麻豆社

Good morning.

Opening tomorrow at the Museum of London Docklands - in good time for Halloween - is an exhibition exploring 700 years of public executions in London. Between 1196 and 1868 - when Londoners witnessed the last public execution - some tens of thousands of people were put to death for crimes ranging from the notorious - treason, murder, highway robbery and the like - to the paltry. By the end of the 18th century some 200 crimes were punishable by death and there were gallows all over the city.

I always think there is a danger with an exhibition of this kind that one might walk away certainly somewhat chilled, but with the comfortable thought 'weren't they primitive and brutal in those days'. The exhibition specifically aims to forbid that too easy take away, by pointing out that issues of crime, poverty, and domestic violence, for example, certainly remain with us - and by drawing attention to the fact that 55 countries still have capital punishment on their books.

For me however, as a Christian, there is a more uncomfortable challenge in this story - and indeed in the general story of crime and punishment, in what we like to call the Christian era. It鈥檚 not just that the Christian church was part of the establishment which oversaw this harsh regime of public execution and the like - that is a challenging, but perhaps rather obvious point. More fundamental still is how Christianity, tends to suggest, in the ways it has thought about Christ's life and death, that the proper way to respond to a crime is with punishment. There is an alternative - which is that a breach in the social order certainly needs repair, but that repair might involve a host of responses, none of them to do with retribution and vengeance.

You know - here's a confession - I find it hard to be a Christian when I look back at our sorry history. What I hold on to however, is the radical challenge which comes to Christianity from its very own founder. I go back to the very first words of Jesus's public ministry as Luke reports them, when Jesus reads from the book of Isaiah the words 'the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, and sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives.' Those words inspire me, and this Exhibition challenges us, not to imagine a slightly less brutal, slightly less violent, slightly more humane, scheme of punishment, however welcome that might be. In fact they challenge us, I believe, to imagine a society in which punishment is, at the very least, the last and not the first thing we reach for in seeking to repair broken relationships.

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