A lot of church newsletters cross my desk each week. A lot of them. Believe it or not, I enjoy receiving them, and read almost every one from front to back before passing them along to my colleagues. Their contents have inspired a number of articles—and even a handful of editorials—through the years, so they play an important role in our work. Sometimes, it’s all-too-easy to get caught up in and preoccupied with the minutiae involved in ministry at the denominational level. Those newsletters are a great way for us to keep ourselves grounded and aware of the vitally important ministries that occur every day in the countless communities in which Cumberland Presbyterian congregations work and play, all around the world. If your congregation isn’t sharing its newsletters with us, please consider doing so. They do not go unread.

The front-page meditation in a recent newsletter from one of our larger congregations was entitled “Vengeance.” The pastor-author offered what I found to be some excellent and instructive observations both about the human tendency to seek revenge when we have been wronged, and how God expects us to respond to those wrongs. Among other salient comments, I was especially struck by a couple in particular. “God has not or ever will give us permission to settle a score or to get even, ever”, the pastor-author wrote, and then a bit later, “To forgive someone is an act of worship.”

Powerful words, those. And to be fair, they are words most of us probably hear—or should hear— frequently, in different ways perhaps, from the pulpits in our own churches; certainly, it is a theme that is touched on repeatedly throughout the New Testament. But the reason that pastor’s words spoke so insistently to me this time was the context in which I read them. Just that afternoon, I had learned that a federal jury in Boston had decided on a sentence of death for Dzhohkar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. Death. We the people have once again decided to take the ultimate form of vengeance out of God’s hands and into our own. As members of a representative society we will, it seems, get our revenge.

The jury’s decision hardly came as a surprise to most of us, I suspect. The cowardly act that the teen-aged Dzhohkar Tsarnaev committed on that sun-drenched afternoon in April 2013 shocked us and filled us with rage. It was premeditated. It was senseless. It was horrific and brutal. It resulted in the deaths of four innocent persons—one of whom was only eight years old—and maimed many more. Over 260 people were injured, many seriously. As if the evil Tsarnaev wrought that fine Spring day in Boston weren’t bad enough, he has subsequently shown virtually no remorse for having done so. What could be more natural than to want to see the young man die for his actions, suffering through it at least as much as the persons who were affected by those actions suffered?

As I see it, however, the problem with killing someone for having so egregiously broken the rules of civil society, besides the fact that in doing so we make our society just a little less civil, is that as Christians, we simply can’t justify it. Like it or not, it is an act rooted in a desire for revenge, and is the very antithesis of an act of mercy. Among the many other teachings with which Jesus left us is that pretty unambiguous line from his Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”

Mercy. God knows we need it for some of the things we do. God also knows we often don’t deserve it. But through an unfathomable shower of grace, mercy is what we get. All we’re asked to do is to show a little mercy ourselves—to forgive the wrongs of others in the same way we’re forgiven. It’s a concept that can make us pretty uncomfortable, isn’t it? I know it is for me. We simply can’t comprehend a love so powerful and without limit that even acts of evil such as occurred in Boston that day, or New York in 2001, or Oklahoma City in 1995, or at Auschwitz 70 years ago are swallowed up by that love.

Forgiveness as an act of worship. I like that. It’s about us, saying to God, “we don’t understand it—and when it’s just as freely available to someone like Dzhohkar Tsarnaev as it is to us, we sure don’t like it—but we trust you to handle things as you see fit.” Part of worshiping God is an acknowledgement that we will never comprehend the fullness of God’s grace—that we will never even approach an understanding of God’s ways.

I don’t know (couldn’t find out) if they self-identify as Christians or not, but as the jury in Boston was deliberating Tsarnaev’s punishment (and make no mistake, he must be punished), there were a number of his victims outside the courtroom pleading for mercy—asking that he be spared the death penalty. Something had convinced them that one more killing will not bring healing. On the same day, the Nebraska legislature voted to do away with the death penalty in that state. Something had convinced the majority of that body (reportedly, a veto-proof majority) that there is no redeeming value to the death penalty. As I see it, God has been busily at work among us.

In a nation in which allegiance to Christian values is so often the subject of front-page news, we cannot continue to justify death as a means of punishment for wrongdoing, no matter how egregious—no matter how strong our desire for revenge. Capital punishment elevates the spectacle of death from something we abhor to something worthy of worship. While revenge “may [feel] natural,” as that newsletter piece reminds its readers, “…it is not what God chooses for [God’s] children.” It is time for us to put aside the death penalty as a means of punishment and seek God’s will as the foundation of our system of justice.