Reflection on the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Posted on October 6, 2024, by Mary Ann McGivern SL
Kaitlyn Marie Wise was killed on Valentine’s Day 2023. She was 29 years old and lived in Lebanon, Marion County, Ky. On May 13, 2024, a year later, Dailin Marquez Brown- Graves, age 23, was arrested and charged with murder. He has pleaded not guilty. She is white; he is Black. The Kentucky Commonwealth is seeking the death penalty. The trial is set for Nov. 25 here in Marion County.
The death penalty is wrong. Today’s first reading celebrates the creation of life. How did God create dolphins and parrots and orangutans? In what order did God make them? How did humans, male and female, come to be? The Bible gives us two creation stories, making the point that it doesn’t matter here how creation happened. God made us, gave us the gift of life.
We celebrate life. We cherish life. Life is not ours to take away. The psalmist says: Blessed are you who fear the Lord. You and your children’s children will be blessed. We prefer to talk about a loving God, but indeed God is fearsome, and what we should be fearing is any destruction of God’s creation. It isn’t a question of someone else destroying, killing. Surely fearing God means that I don’t kill or have any part in killing.
The epistle to the Hebrews says that God does care for us. God cares for the soldier and the general – on both sides. God cares for the tax collector and even for the war profiteer. God cares for the polluter. God cares for the sinner. God cares for us.
The Gospel we were supposed to hear today begins, “Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?” Our Motherhouse Peace Committee is asking Marion County pastors to preach on capital punishment, and I wanted to offer such a homily. Many parishes may benefit from a reflection on marriage and divorce – but it seemed to me OK to offer something else. I read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion and also the accounts of Pontius Pilate’s judgment. But the death penalty isn’t about the moment of death. Nor is it about sentencing.
I chose to offer for our prayer and reflection Jesus’ instruction to us: to love God with all our hearts and souls and minds and to love our neighbors as ourselves. This is the teaching at the center of our lives. Our very purpose is to reflect back to God all the beauty and goodness we are surrounded with. Some people don’t have the gifts we’ve received and again, our job is to share this goodness that we know.
And still we take life. We’re each capable of murder. Some of our taxes go to war. Some of our brothers go to war. We are surrounded by accounts of the horrors of war, of gun violence, of cruelty and threats of cruelty. And some of our taxes go to carry out the death penalty.
The death penalty is different from war or murder or abortion or even suicide. The death penalty is not an action taken out of fear or impulse or desperation. The crime has happened, and it has happened to other people, not to the prosecutor and jury, much less the state legislature. The perpetrator has been caught and is not a threat. In choosing to execute a person, we deny everything that God has taught us about the sacredness of life, its beauty and preciousness. We take all that away from another person in full deliberate consciousness.
You can’t say everything in a homily. I haven’t mentioned the victim, Kaitlyn Wise, who left two children behind. I haven’t considered if Dailin Brown-Graves is guilty. I haven’t looked at the cost of the death penalty, the burden on the executioner, the trauma on the family of the victim as well as the family of the one found guilty. I haven’t considered the hope of healing from a life spent in prison.
None of those things are ours to consider. It is the task of Kaitlyn Wise’s family to live with their grief. Dailin Brown-Graves and the prosecutor and the jury must carry out their own truths and responsibilities.
We who are the citizens of the Commonwealth of Kentucky must stand for life. That’s our job. That’s what it means to be a child of God. We must reject the death penalty because the judgment of life and death doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to God.