We Live in Rome Now

The firing squad is the state’s business. The livestream is ours.

On December 3, the United States Army plans to execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad at Fort Hood, the same base where he murdered thirteen people and wounded thirty-two more in 2009.

The Pentagon announced it will be livestreamed. The Secretary of War went on television and said, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it.”

As I write this, the President has sent mixed signals on whether that will happen.

I posted that we shouldn’t stream it. That’s all I said.

Then the comments came.

One man suggested waiting a week and doing it at halftime of the Army-Navy game. Another said to pull out a chair and enjoy some popcorn. One asked where he could apply to be a trigger man. One wanted the bullets dipped in bacon grease. One wrote, “Let’s get it and many more.”

The rest called me a liberal, and a few things I won’t repeat here.

I’m not writing this to answer the insults. I’m writing because those comments told me where we live now.

We live in Rome.

This is not about whether he deserves it

Hear me before you fill in the blanks.

Hasan is guilty. He said so himself. Thirteen families have waited seventeen years. Romans 13 says the governing authority does not bear the sword for nothing, and I am not here to argue the sentence.

A Republican senator said it plainly this week: Hasan should face the death penalty, and streaming it is “beyond disgusting.” Asked about it, the Vice President said he won’t be watching. You can hold both. I’m asking you to.

The sword belongs to the state. The bleachers belong to us.

This article is about the bleachers.

The halftime show is two thousand years old

Rome’s arena ran on a schedule. Beast hunts in the morning. Gladiators in the afternoon. And at midday, while the crowd ate lunch, criminals were executed for entertainment.

The philosopher Seneca wandered into one of those midday shows expecting something light. He wrote to a friend that what he found was plain murder, and that he came home crueler and less human for having sat there.

The man in my comments who wants an execution at halftime has no idea he is reading Rome’s program back to us. That’s the point. Nobody decides to become Rome. You just get hungry.

Augustine tells the story of his friend Alypius, a serious young man who hated the games. His friends dragged him to the arena anyway. He kept his eyes shut and swore he would stay above it.

Then the crowd roared. He looked. Augustine says he drank in the savagery and could not turn away. He left a different man than he came. He went back. He brought others.

That is “and many more.” The appetite never stops at one.

“But it’s biblical”

This week Dr. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, posted that he supports the Pentagon’s decision to livestream the execution. His reasoning, in his own words: “Capital punishment is commanded by God in Genesis 9:6 to remind people of the sanctity of human life. The more people that can see that truth illustrated through a public execution, the better.”

Read the verse. It gives the penalty, and it gives the reason: God made man in His own image.

It says nothing about an audience.

And the image of God did not leave the room when the condemned man was wheeled in. You do not honor the image of God by turning the death of an image-bearer into content.

“Make it public so the lesson lands” is not a new idea either. It is the reason Rome crucified men beside busy roads. It is the logic that put a cross outside Jerusalem where everyone passing by could read the sign.

We are quoting Genesis and thinking like Pilate.

You can be “biblical” and unchristlike

Luke 9. A Samaritan village refuses to receive Jesus. James and John ask, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven and consume them?”

They were not making that up. Elijah did exactly that, in that same region, in 2 Kings 1. They had a text. They had a prophet. They had precedent and a righteous offense.

And Jesus turned and rebuked them.

That much is in every manuscript we have. Later copies add His words: “You do not know what manner of spirit you are of.” Whether or not Luke wrote that line, the rebuke already says it. They had the text right and the spirit wrong.

A verse in your mouth and a different spirit in your chest. It’s possible. The disciples proved it standing three feet from Jesus.

Paul names the danger outright. He calls himself a minister of a new covenant, “not of the letter but of the Spirit,” because the letter kills and the Spirit gives life.

Jesus said it to the best Bible students of His day. You search the Scriptures because you think they hold eternal life. They testify about Me. And you refuse to come to Me.

The New Testament changes things. “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you…” That is not a footnote. That is the King telling us how His Kingdom reads the Law.

Jesus is not one voice in the Bible among many. He is who the whole book is about. If your reading of Genesis lands you where He rebuked His own disciples for standing, you stopped reading too early.

Then there is John 8. It is the one time we see Jesus at a public execution. The crowd is already gathered. The stones are already in hand. The law they are quoting is real.

He doesn’t argue the statute. He turns to the crowd. And one by one, oldest first, they leave.

Jesus emptied the bleachers.

That woman was guilty of adultery. Hasan is guilty of mass murder. Those are not the same, and I won’t pretend they are. But the crowd is the same crowd.

God says in Ezekiel 33:11 that He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. A livestream is an invitation to take pleasure in what God does not.

“Let them see justice”

One commenter said exactly that, and it deserves a real answer.

Justice already has witnesses. Army regulation puts the press in the room. Accountability is covered. A livestream adds one thing only, and that is an audience.

Under Moses, the witnesses had to throw the first stone. That is weight. That is your own hand on the consequence of your own testimony. It is the opposite of popcorn.

Another man wrote that nobody had a problem watching Charlie die. I hear grief in that, and I’m not going to mock it. We watched a man murdered on our phones last year, on a loop, and it did something to us.

He’s right about that. It is the very reason not to do it again on purpose. Being made to watch a killing did not make us more just. It made us hungrier.

And the bacon grease? That is not justice for thirteen soldiers. That is contempt wearing justice’s uniform.

One allegiance

America has now become Rome. I don’t say that to insult my country. I say it as a description of the stands.

The first Christians lived there before us, and they left instructions. Pay your taxes. Honor the emperor. Pray for those in authority. Be the best citizens the empire has.

But their confession was three words: Jesus is Lord. In Rome, everyone could hear the second half of that sentence. Caesar is not.

We can be good citizens. We cannot have two lords. A Christian has no allegiance other than to Christ, and Paul says our citizenship is in heaven.

You don’t have to hate your country. You don’t have to carry a sign. You simply cannot participate in this.

The monk in the arena

Church tradition tells of a monk named Telemachus who came to Rome from the East, walked into the arena, and stepped between the fighters to stop it.

The crowd was furious at losing its show. They stoned him. And the story goes that the emperor Honorius, moved by his death, ended the games.

The early church was known in Rome as the people who would not go. Not because they were soft. They were being fed to animals in that same arena. They knew exactly what it was.

The date on the calendar is December 3, one o’clock Central. A court may move it. Whenever it comes, there will be a link.

The state may yet back out of the arena. The crowd already showed up.

The state will do what the state does. The question for every Kingdom leader, every father, every person who carries the name of Jesus is smaller and harder.

Will you click?

I won’t. And I would rather be called names in a comment section than be found in the stands.

Mark Casto