It would take an ostrich to not be aware that the issue of race has been prominent in recent months in America.
The matter of race has been one that has troubled humanity itself down through the eons. Obviously, the ante-bellum slavery has left its own nefarious trail of dehumanisation, bitterness, and defensiveness, and at the same time other racial/racist attitudes pervade other cultures too.
The distinction that Paul addresses in Galatians 3.28 – primarily and most emo-tively between Jew and Gentile in the context of the letter to the Galatians, but also male and female, and slave and free – is one that had, at the time and still does have, a power to bring fear and hate in different but also hard to solve ways.
All one in Christ Jesus
Paul’s solution is the one that every Christian must trumpet: in Christ we are, from all nations, one. There is neither slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile, black nor white, but all find their point of unity and fellowship in the exaltation of the sacrificial Lordship of Christ at the cross. Billy Graham put it like this: ‘The closer the people of all races get to Christ and his cross, the closer they will get to one another.’
After such a rallying call to focus on Christ, it is natural to think that little else need be said, yet here we need to listen hard to the perspective of those from all sides to understand how much it takes to genuinely apply the solution of Christ and the cross. Martin Luther King described the vicious cycle, that only Christ can break, in this way: ‘Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they cannot communicate; they cannot communicate because they are separated.’
What then can we – little humans with our own, sometimes unacknowledged, biases, tendencies to pre-judge (or even be ‘prejudiced’), propensities to think in fallen terms regarding defending our own tribal positions and rights – do about all this? How can we move from passive receptivity to being agents of the Christ of the cross in our world today?
Humbled at the cross
Those questions beg rapid answers but are not susceptible to easy solutions. This at least I suspect we can all agree: it starts with a fresh, unvarnished worship of that Christ of the cross. As we are filled with him, humbled beneath his crown of thorns, we are less likely to live in fear of each other, to hate, or to act out of self-justifying defensiveness. We are freed, in other words, by the one God-Man who is able to call all nations to himself, to be a part of that calling, journeying to the foot of the cross. There forgiveness must be offered, repentance made, and gracious love triumph.
