Mocking The Death of Jesus--Terri Being Killed By Judicial Fiat

I have struggled all week to maintain my anticipation of the joyous celebration of easter, while Terri Schiavo is being starved and dehydrated to death in Florida. I have been torn between highlighting the LORD's triumph over sin and death and screaming with my tiny little blogosphere voice over the injustice being imposed upon a helpless person by a court system that has seen if fit to rule on the side of death instead of heeding God's timeless instruction to choose life.

Leave it to Chuck Colson to find for me the Christian perspective that connects what to me, at least, has seemed two extremely significant historical events that negate each other. Unable to put it in better terms, I quote here completely his commentary today titled, "Between Life and Death, Lives In The Balance" in a BreakPoint page of the Prison Fellowship website:

Between Life and Death
Lives in the Balance

March 25, 2005

On Good Friday Jesus died as a substitutionary atonement for the sins of mankind. This is what Christians commemorate. In dying, Jesus established, as a defining mark of a Christian society, the principle of human dignity and the sacredness of life. Fallen sinners—all made in the image of God—are so precious in God’s sight that He would sacrifice His only begotten Son for them.

What an irony this presents this year. Jesus died so that we could be free and saved. It was a noble death, if there ever was one. But another death occupies the headlines today, one that mocks the death of Jesus. It is Terri Schiavo who is being killed by judicial fiat. For what reason?

She is being killed so that society can get rid of a nuisance. She is being killed so her husband can be free to marry the woman he has lived with for years and who has borne his children. Her husband, allegedly, profited from the damages paid because of the medical injury to Terri. She is being killed so that medical funds can be saved.

Good Friday marks a day on which God established the principle of the sanctity of life once and for all. One man died so that all men could be free. The Terri Schiavo case marks the triumph of utilitarianism over that Christian view of life. It is victory for the likes of Peter Singer, the ethicist at Princeton, who favors infanticide and euthanasia and who argues that the governing ethical principle in life has to create the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

But no life is safe in a utilitarian society. I am seventy-three. One of these days a committee of doctors could say that I am too inconvenient or cost too much to keep alive. “It is time,” as former Governor Lamb once provocatively said in Colorado, “to do my duty and die and get out of the way of the younger generation, like leaves swept up off the streets.”

The retired folks in Florida and elsewhere, many of whom are privately thinking they really would like to keep this principle of assisted suicide intact because they may want to avoid suffering, are turning the decision of whether they live or die over to others. Do they really want to do that?

We used to say in law school, “Bad cases make bad law.” This is a very bad case. Medical data concerning Terri is old and ambiguous. There is conflicting testimony about whether she really is in a persistent vegetative state. She certainly does not look and act like she is in one. She was not being maintained on life support. She was simply being fed and receiving water as any other human being would expect. So if we can kill Terri, who is next?

Thundering out of the heavens this Good Friday come God’s words: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses, now choose life so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God.”

I shudder to think what is going on in the heavenly councils at this moment, as on this day of all days, black-robed judges in courts are ordering that an innocent woman starve to death. Choose life? Can anyone hear those words today?

Forgive us, Father, for our lack of trust in you and the enabling grace that you provide. Forgive us, LORD, for choosing our own way instead of yours. Have mercy upon our land.

I continue to pray that you root out from our country's halls of leadership, justice, education and information those that are ungodly and immoral. I pray you replace them all with the God-ly and the morally upright.

As the song goes, LORD, "Flow through this land until every man praises your name once more."

In Jesus' Mighty Name, I pray. Amen.