God Loves Jamaal Howard…More Than Us.

God loves Jamaal Howard…more than us. Such a statement is not a metaphor. It is not a provocation dressed up as theology. It is the claim itself.

Jamaal Howard lives in a cell in Texas. The state has written down the day it intends to kill him: October 7. Judge Steve Thomas in Hardin County can order a hearing on whether Jamaal understands what is coming. Under Texas law, it must occur more than twenty days before an execution. For Jamaal, that deadline is September 17. The state has looked at him and decided he is well enough to die…though not well enough for much else.

I sat with him a few weeks ago. I have sat in rooms like that one for years. So when I tell you where God is, I am not guessing.

I have seen God in such places.

Such places are where God is.

Indeed, God is the God that dwells in those we put out and condemn. God is… A God who chose slaves over Pharaoh. A God who ate with tax collectors while the righteous stood outside the door. A God who was strapped to wood by the state, who died between two condemned men, who promised paradise to one of them without asking what he had done.

We say we believe that. Then, we build a chamber and call God neutral about who goes in it.

God is not neutral. Love is not neutral. Love goes where the horror is. Jamaal is in the horror.

So yes. More. Not equal. Not the same. More. If that offends, the offense is the point.

This is why Jamaal Howard is the test of whether we believe in God’s love…not just believing that he is an object of God’s love.

Not God’s love as an idea. Not the creed we can recite. Not the pew we sit in on Sunday. Whether belief in God’s love survives contact with a condemned man.

Everything we say about God in the abstract turns concrete at Jamaal’s cell door. God is love. What does that mean when the state has picked the day to kill a man? Every human being bears the image of God. What happens when we shrug when others try to destroy that image with a needle? Christ is met in the prisoner. Then, Jamaal is not a question at the edge of the faith. He is the epicenter of our faith.

Matthew 25 makes it almost unbearable. Christ does not say we will be judged by what we believed about the prisoner. Christ says he is the prisoner. I was in prison, and you came to me. Not you thought about me. Not you prayed for me. You came. Christ is in the terrorized. Christ is the condemned.

That moves the burden. Jamaal is not the test of whether God will save him. God is already in the cell. God is already there. Jamaal is the test of whether we will encounter the love of God at all….the text of whether the love of God will save us.

God is not in Jamaal because he is worthy. God is there because Jamaal is condemned. The condemned is always the destination of a God of love. Our sentence has determined God’s destination.

This is why executions are heresy. I do not use the word loosely. Heresy is the denial of who God is. When Texas straps Jamaal to the gurney, it will be preaching that God’s love can be overruled by a jury, a judge, a governor. That the state has the authority to contradict God’s love. That somehow the very place where God is can be destroyed. That God is not the one lying on the gurney. Every execution preaches that heretical sermon of hate. Every one of those sermons is a lie.

Here is the part nobody expects. If God loves Jamaal Howard…the murderer that society is determined to kill…more than God loves us, then there is no place we can fall that God has not already gone. The murderer is not the exception to God’s love. He is the proof of it.