The Vicar’s Corner

“For people do not gather figs from thorns or from thorn trees, if they are wise, nor grapes from thistles. For, on the one hand, that which is always becoming is in that from which it is, being from what is not good, which becomes destruction for it and death. But that which comes to be in the Eternal One is in the One of the life and the immortality of the life which they resemble” (Apocalypse of Peter)

It seems fundamentally impossible for us Gnostics, who seek full participation in the unadulterated life and light of the pleroma, to accept practices that amount to the exercise of killing by any state or government.  In responding to this issue, we must first feel profoundly the pain of those who are the victims or who are otherwise impacted by violent crime.  We too, like all people of good will, are horrified by the amount of violence that burdens our communities and the larger world around us.

Even common sense should tell us that you do not fight fire with fire, and that adding to violence does nothing more than make the problem all the worse.  But we Gnostics do not have to rely solely on common sense, for we also have the great example of our brother and teacher Christ to guide us.  Remember, my friends, how even in the Christian retelling of the story he saved the woman about to be stoned to death.  Remember, my friends, how his words forced the angry crowd to put down its stones and examine their own faults and failings before engaging in an act of violent self-righteous hypocrisy.  And this is not even to speak of the increasing likelihood that significant numbers of innocent people are trapped in death rows throughout the United States

 Indeed, however, capital punishment is even more disturbing than a mere act of individual or collective revenge, because it is carried out by the state, not by a single person or group of persons, but the government formed from the consent of the people.  It is a perversion of anything that a government should stand for to then turn on its own people and murder them.  It is only a few steps from murdering the “worst elements” in a criminal sense to weeding out the disabled, the undesirable, the merely unattractive or unwanted.  This is far worse than any murder carried out by a mere private individiaul or group of private individuals, because the state has a fundamental responsibility to its people.  If government becomes destructive of these ends, the Declaration of Independence reminds us, we are no longer living in a democratic or free society.

 And, my friends, do we not remember the greatest of all unjust state executions, the death of Christ? Are we so confident? Are we so bold? Are we so perfect, so infallible, so unquestionably perfect that we can take the power of life and death into our hands?  Are we so  ready to wash our hands along with Pilate and kill those for whom the crowd of public opinion is baying for their death?  Does not Sophia in the Thunder: Perfect Mind cry out to us, “Why do you scorn me?”  Both Christ and Sophia within our souls cry out to us when we scorn another human being, a child of the living God.

I ask you to remember the words of the late Robert F. Kennedy: “Let us dedicate to ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”