There’s a lineal descent of protest and grievance in American politics that runs from the civil rights movement to second-wave feminism to gay rights to the trans movement to supporting Hamas in the wake of October 7. (I suspect this line could be extended back in time a good ways: parts of the labor movement, temperance, abolitionism, and more.) The line of descent is a matter of the causes being related, but a matter of the same class of people supporting them, one after the other.
Good has been done along the way. Evil has been done along the way. But as the trajectory becomes both undeniably clear and undeniably evil, honesty compels us to ask if we got something wrong at the very start.
We did. Not with the causes themselves—the merits of the causes are a whole series of separate conversations—but with what we think it means to support them.
There’s a class of Americans that reliably supported all these causes, one after another, in an attempt to relieve itself of guilt. The emotional logic has been the same all along: if I can find innocent victims of oppression, lionize and defend them, then I will be redeemed from my guilt. When it fails—and it fails just as surely as Stalin’s Five-Year Plans—we always react the same way: jump to a new group of supposed innocent victims and try harder. The less obviously innocent they are, and the more extremely we debase ourselves to support them, the better our chances at excising our own inner stain.
It has not worked, and it never will. We are trying to self-medicate our way out of the wrong problem.
That inner stain cannot be removed by any amount of your own effort. Even if we only consider your own life, let’s be honest: your life contains plenty of evil you can’t blame on anyone else, and in your more honest moments, you know it. And that’s to say nothing of your ancestry: we surely all have ancestors who deserve to have their entire legacy wiped from the earth. Do you imagine that in the long history of humanity, you are descended from nothing but saints? No. All of us are descended of rapists, murderers, child molesters. We try to forget. We pretend that if we belatedly rescue the innocent now, we will somehow balance the scales, as if the lives our ancestors destroyed could somehow be restored to health after they’ve ended. As if the murder victims’ descendants who will never be could somehow be brought into existence after generations.
Sometimes a thing gets broke, can’t be fixed.
We are guilty children of guilty parents. We will never find someone so innocent that the rescue, were it even possible, would balance the scales. The endeavor is doomed from the start.
But our intuitions are not wholly wrong. In the dark recesses of the long, long memory of the Christian church, deep truths move that even most Christians aren’t consciously aware of. Here’s one of them: we hunt that innocent victim for good reason…just not the reason we tell ourselves.
We won’t rescue the innocent. The experiment has been tried. We were once given a truly good human, a man who did literally no wrong. We murdered him in cold blood. So it’s too late. You can’t “stand with” him, and it wouldn’t matter if you did. Thinking there was something you could do…that was the mistake all along. You can’t. Worse, you wouldn’t if you could.
But you don’t need to stand with him. You need him to stand with you.
That day he died, the world changed. Drawn by the monstrous perversion of his murder, every moral failure, every twisted desire, every sin, every sickness, every dark thing that stains our souls was drawn into Him. He willingly accepted it all, carried all of our darkness in his very flesh.
When He was nailed to the cross, so was all your darkness. When He died, it died. When He was buried, it was buried. And because He was righteous, God the Father would not leave Him in the grave. Raised to new, unending Life, He did not come out of the grave dragging a giant bag of your crap. He came out clean, infused forever with the power of an endless life. He lives now to make you clean. That stain you could never remove, no matter who you stood with, no matter how hard you tried? He knows every quarter-inch of it, better than you ever will. And He removes it.
What does He require in exchange? Nothing. Which makes sense, if you stop and think about it for a minute. Nothing you can do contributes to the solution. You have nothing that He needs. And so what could it be, other than sheer gift?
If you want to be clean, you can be. Trust Him to take care of everything, and it’s taken care of. Too simple? Too good to be true? Downright offensive, even? Yup. But there it is. God loves you that much, and so He just did it anyway. You don’t have to contribute; you don’t even have to approve. But since it’s already done, don’t pretend it isn’t. The cost is paid. Just say yes.
…and then, because you have been given mercy beyond imagining, do the same—in whatever limited way you can—for others. Not in a frantic and doomed effort to put yourself right, but as a secure expression of the truth: you are righteous. You are clean. You are forgiven. Because Jesus is risen from the dead.
Happy Easter!
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