I got this article come through on email from LICC (London institute for contemporary Christianity) from their Culture Section. In this article Brian Draper is deliberating how we should respond to the showing of video clip of Sadam Hussein's Hanging and the fact that many felt that it wasn't right to show these clips.
I was struck by the comment which Brian Draper made at the end of the comment which was this which in effect brings us back to our attention that our Lord went through quite a brutal death for us:
"Christians, too, replay the final moments of an executed man to a world that doesn’t want to look, through our equivalent of the grainy mobile-phone download: our hymns and readings, statues and stained-glass windows. Of course, any comparison with Saddam ends there. One man deserved death, the other did not. Yet in the context of the recent pictures it’s even more sobering to think that Jesus Christ died as a criminal, taunted mercilessly by his enemies as he was finally nailed.
Sometimes you shouldn’t just look away."
To view the rest of the article entitled Don't look away click here
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2 comments:
I thought it was sad that Brian Draper's main use of the execution of Saddam Hussein was not to protest the barbaric way in which it was carried out, nor to question the validity of the sentence, but as an evangelical tool.
He almost dismisses the execution itself with: any comparison ends there, and Hussein deserved death. He makes no attempt to justify this statement, nor even any acknowledgement that Hussein was acting as the tool of western so-called democratic nations when he committed the crime for which he was sentenced to death.
If Saddam Hussein is deserving of death, what about those who supported him throughout those years.
Whenever I come across the phrase "he deserved death" it reminds me of what JRR Tolkein had to say on this subject in Lord of the Rings. Frodo states that Gollum deserved death and Gandalf says something like some of those who die deserve life, and until we can give that to them we should not mete out death to those we think deserve that.
That simple passage did more to persuade me that capital punishment is wrong than anything else I have encountered.
Looking at the close of Brian Draper's article - there is one or two who have commented that struggled with the article itself.
I think he appreciates that we are never going to go through life without seeing something distasteful. But it is more than that it is "barbaric" as you say, dinsy. This event has clearly shocked him in my opinion but yet he is using this live news item to hang his final point on and isnt really dwelling on the news item.
It is interesting that he seems to dismiss the philipian 4 about "Whatever is lovely". I guess we know that it is one we all struggle with in reality.
The quote struck me for this reason: We know that in this day and age Capital punishment is wrong and isnt a part of our culture.
But yet Jesus died a brutal death using a form of execution. We struggle to comprehend this.
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