It was four in the morning, I was in the shower, and NPR was playing. I never caught the name of the program. They were interviewing chaplains who minister to men on death row, and not only at the very end. These men sit with the condemned for months, sometimes years, through the long wait.

At one point the interviewer raised the objection you'd expect. Some people would say that comforting a murderer gives him something he doesn't deserve, that it somehow dismisses what he did. One of the chaplains answered that people who say this have made it a binary: any kindness toward the condemned becomes a dismissal of the crime, and so the condemned deserve none. Then he said that the people who make that claim lack moral imagination.

I haven't been able to put that phrase down since.

Kindness is not a verdict

The binary the chaplain described treats kindness as a ruling, as if sitting with a man is a statement about whether he's guilty. But kindness was never the verdict. The court already rendered that. The chaplain isn't relitigating the case. He is simply refusing to let the verdict be the only true thing about the man.

The cross has exactly this shape. One of the thieves crucified beside Jesus says it plainly: we are here justly, receiving what our deeds deserve. He doesn't dispute his sentence, and Jesus doesn't commute it. The thief still dies that afternoon. And yet he receives the most extravagant comfort anyone has ever been offered: today you will be with me in paradise.

Justice and mercy are not competing for the same space on that hill. The sentence stands, and the man is still met. That is what the binary cannot hold, and I think it is what moral imagination really means: the capacity to hold both at once without feeling that one cancels the other.

The objection that he doesn't deserve it gives the game away anyway. Comfort that has to be deserved isn't comfort. It's wages.

The image underneath

What grabbed me, as it always does, is the imago Dei. We bear the image of God, all of us, and that is where this whole question finally rests.

It is striking that Genesis 9:6, the text most often cited in defense of capital punishment, grounds the penalty in the image itself. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. The murder is grave precisely because the victim bore God's image.

But the murderer bears it too, and nothing in the text says he stopped. So the same reality that makes the crime monstrous is what makes the chaplain's visit fitting. The image explains the weight of the sentence and the obligation of the visit at the same time. That is moral imagination in its purest form.

Calvin, who was never accused of being soft on human depravity, says something like this in the Institutes. We are not to look at what a person merits, but at the image of God in them, which covers and blots out their faults and draws us to love them. He simply thought the image outranked the record.

What is actually taken

The program told the story of a nineteen-year-old woman who was killed, and it described her loss in the familiar terms. She would never have children. She would never know the love of a husband. She would never have a career. These are the things everybody wants, at least until they have them and feel their full shape.

I understand why we talk this way, and the speculation has some value. But it doesn't tell us what is true. None of those things may ever have come to pass. She might never have married. She might never have wanted children. The lost-potential framing measures her loss by what she would have had, which turns a person into a ledger of future goods.

What was actually taken from her was not a set of possibilities. It was her right to choose. Her sovereignty over her own life. Whatever might or might not have happened, that was real, and it was hers, and it was present in her every single day.

This is where the image of God comes back in. Even a robust Reformed account of God's sovereignty insists that his decree does no violence to the will of the creature. God made room for Adam to reach for the fruit. He lets people walk away from him. Whatever you make of how his sovereignty and our choices fit together, God treats human agency as real and weighty, weighty enough that he would rather bear its consequences than erase it.

The murderer does what God himself declines to do. He doesn't just end a life. He overrides a person entirely. It is a counterfeit sovereignty. Only God gives and takes life, and even God does not take it like that.

In spite of yourself

The idea of kindness to everyone is hermetically sealed. The moment you carve out an exception, the seal breaks. If dignity can be forfeited by what a person does, then it was never intrinsic in the first place. It was only ever a reward for good behavior. And a dignity that can be revoked from him can be revoked from you.

That is why "do unto others" makes sense. It isn't reciprocity. It doesn't say to treat others the way they treat you. It says to treat them the way you would want to be treated, in spite of yourself and in spite of your instinct to give people what they've earned. You have skin in the game, not because of anything they'll give back, but because you have to honestly picture yourself in their place. Luke sets the Golden Rule right next to the command to love your enemies, and I don't think that's an accident.

Keeping that rule takes moral imagination. You have to imagine yourself in the cell.

The natural objection is that I've never murdered anyone, and most people consider murder the ultimate crime. But if we believe that sin, full stop, is what put Christ on the cross, requiring the death of God himself as propitiation, then its magnitude doesn't matter. That extra, gluttonous helping of potato salad at the church picnic put him there too. We are on equal ground. If you think the size of the sin changes the math, you've underestimated how holy God is and what it cost to redeem any of us.

The chaplain in that visiting room isn't there on merit any more than the inmate is. Christ died for us while we were still sinners, not after we had cleaned ourselves up. That is what it means to be a human among fellow humans.

You are loved

The state was about to take the condemned man's choices away, just as he had taken his victim's. But in those months beforehand he still held the most important choice left to him: how he would meet the end. The chaplain sitting with him was, in a sense, honoring the very thing the man had stolen. Not as a reward. Simply because it was part of the image he still bore, and it hadn't been taken yet.

The program closed with one of the chaplains describing a man's last hours. For reasons I still don't understand, the condemned are strapped to the gurney hours before the execution. So he received his family, his friends, and his chaplain while tied down.

The chaplain described him as full of anger. He didn't say why, but he intimated that it came from what had been done to him, from childhood forward. Whenever the moments grew most tense and real, the man would crack a joke. He was controlling the situation, the chaplain said, seeking the comfort of the people around him, and his own if we're honest. Every bit of agency had been stripped from him, and he still found the one lever he had left.

Then, as the injections were administered, the anger came pouring out. The chaplain described it as almost a pantomime: a litany of hatred spewed at everyone who had ever wronged him.

The chaplain didn't argue with him. He didn't correct him or tell him to repent. He put his hand on the man's leg and said, "It's ok. You are loved."

The man stopped. He went silent. A few moments later, he slipped off to sleep.

Everyone else in that room was there to restrain him or to watch. One man touched him as a man. We don't get to know what happened in that silence. But the last voice he heard was not the state's, and it was not his own rage. It was someone telling him the truth.