The Telegram That Saved the Condemned

On a bitter January morning in 1830, George Wilson sat in a Philadelphia jail cell awaiting execution for robbery and endangering a mail carrier's life. His case had wound through every appeal. There was nothing left. Then President Andrew Jackson, moved by petitions from Wilson's friends, issued a full presidential pardon.

What happened next stunned the legal world. Wilson refused the pardon. The case climbed all the way to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice John Marshall rendered a remarkable opinion: "A pardon is a deed, to the validity of which delivery is essential, and delivery is not complete without acceptance." A pardon rejected, Marshall ruled, is no pardon at all.

This is the strange and breathtaking truth Peter presses upon the early church. Christ suffered once for sins — the Righteous for the unrighteous — to bring us to God. The pardon has been signed. It was signed not with ink but with blood, not by a president but by the Almighty Himself. And like Noah's family stepping into the ark while the whole world thought them fools, we accept that pardon through baptism — not as a ritual cleaning of the body, Peter insists, but as the pledge of a clear conscience before God.

George Wilson died because he would not receive what was freely given. The ark floats. The pardon stands. The risen Christ holds it out with nail-scarred hands. The only question left is whether we will accept it.