THE HOPE OF THE CROSS IN AN UNJUST WORLD

Gabriel Cairns

I find it hard to talk about my hope. Not because I don’t have enough—I believe that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ I have the greatest hope of all; a hope that I am unconditionally loved, universally known, and eternally secure. In fact, the problem is the opposite: I have plenty of cause for hope. I have a place at a top global university studying a sought-after degree, a safe home, financial security, good health, a loving family—should I really expect people to wonder where my hope comes from? When I try to tell people about hope, I want to make it clear that I could continue to rejoice in Christ, even if all these things suddenly disappeared. But for me, it’s still an ‘if ’. For others, including many with whom I have these conversations, it’s a reality.

Try talking about hope to someone with none of these things. Try talking about hope to a rough sleeper in Oxford battling an anxiety disorder, alongside the alcohol addiction they gained as a coping mechanism. Or to a child with muscular dystrophy, growing up in an orphanage in China, abandoned by their parents. Or to an inner London teenage boy with a fractured family and failed education, and nothing to resist the pull into gang crime. Or to a farmer in Sub-Saharan Africa, whose field yields a fraction of what it used to, as climate change brings longer and more brutal droughts every year. Or to a woman facing continual abuse at the hands of sex traffickers, who, even if she escapes, will carry psychological scars all her life. Or to a child with terminal cancer who has given up on the basic dream of a normal life.

I have plenty of cause for hope, but that makes me part of an overwhelming minority, not just worldwide but even in Oxford. Simply put, some people have it much, much worse than others. This forms the core of many people’s primary objection to Christianity, whether asked as a matter of intellectual questioning, or from a place of deep pain and resentment—if God is real, and He is loving, and He is all-powerful, why is there so much suffering, and why is it shared so unevenly? When I have to respond to someone who asks that question from agonizing personal experience, I’m often aware that I just don’t have the answers they need. Because, even though my life hasn’t been without pain or difficulty, I’ve comparatively only had to wrestle with that question as an intellectual exercise. Many who ask this question seem to believe that my relatively comfortable life has enabled me to maintain the faith I was taught from a young age; whereas the injustice and suffering they witnessed, or often experienced, led them to abandon hope in a loving God long ago. And that’s why I’m a Christian—but they can’t be.

Some see this as a harmless but inevitable difference of opinion, brought about by our different personalities and experiences. But to others, the sight of thousands of Christians peddling out the same old explanations for suffering whilst enjoying their own comfortable lifestyles represents more than just naivety. It seems to them to be symptomatic of a religion that encourages people to be complicit in a broken society of injustice and inequality. The mainstream belief, occasionally explicit but more often implicit, is that Christianity is, and always has been, a hinderance to natural human progress: used to enforce the status quo, defend oppressive power structures, and spread hatred and division. In order for humans to create their own utopia, Christianity needs to be eradicated, or at the very least subjected to strict control to prevent Christians from infringing on the lives of others.

Sadly, this perception isn’t without basis. For every professing Christian throughout history who has stood up for the rights of the poor, met the needs of the vulnerable or challenged racism and bigotry, there are many who have done the opposite. The churches which distort the Bible to justify grotesque racism, sexism, or homophobia; the politicians who proudly claim to endorse Christian values yet show utter disregard for society’s vulnerable; the respected Church leaders who use their influence to commit twisted sexual abuse; the prosperity preachers who sell false hope and a false Gospel to tens of millions, profiting from the desperation of the working class. And perhaps many Christians who agree all of the above is wrong, yet whose faith will often take them no further than to the end of their comfort zone.

Everything I’ve said so far seems to make a pretty miserable case for Christianity, and in my opinion, this, rather than any scientific or philosophical objection, is the largest reason why the magnificent hope of Christianity is widely seen as unattractive and unbelievable. People’s primary experience of Christianity—and often their only experience—is through the mediocrity of Christian behaviour, rather than through God revealed in the Bible. But if we look into the Bible, we begin to see how radically the Christian God turns society’s perceptions and standards on their head.

The first thing we note is that the Bible is filled with people aghast at the reality of injustice: David (Psalm 12), Asaph (Psalm 73), the writer of Ecclesiastes (3:16, 4:1), Job (chapter 21), Jeremiah (12:1), and Habakkuk (1:3) are just a few of those to recognise and question the oppression of the vulnerable and the prosperity of the wicked. And God’s thundering response from the glory of heaven isn’t a series of well-rehearsed theological rebuttals. He actually turns the question back on us. Throughout the Old Testament law, the Wisdom books, the stark warnings of the prophets, the teaching of Jesus, and the epistles of early Church leaders, God fiercely demands that His people care for the vulnerable and love their neighbour as themselves, and condemns the hypocrites, oppressors, and exploiters, with an intensity that should force every Christian to self-examine. And so in the whole Bible, God actually acknowledges the problem of injustice and of suffering far more frequently and consistently than any human. Not only that but He prescribes the solution: he calls each and every one of us to right these wrongs as far as we can and gives a stark promise of judgement upon all the perpetrators. This should be enough for us—but what the God of the Bible does next is extraordinary.

I find it hard to talk about hope because I have plenty of cause for hope, and the people that I talk to often do not. My struggles and hardships simply don’t match up to theirs. And God, on His heavenly throne, should be infinitely further removed from the problem of human suffering. Yet the Bible claims that, in the person of Jesus Christ, God became a man. And not a king or a hero—God became an ordinary carpenter’s son, spending his first night in a manger instead of a bed. He fled persecution as an infant; as a man he knew poverty, hunger, thirst, abuse and rejection. Ultimately, he was betrayed by a close friend, arrested, tried illegitimately, tortured, publicly humiliated, and executed in brutal fashion upon a cross, as a common criminal. Such a man ought to have no hope whatsoever—yet hundreds of millions across the world base their lives around him. Because according to the Bible, the man Jesus Christ was God, and he proved this by rising from the dead. And if this is true, then God has complete power over death, and so has a hope of everlasting life even for those who suffer as Jesus did.

More than that, it means that when Jesus talks of hope, he talks as one who knows how it feels to bear the full force of injustice. His message is for everyone—the rough sleeper, the abandoned child, the teenage boy, the farmer, the trafficking victim, the cancer patient—because when he promises hope of eternal life, he knows what it’s like to have no hope at all. This is the hope that I and all Christians live by and cling to, and it comes with a challenge. If we claim to be followers of Jesus, then we ought to follow not just His teaching but also His example, in humbling ourselves and sacrificing our own prosperity to show love to the hopeless, by caring for them, defending their rights, addressing their needs—but mostly importantly, by sharing with them the same hope which Jesus shares with us.

In his life and death, Jesus sets out through teaching and action the perfect model of a life devoted wholly to others, and a heart set on bringing lasting hope to a world marred by injustice; a model which still challenges and startles the most devout Christians today as much as it did in his lifetime. Every one of Jesus’ actions is motivated by genuine love and compassion for the physically and spiritually needy, rather than to boost His reputation or offset His guilty conscience. This might be unrecognisable from the half-hearted, often self-serving lives led by too many Christians today. Yet when we even display the faintest echoes of Christ’s character, we can change the lives of hundreds, if not millions. And if my actions truly reflect His, they would more than make up for the inadequacy of my words in trying to express the hope I have.

To me, Christ’s commandment and example is so challenging and life-transforming that it’s no wonder even the best of Christians fail to fully honour it, and why we often present such an uncompelling case for God. But when we let the God of the Bible speak for Himself, we see He isn’t indifferent to injustice and oppression, nor is He incapable—far from it. Jesus Christ reveals in his life, death, and resurrection that God’s standard of justice, love, and compassion is so far beyond what a human can achieve that He Himself has to act to fulfil it. Where Christians fall short daily, Christ has already succeeded, and invites all to share in his victory. And so, when I talk about my hope, I’m not talking about the hope of a middle-class Oxford student. The hope that I hold on to, and invite you to share, is the hope that remains steadfast in the face of any misfortune or injustice: the hope of Jesus on the Cross.

Gabriel is a second year Maths student at Worcester. He enjoys playing guitar, going for walks in nature, learning obscure facts, and attempting to write or draw things, and is almost permanently distracted by one or all of the above.