Three men, three states, one day, and the church bells tolled

On Thursday, August 13, three states put three men to death within hours of each other. Tennessee executed Anthony Hines, who had spent forty years on death row. Oklahoma executed Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, seventy years old, for a killing in 2003. That evening Alabama executed Jeremy Williams, who had raped and murdered a five-year-old girl and filmed it. It was the first time in sixteen years the country carried out three executions in a single day.

That morning, churches in Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, Kentucky and two states further north rang their bells. The campaign takes its name from a line of John Donne: For Whom the Bells Toll. The bell they chose is an old instrument. For centuries a parish tolled the "passing bell" when one of its own lay dying, so neighbors would stop in the field and pray for a soul on its way out. To ring that same bell for a man strapped to a gurney is to insist that his death is a death, and that a death is the whole community's business.

None of this claims that Scripture forbids the state to act. It does not. After the flood, the worth of a human life gets written into law with a blade inside it.

Genesis 9:6Whoever sheds man's blood, his blood will be shed by man, for God made man in his own image.

The reason attached to the penalty is the image of God in the person being killed. Paul says something similar about the government: it carries a sword, and not for decoration.

Romans 13:4for he is a servant of God to you for good. But if you do that which is evil, be afraid, for he doesn't bear the sword in vain; for he is a servant of God, an avenger for wrath to him who does evil.

A person who believes that a man who recorded himself murdering a child has forfeited something is not standing outside the Bible. He is standing inside Genesis 9. Yet the image of God that grounds the sentence is also stamped on the man being executed, and the sword of Romans 13 is placed in the state's hand in the same passage that forbids private revenge (Romans 12:19). Authority is real. It is also on a leash.

So the bell is not really an argument about policy. It is the sound of the one thing the text will not let anyone celebrate. The God who holds every right to judge has already sworn, by his own life, that he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. He means the guilty. The ones who have earned the sentence. What he wants from them is their turning, so that they live.

Williams said he had turned. On the gurney he thanked God for forgiving him so that he could die in peace, and he had asked the state to hurry his execution so the girl's family might find some closure. Whether that repentance was real is God's to weigh. The God who refuses to delight in the death of the guilty is also the only one who can see whether a guilty man has truly turned. The state's arithmetic and heaven's were never measuring the same thing.

The passing bell always did two jobs at once. It mourned the person leaving, and it reminded everyone still standing in the field that one day the same bell would ring for them. When three states put three men to death in a day, the bell is not telling the government that it has no sword. It is telling the country that even a lawful death is not something God enjoys, and that the sound of one should never be mistaken for applause.