Empty Seats Were Their Sermon: Why I Won’t Watch the Fort Hood Execution
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On December 3rd, at one o’clock in the afternoon, the United States Army is scheduled to execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad at Fort Hood, Texas. The Pentagon has said it will be livestreamed. You will be able to watch a man die on the thing that sits in your pocket, and if you’re honest, something in you already knows whether you’re going to click.
I’m not here to defend him. In November of 2009 he walked into a building full of unarmed soldiers who were getting ready to deploy and opened fire. Thirteen people were killed. Thirty-two were wounded. He admitted it, he was tried, he was convicted and sentenced. Thirteen families have sat at a table with an empty chair every year since. I’m not here to argue the death penalty either. Christians have landed on both sides of that for hundreds of years. I want to talk about the camera.
The Camera Adds Nothing to Justice
The trial gave us justice. The verdict gave us justice. The sentence is the law. The camera doesn’t add one thing to any of it. All it adds is an audience. And when you add an audience to the killing of a man, you’ve stopped doing justice and started making a statement through a show.
We’ve seen that strategy before. Men in orange on their knees by the ocean, men in black standing behind them, and a camera. They filmed it so the world would understand consequences. I want to be exact here: the people killed in those videos were innocent. Hasan is guilty, and he got a trial. That difference is enormous. But notice where the difference lives. It lives in the courtroom, not in the camera. The courtroom is ours. The strategy of filming a death for an audience was theirs. We called it barbaric and told our kids not to click. Now we’re reaching for it.
Empty Seats Were Their Sermon
Go back to the year 177. Christians were being accused of murder, and a believer named Athenagoras wrote to the emperor. His defense is stunning: how could we be murderers when we even refuse to watch? Rome had an arena. Condemned criminals, many of them guilty, were executed in front of a crowd, and Christians would not go. Athenagoras said that to watch a man be put to death is much the same as killing him, even when it’s just.
They didn’t have one senator. They couldn’t change Rome’s justice system, and they didn’t try. They just refused to be the audience. Empty seats were their sermon.
A church with no governmental or cultural power couldn’t bear to watch a guilty man die. We have a church on every corner. And we can’t pretend this is new for us. The last public hanging in this country, in 1936, drew 20,000 people in Kentucky. A nation doesn’t become Christian by saying God’s name while it does the same thing Rome did.
Somebody is already typing Romans 13. Good. Read it. Romans 13 hands the state a sword. It does not hand the state a stadium. Somebody else will tell me Israel sang when Pharaoh’s army drowned. They did. James and John knew those stories too, which is why they wanted to call down fire on a village that rejected Jesus. He turned and rebuked them and told them they didn’t know what spirit they were of (Luke 9:55). I read my whole Bible through that moment. The law can tell you what a man deserves. Only Jesus tells you what to do with your heart while he gets it.
The mercy was always in there. Ezekiel said God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11). Paul calls death the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). Jesus stood at a tomb and wept minutes before He emptied it. He didn’t come to use death. He came to destroy it. So when a crowd cheers a death, even a deserved one, it is cheering for the enemy He defeated.
The Appetite Was Already in Us
I can’t preach this at Washington and skip my own house. When I read that they were finally going to shoot him, something in me said, “Now he gets what he deserves.” Looking back, that was not a Christlike response. Justice is sober.
Augustine tells a story about a friend named Alypius who got dragged to the arena and swore he would keep his eyes shut. Then the crowd roared, and he opened them for one second. Augustine says he drank in the savagery and walked out a different man. One look. Years ago I watched those videos by the ocean. Nobody made me. I told myself I was staying informed. I was Alypius. The psalmist said, “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes” (Psalm 101:3). He wasn’t being delicate. He knew what eyes do to a soul.
Friend, that appetite is in me and it’s in you, and we don’t need a firing squad to feed it. We feed it every day. The clip of the person you can’t stand getting humiliated, watched over and over. The pastor who fell, and the article you read two or three times. The mugshot you shared. We’ve been watching executions for years. They’ve just been bloodless. December 3rd won’t create an appetite in America. It reveals one.
You Have Already Been to an Execution
Here is what the gospel does with all of this. The center of our faith is a public execution. State sanctioned, staged outside the city so everybody could see, meant to send a message. Luke says the people stood by watching (Luke 23:35), and then he names it: the crowds had gathered for the spectacle (Luke 23:48). That’s the gospel writer’s word for the cross. A show. And we weren’t the hero in that story. We were the crowd.
Two guilty men died beside Him. One of them said they were getting what their deeds deserved (Luke 23:41). The last conversation Jesus had before He died was with that man: today you will be with Me in paradise (Luke 23:43). Mercy, at an execution, for a guilty man, from the only innocent man there.
The crowd came to watch guilty men get what they deserved, and hanging between them, God was taking what all of us deserved. Paul says that at the cross God disarmed the powers and made a public spectacle of them (Colossians 2:15). He turned the show inside out. The thing built to display the state’s power to kill ended up displaying God’s power to forgive.
Every appetite for vengeance in you is a demand for payment. Somebody has to pay. Evil is real, and thirteen people are dead because of this man. But the payment for the sin of the world has already been witnessed, once. You don’t need to see another man’s blood. That’s why the early Christians could leave the seats empty. Not because they were soft on evil, but because they had already been to an execution, and it finished something in them.
I’m not telling a court what to do with him. I’m telling you what we can do with our eyes. On December 3rd at one o’clock, I will not be watching. I’ll be praying for thirteen families, and God help me, I’m going to pray for him too, because my King prayed for the men who were killing Him while they did it (Luke 23:34). You don’t have to watch a man die to believe in justice. You already watched one. And He said, “It is finished” (John 19:30).
Mark
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