Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. | Romans 5:1–5
I have been putting some words to thoughts this week on issues of sin, race and the Christian (you can read the previous posts here, here, here, and here). There is a lot more to say, but I want to add one more idea for now: Christians need to be involved in the process of racial healing because we have a hope that can sustain the work that needs to be done.
I have been around long enough to have seen a lot of causes come and go; that which is trending on Twitter today is often forgotten tomorrow. I have also watched time and time again as people get excited about a cause, only to be discouraged when confronted by how slow and difficult forward progress is. Anyone who does any type of social work knows that the despair and failures threaten to overwhelm even the best success stories. Lots of people excitedly sign up to make a difference, only to give up when it gets tough.
This type of work needs a strength that comes from somewhere else; a hope that is not based in results, but in things not seen. Thinking through this, I was reminded of a conversation on hope that took place between pastor Thabiti Anyabwile and author Ta-Nehisi Coates. In it, Thabiti points to his hope and is challenged by Coates on whether hope is actually necessary to persevere. Thabiti responds:
Our faith is only as good as the object of our faith.
His point, he describes it out further, is that anything other than God that you place your hope is going to reach its end. Some can sustain you for a while, but they all have a breaking point. If you are going to confront sin and do battle with Satan, you need the kind of strength an unshakable hope provides.
The reason goes beyond perseverance, it also shapes how you practice reconciliation. The more you choose to contend with evil, the more you will be faced with the desire to enact your own forms of earthly justice (anger, hatred, revenge, and violence). As Christians, we can not justify sinful acts because they help us reach our ends. Our hope in God’s final judgement reminds us that no evil deed goes unpunished; this keeps us from feeling the need to be the final judge. Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf says it this way:
The practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance.
He works this out in his book, Exclusion and Embrace, where he points to hope, rooted in our forgiveness as the only means to keep justice from becoming injustice:
Only those who are forgiven and who are willing to forgive will be capable of relentlessly pursuing justice without falling into the temptation to pervert it into injustice.
We have been given this living hope, rooted in the atoning work on the cross and terminating in the promise of the perfect world to come, that gives us both a picture of what restorative justice looks like, while also giving us the strength to keep going and the buffer from making earthly justice our greatest hope. I love how this hope of what is to come is described by Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov:
I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.
This hope, that the God who created and who has Redeemed and forgiven us will come back to heal this world and to bring perfect justice, this is the hope that must fuel all of our acts of reconciliation. Any other hope will fail, will distort, and will bring more destruction in its wake. Having Christians at the forefront of racial and ALL works of healing is important because we have the hope that can bring about change, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.