Assisted dying: truly a black Friday

The UK takes a step into the bleak unknown.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Four MPs stand at a table with heads bowed.

Assisted dying vote tellers acknowledge the result.

Parliament TV.

So, the House of Commons has voted in favour of assisted suicide. When the result was announced there was an audible gasp in the House. There were no cries of victory or whoops of delight. Maybe it was a sense of the gravity of what the MPs had just done. Presumably there was some relief for those who had advocated a change to the law but for those who were against it, a deep, deep sadness.

The arguments have been rehearsed many times over the past few weeks, although to be honest it feels like this debate has been extraordinarily rushed, given the gravity of the step we have just taken. Of course, the bill now needs to be scrutinised and voted on further, and it may yet fail.

Of course, not every Christian is against a change to the law. And I do feel the strength of the argument for individuals in extreme pain as death approaches. Yet the more I have thought about it, the more convinced I have become that this is a grave error. I worry that as we all grow towards old age, this decision will open the gates to an intolerable choice. Numerous people, especially the elderly and confused, those who go through depressive episodes or whose lives are in a mess and need encouragement and support not the suggestion of an easy way out, will be tempted to take a drastic step that before, would not have been possible.

Surely one of the best defences against suicide is simply to make it unthinkable, so it's not really an option, however bad things get. Once it becomes not only an option but even in some cases recommended, we have opened a door that should have remained closed. As someone said about the progress of MAID in Canada, what started as occasional permission gradually became a viable option, and now risks turning into an obligation.

Whatever happens, there is need for further vigilance - to protect the vulnerable, to hold those who advocated for change to the safeguards they put in place, to keep pushing for investment in palliative care. And as far as possible, to keep this as an option for the very few.

Yet those things seem much harder to do now. If life is the gift of God; if the attempt to control everything, even our last moments in the mystery of death is a pathological mistake of modernity; if exalting personal autonomy over all other considerations is a denial of our interdependence; if being cared for by others in our last moments is more important than the assertion of personal choice, then this seems to be a moment when as a society we have embraced death, not life. It does feel truly a black Friday.

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Justice

20 June 2024

5 min read

Mercy of any magnitude is scarce

Today’s cynicism, means justice really needs tempering.

Natalie Williams

Natalie is the chief executive of Jubilee+ and an author.

In a court room a judge looks out across it as a lawyer standing addressing her turns his head to look.

Rhoda Griffis and Michael B. Jordan in Just Mercy.

My friend Jo was killed by a lorry driver while she was cycling to work. She was thirty-four. The driver wasn’t paying attention. A couple of distracted minutes had tragic consequences. One life was lost; many others would never be the same again.

Months later, in court, the driver pled guilty to causing death by careless driving, and the judge warned him that he was facing time in prison. But between the verdict and the sentencing, Jo’s parents wrote to the judge asking him to show mercy.

So he did. The driver didn’t go to jail. He was spared the punishment that our legal system says he deserved. He admitted his guilt, and he didn’t ask for leniency or mercy or forgiveness, but Jo’s parents showed it anyway. They even made a point of going over to him to tell him clearly that they forgave him for taking their daughter’s life.

The court case was covered by national and local media, with one newspaper summing up what had happened with the headline: ‘Death driver shown mercy.’

It made national news because mercy of this magnitude is rare in society today. In fact, mercy of any magnitude is scarce. We live in an increasingly polarised world, where our desire for justice eclipses the beauty of mercy because we cannot see how both could exist at the same time. We want justice, and rightly so. We want people to pay for harm they have caused and we especially cannot abide it when the obviously guilty use their power, wealth or status to get them off the hook.

Extending mercy seems to us to come at the expense of justice. If we forgive, somehow that seems to deny the damage caused.

But cancel culture is rapidly turning our society into a place where anyone with a remotely public profile needs to live in fear of saying or doing anything wrong. We increasingly err on the side of cynicism when someone says they are sorry. We dismiss apologies, even when accompanied with tears and distress, as a stunt or ‘too little too late’ or more to do with being caught than with the original offence. We have become predisposed to assume the worst.

We start by recognising that justice in its purest form, at its best, is inherently merciful because it wants repentance more than it wants retribution.

I wonder if we have strayed beyond the necessary and right fight for justice into an insatiable appetite for vengeance, which leads us to a place where there is no space for contrition. If guilt is irredeemable, punishment must be permanent and absolute.

We argue that mercy is not deserved. And we are right. But it never is. If it were deserved, it wouldn’t be mercy. The very definition of mercy is that it is undeserved – to receive mercy is to receive kindness, compassion and forgiveness that you have no right to, no claim on, no reasonable grounds to expect.

But a bigger problem with our desire for justice over mercy is that we are not consistent. I know that my default is to want justice when I am wronged, but mercy when I am in the wrong. Who among us has not made a mistake or hurt someone else but then defended our actions by claiming mitigating circumstances or good motives? We want to be forgiven. Even when we know we have done wrong, we do not want to be punished.

I’m self-centred in my approach to mercy and justice. I am also way more lenient when those I love get things wrong than I am when someone hurts someone close to me. I assume that those dear to me had the best intentions, and those I don’t know or don’t like had the worst. My friends meant well; my enemies meant harm.

The Bible presents God as both merciful and just. It repeatedly affirms his concern for victims of injustice and reminds anyone who claims to know him that, if they really do, pleading the cause of the vulnerable and marginalised will be an inevitable (even required) outworking of that. It says that getting justice for the oppressed is more important to God than religious rituals such as fasting from food. In fact, it calls caring for the afflicted and distressed “true religion”.

But at the same time, Jesus told the religious people around him – the justice-warriors of his day who looked out for the slightest misdemeanour in others so they could call them out on it – that they needed to learn that God prefers mercy to sacrifice. Indeed, there is no example in the Bible of anyone pleading for mercy and God denying them. Even the most wicked and cruel abusers of power, if they humbled themselves and cried out to God for mercy, were shown it.

And it is not just God who exercises both justice and mercy. He says that he wants ordinary human beings to act justly and love mercy. In Christianity, justice and mercy are not pitted against each other; they are woven together as time and time again we are invited to live a better way by valuing and practicing both. Jesus criticised the religious leaders of his day for following all sorts of detailed and pedantic rules while neglecting what he called “the weightier matters of justice, mercy and faithfulness” and ultimately he died on the cross in the most astonishing act of faithfulness to bring perfect justice and limitless mercy.

But how do we mere mortals do both? We start by recognising that justice in its purest form, at its best, is inherently merciful because it wants repentance more than it wants retribution. Without repentance, there can be no reconciliation or restoration. A society that rules out redemption – that says no apology or atonement can ever be enough – will soon become a harsh and hopeless place. Biblical justice always leaves space for mercy. So must we.

‘Natalie Williams' Tis Mercy All: The Power of Mercy in a Polarised World is published by SPCK.