We Can’t Afford To Be Kinder Than Wise

by Curtis Shelburne

IT IS OFTEN TEMPTING for individuals and even nations to be kinder than they are wise.

We’ve all seen the wreckage wrought by permissive parents too “kind” to discipline their children. We would be a great deal better off if they would be kind to the rest of us instead and love their kids enough to restrain them.

Kindness untempered by “tough love” seems easy and simple, but it is actually simpleminded and, in the end, very cruel.

Some of us would like God to be kinder than he is loving. As C.S. Lewis writes, we want more of a “grandfather in heaven” than a Father, “a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves,’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.’” That “kind” God would require no obedience, no change, on the part of his children. Thank God that though he accepts me “just as I am” he loves me too much to leave me that way!

I’m glad that God is wiser and more loving than he is kind. I am afraid that May Johnson is not.

The man who killed May Johnson’s parents in cold blood sits on death row in Oklahoma. She is kindly leading the fight to have his sentence commuted. She says he has been converted. She says that “if our world is going to change, we have to . . . learn to love with the unconditional love” of Christ.

She is at once, I believe, both absolutely right and terribly wrong. I hope the man has truly repented, asked for, and received God’s grace. I thank God that the ground is level at the foot of the cross. His grace is open to all. That the man who killed May Johnson’s parents can be absolutely for forgiven by God and stand justified in His sight by the blood of His Son I do not doubt for a moment. In any case, for her sake, May needs to forgive him, though I can’t imagine how she could come to that point quickly and easily. Forgiveness for real wrongs is rarely easy, nor should it be, but we as individuals must learn to forgive.

Oklahoma is not an individual. It would be vindictive and wrong, though tempting, for May Johnson to kill her parents’ killer. It is neither vindictive nor wrong for Oklahoma to do it. It is not kind, but it is just, and government’s primary responsibility to its citizens is to be just. For the state to be “kind” to those who break our society’s, and God’s, holiest laws is to be very cruel to citizens whose life and liberty is dependent upon a just society ruled by law.

Nations and states have no business being kinder than they are wise.