How Jesus saves through Michael Brown and Eric Garner

Last updated on: April 29, 2015 at 8:48 pm by Guest Contributor

How Jesus saves through Michael Brown and Eric Garner 2015-04-29T20:48:56-05:00 Guest Contributor

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One thing that I never tire of pondering as a Christian is how Jesus’ cross saves me and what it saves me from. Growing up evangelical, the answer was simple: Jesus took the punishment for my sin to save me from an angry, perfectionist God who wanted to burn me in hell forever. But this explanation looks nothing like the salvation that takes place in response to Peter’s first sermon about Jesus’ cross in Acts 2. Peter says nothing whatsoever about hell. So what does he say that people need to be saved from? He tells the crowd, “Save yourself from this corrupt generation” (v. 40). And how does the cross accomplish this salvation for Peter? It causes his hearers to be “cut to the heart” (v. 37) after Peter tells the crowd that they killed their messiah. They are saved not by being legally exonerated in some abstract heavenly courtroom, but by having their hearts mortally wounded by their implication in the murder of their king. In other words, Jesus’ cross saves them by unmasking their sin and putting it on public display in the ugliness of his brutal death. None of the modern formulaic Romans Road “four spiritual laws” account of salvation was part of the experience of the original three thousand converts to the Christian faith. Since we are two thousand years removed from Jesus’ crucifixion, it’s an abstraction to associate our sin directly with Jesus’ cross, so we cannot be saved in the same manner as the first 3000 Christians, unless we recognize that our sin continues to crucify Jesus in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island, New York in the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

There are three places in Acts where the phrase “cut to the heart” is used. In Acts 2:37, the crowd that is “cut to the heart” by Peter responds with abject humility, saying “Brothers, what should we do?” So Peter baptizes them and they become the original Jerusalem church. In this first case, being “cut to the heart” results in repentance. But in Acts 5:33 and 7:54, the Sanhedrin council of religious authorities are “cut to the heart” in a very different way by the testimony of Peter and Stephen respectively (the phrase in Greek is dieprionto tais kardiais, which should be translated literally “cut to the heart” as it is in the King James Bible even though the NRSV translation paraphrases it as “enraged”). The cutting of the Sanhedrin’s hearts has the opposite result from the crowd that was saved by Peter’s sermon. They are hardened into rage instead of being broken into repentance. In Peter’s case in Acts 5, his life is spared by Gamaliel who warns his fellow religious authorities that they might be fighting against God if they kill Peter. In Stephen’s case in Acts 7, he is taken out and stoned to death. When people are “cut to the heart” by the recognition that they have blood on their hands, they either respond with remorseful surrender or angry defensiveness.

So “cut to the heart” can have two opposite results. Kind of like how there are two opposite ways to respond to the naked injustice that has been put on display by the crucified bodies of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The more that the river of blood from dead black bodies makes it impossible to say that we don’t live in a racist society anymore, the angrier it makes white people who resent being cut to the heart by the conviction of the core defining sin of American society whose existence they adamantly refuse to recognize. Meanwhile other white people see this injustice and are put to shame by it, which becomes the means of their salvation from “this corrupt generation” in which racism is alive and well.

What if the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, and all the other black men who die every 28 hours at the hands of police are the means by which Jesus is separating the sheep from the goats among his professed followers just like he describes in Matthew 25:31-46?

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