A Life for a Life

A Life for a Life
Genesis 9: 5- 13

I was once asked to visit a man in prison who had come to trust in Christ and was now taking online courses on Christian faith; he hoped to be ordained one day. He was a man about my age and build; indeed, his name was also John. As we sat on either side of a small table and talked about the theological books that lay there, I remember thinking how very similar we were, and yet also how different. I didn’t know the half of it. On the way out of the prison on that first visit, I casually asked the chaplain who was escorting me if she knew what he was in prison for. It was for murder. “There but for the grace of God” go I, said another John, the Reformer John Bradford, as he saw a criminal being led off for execution (admittedly he meant something rather different from what the saying has come to suggest, since at the time he was himself already imprisoned in the Tower of London for his beliefs, and he was eventually burnt at the stake). Actually what my escort said was, “Oh, he killed nineteen people.” This John had been the hit man for a notorious gang a decade or two previously. It was only because in Britain the death penalty for murder was abolished in 1969 that he was still alive...