Justice and Forgiveness

Justice and forgiveness

A woman has been executed in the United States, in the state of Georgia.  The story was that the woman,  Kelly had a lover and with him conspired to kill her husband.  Her background was that she came from a highly dysfunctional family  where there had been severe alcohol problems.   The lover stabbed the husband to death.  At his trial he entered a plea bargain.  He was spared the death penalty and given a long prison sentence.  She was arrested as an accomplice and sentenced to death.     She was sent to death row at the prison in Georgia.   This was in 1997.   Eighteen years later, she was executed by lethal injection, in spite of please for clemency from her children and many organisations.  That was on Wednesday.  Justice had at last been done.  The

man who stabbed her husband will be released in four years time.

This case has caused a furore.  Even the Pope asked for her life to be spared.   Why the furore?   Because she was immediately sorry for what she had done.  Not sorry as a way to avoid the death penalty, but genuinely sorry.  Full of remorse for the process she had started.

She did something about it, educating herself in prison, she joined a church, the Unitarian Universalists and was an active prison member of the CLF, the Church of the Larger Fellowship which is part of the Unitarian Universalist outreach worldwide.   She studied their distance learning courses.     She was a model prisoner, She became like a minister, caring for fellow inmates and staff alike.  

She was a changed person.   Even she would not have recognised the person she was in 1997 when she first entered that prison.

But justice is justice, so the sentence was carried out.    Rev Meg Riley who is the minister to the Church of the Larger Fellowship said it is Justice at its worst.      Calvanist justice she called it -  you commit a crime so you will be punished.   Lex talionis an eye for an eye, a life for a life.  Justice  is black and white.

But what about forgiveness ?   Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.     You could say that only God can forgive and only God can really punish.

In a forgiving world, Kelly would have been forgiven for the wrong she did because she was truly sorry.   She had atoned for her crime by her remorse and by doing good works, helping her fellow prisoners to come to terms with what they had done, helping fellow prisoners to rebuild broken lives and in turn atone for the wrongs they have done.

But it doesn’t work like that.   We don't live in a forgiving world.   We sort out the wrongs with justice,  we go to war over differences,

The purpose of prison is on the one hand to punish by taking a wrongdoer out of society and secondly as a deterrent, people wont break the law for fear of going to prison.    In the majority of cases it really means locking a person up in a cell, some for as many as twenty hours a day.   They are deprived of all liberty.

We should that the purpose of prison is to punish but also prison is  an opportunity for the prisoner to be prepared for return to society; to learn the error of their ways, understand the damage they have done in committing the crime, be an opportunity to change their attitudes to life, to enjoy education and training, give some restitution to their victim, let there be forgiveness, so they return to society as a model citizen.

But what about those who have done no wrong and struggle on outside prison ?    They get no favours.      I suppose that is the main argument.   So prison is punishment, retribution by society, nothing more.

Forgiveness doesn’t come into it.   The State cannot forgive.    Only the victim can forgive on this earth and only God can forgive in heaven.   That seems to be the rule.

It is very hard to forgive.     People who have been wronged might demand an apology before they forgive but that is not true forgiveness, only the wielding of power.

With Kelly Gissendaner, those who called for forgiveness were her children and those who had seen the change in her.

The family of her murdered husband never stopped demanding that she be executed.  She had taken a life, she must pay with her life.  There was to be no discussion.  The purpose of the law they said was to exact justice, and that had been done, it merely needed to be completed.   They maintained this attitude for eighteen years.

In that prayer of Jesus we realise what a hard challenge it is to be told, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.     

I have known people who have carried anger in their hearts for years.   They say they cannot forgive, or they won’t forgive, and that anger slowly destroys them because it has destroyed the love in their hearts, sometimes that anger is their modus operandi, their anger is their lif's passion.

Jesus in the Gospels nearly always ends a healing by saying, ‘Your sins are forgiven’, or ‘go and sin no more’.

It was a ministry of forgiveness.   That didn’t last of course, because the church became an organisation with rules and punishments.      They decided what the truth was and once that happened they became inflexible.    Because every alternative and every disagreement was a treason and became a crime against the church.   You cannot argue or seek to persuade anyone who who is so convinced that they are right or they have the truth.  All other beliefs become heresies.

The ministry of forgiveness does continue but in small ways.  The Church of the Larger Fellowship is part of the Unitarian Universalist church in the United States.  It is the equivalent of our own National Unitarian Fellowship, but receives funds from the central organisation.  So they have a minister, Meg, who is supported by others.   They produce podcasts and online learning material.

They have contacts throughout the country to support members who are not in touch with a congregation.   They have contacts within prisons.   It was through them that Kelly graduated with a theology degree while in prison.

It is small web in the grand scheme of things, but it is a ministry of forgiveness in an unforgiving world.   It is an organisation that preaches reconciliation and redemption.

It is laudable, but really how easy is it to be within the ministry of forgiveness?  We can look on this sad episode from a distance and be quite objective.  We can sympathise with both sides.  We might strongly agree with one side or the other.

We might wonder how we would feel if we were to be involved in such an extreme experience.  Would we be able to forgive, would we urge reconciliation?  Would we try to mediate, would we be able to belong in the ministry of forgiveness.

We only have our scriptures to guide us.  Our history and our conditioning is against forgiveness, because our world is an adversarial world.

Our justice system is based more on winning an argument, discrediting a witness rather than inquiring after truth.  Our political system too is adversarial, based on verbal conflict in the House of Commons between the main parties.

There is right and there is wrong and nothing in between.  Is that what we should live with?

I suppose the best we can hope for is that one day that adversarial system will change to debates where all speak to find a way forward and a fair solution.

Shall the Christian world still sing, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against them, but actually take no notice of those words -

Forgiveness requires sacrifice and love, it could change the world and change the way each one of us acts in the world, if we were try to forgive those who trespass against us.

Ah but it is a big challenge as the sad story of Kelly has shown us.