orthodox Christian point of view, is the very idea that justice can be systematically administered in a manner that is just, meaning “righteous,” a standard that means for us consonant with God’s unconditional, self-emptying and self-sacrificing love and example.

One may point out that I have been an activist for seeking to reform our system of justice.  This is not because I believe that the system can be reformed in such a manner as to be consistent with this ethos of love.  It cannot.  We live in a society of laws, a society of systems, a society where justice requires the payment of debts, not the forgiveness of them (unless you have extremely good political relationships with the U.S. Congress).  It is a society where the death penalty still exists because it does, in fact, hold a certain logic of it own, consistent with the lex talionis: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an arm for an arm, a life for a life.”  It also, paradoxically, perhaps, appeals to feelings and sentiment of grief and anger.

Yet as a bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ, I fight against the injustice of capital punishment precisely because the Church cannot abandon or betray or distort the Gospel, and present to society at large an ethos different from that of Christ’s life.  In the final analysis, the Church is in this world, but it is not of it (Jn 15:16).  Despite the “way of the world,” the Church must persevere in converting the ethos of the world, and this we can only do with acts of love, one at a time.  This process begins with the very worst, most unjust and egregious example of capital punishment: that of our Lord and Savior on the Cross.  Yet, it is exactly through the Cross that “joy has come to the whole world,” to show us not only God’s perfect love for us, but also our ability to love as our response to that gift—to be “blessing the Lord always.”

And so at a very basic level, to change minds and hearts (and the meaning of the New Testament word we usually translate as “repent”, metanoieite, literally means to change one’s mind), to change minds we begin at a common denominator of language—those elements on which we can agree.  These are the practical and moral (because there certainly is a right and wrong) aspects of the calls to abolish state-sanctioned murder of human beings created in the image and likeness of God.  On these, all rational minds can agree (whether they will or not).  From this point, what I have called our new moral awakening, we can move to the more excellent way, and for Christians this is always the way of love in Christ Jesus.  

During this part of the Fast, we are confronted with the power of death in the Cross, even as we are confronted on a daily basis with the power of death in our world.  Yet if we truly come to understand the gift of the Cross, its power to give new life, to actually destroy the power and dominion of death by the death of our holy Lord Jesus, then our joy will only be manifest by constantly reacting against death by upholding the absolute sanctity of life—all life endowed by our Creator.  Then, and only then, can we truly be seen as those who have “beheld the Resurrection of Christ” and who truly “worship our holy Lord Jesus who is alone without sin.”