Many across our country and in our own fellowship feel grief and moral outrage over the racism and moral injustice we’ve seen just in the last few months.
Some of you feel a mixture of anger, fear, and exasperation. Anger: because you have experienced racism and injustice firsthand. Fear: because you worry for your own life and the lives of your friends and family. Exasperation: because you feel like it keeps happening and nothing is changing.
During Jesus’ life, he often used Scripture to express how he felt. As the executioners fastened him to the cross, Jesus cried out the first line of Psalm 22 to express his feeling of god-forsakenness. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” Recently, I stumbled upon a verse that expresses the anger many of you feel right now. “Though I cry, ‘Violence!’ I get no response; though I call for help, there is no justice” (Job 19:7).
God wants you to know that he understands how you feel. Jesus suffered injustice at the hands of evil men. God made Jesus like us in every way so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest. Jesus endured what we endured, he faced what we face, so that he could identify with us at the cross. This gives me comfort knowing that God can empathize with us. He isn’t far removed from our grief, anger, and frustrations. He lived in it.
But God does more than empathize with us. He gives us a theological foundation for equality. Scripture declares that God stamped his image up all men and women. Therefore, we all possess true value and significance, independent of how people view us. Not only this, God says that in Christ he’s erased the socio-economic divide, the gender divide, and the racial divide that tears apart the world. Most importantly, he administers justice. He stands with those who suffer injustice. He stands with those who face racism. He stands with those who have experienced inequality. And yet through the cross, he is able to extend grace to wrongdoers without disregarding their sin. I would like to end with the words of Yale Theologian, Miroslov Volf, who suffered persecution for his Christian faith in the former Communist Yugoslavia.
“In the memory of the Passion we honor victims even while extending grace to perpetrators. In shouldering the wrongdoing done to sufferers, God identifies it truthfully and condemns it justly. As a substitute, Christ may remove from wrongdoers the guilt of their sin, but he does not distort or disregard the sin itself.
Even more, to victims Christ offers his own saving presence…He shields the sufferer's self so that the wrongdoing can neither penetrate to the core of her identity nor determine her possibilities. He promises that her life will acquire wholeness, whether or not the wrongdoing she has suffered can be rendered meaningful. And Christ, who by the Spirit is present in sufferers, gives them the power to emulate God by both loving the wrongdoers and struggling against wrongdoing.”