Suffering Unjustly
The Fourth Word from the Cross
Injustice, unrighteousness, wickedness, it’s all around us; it feels as if it surrounds us. We see it on our televisions and computers. We hear about it on the radio and podcasts. We read about it on our social media outlets. We live in a world that is filled to overflowing with injustice.
Several years ago, Sherri and I traveled to Phnom Penh to visit some friends. While we were there, we hired a tuk-tuk driver, who carried us just outside the city to the infamous Killing Fields. It was here that more than one million men, women, and children were senselessly slaughtered in an anti-diversity campaign to preserve the purity of the Khmer (ethnic Cambodians).
We stood before clear plastic containers twelve feet high and filled with human skulls. All around us were mass graves, where, to this day, bones and teeth are exposed during heavy rains. But it wasn’t just here in the Killing Fields that we witnessed the horror of this oppressive regime. Throughout our travels in Cambodia, we encountered numerous men and women missing body parts or eyes, mutilated and abused by a godless leader and his followers.
I’ve traveled many times to India, ministering to the Untouchables, the poorest of the poor, and the poverty and filth they live in is heartbreaking. What is even more heartbreaking is the way they are treated by those belonging to the upper castes. Villages are walled off to separate the different castes from one another.
In Korea, I worked with North Korean refugees who, after escaping their country, were forced into years of slavery and forced prostitution before making their way to South Korea desperately hoping for a new life.
But it’s not just “over there” or “out there” somewhere. Cruelty, wickedness, and injustice are right here at home, in the United States. My daughter is an immigration attorney and to hear the stories she tells of human trafficking in this country will chill you to the bone.
The fact is injustice touches each and every one of us in one way or another. Who, reading this, has not been treated unfairly at one time or another. Who among us has never suffered some kind of injustice?
Maybe you’ve suffered injustice at the hands of an imperfect, and often corrupt, legal system. Right is right and wrong is wrong, but it doesn’t always work that way in the courts, does it? Money, high paid lawyers, and political pull go a long way in shielding the guilty from their just deserts. If only justice were blind, but we all know it’s not.
Many suffer an injustice that is more circumstantial in nature. Caught in the whipping whirlwind of life, they’ve lost loved ones, suffered debilitating illnesses, or some other so-called “act of God.” It seems so unfair, so unjust, so wrong.
When these things happen, we can’t help but ask why. A question that, as followers of Jesus, places us among some distinguished servants of God. Take, for example, Jeremiah, who was arguably the favorite prophet of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus quoted Jeremiah more than any other prophet.
Jeremiah, after learning that his family and relatives were plotting to take his life, goes to God and says I would speak with you about your justice, O Lord. Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?
Did you know that one-third of the psalms are laments, complaints, and questions directed at God regarding injustice and the suffering of the oppressed and innocent? The prophets, both major and minor, address these same issues.
It is with this in mind that we tune our hearts and ears to hear, really hear, Jesus’s fourth word spoken from the cross. And in order to understand this eerie and often misunderstood cry of Jesus, we must do, at least, two things. First, we must understand what it was exactly that put Jesus on the cross, and second, we must understand our Lord’s words in light of the psalm from which he quotes, Psalm 22.
It’s going to take some time, but I believe it will be worth it, especially for those who understand the cross as the appeasement of an angry God. What if, instead, we understood the cross to be the demonstration of God’s love, and I don’t just mean the love of God the Son, but the love of God the Father as well?
Did Jesus take the bullet of God’s wrath aimed at a sinful world? Is the cross sort of a good-cop, bad-cop thing, where the Father is the tough guy and the Son the nice guy who shields us from his anger and retribution? These are important questions. How we answer them will not only affect our image of God but our understanding of the Trinity as well.
I hope you will take the time to read, think, and pray about these next several posts.
In Christ,
Dan
You can listen to the messages on the Seven Last Words of Jesus here.
To learn more about the ministry of church on the edge check out my website.