THERE will be many sermons preached in Holy Week claiming that Christ was a victim of human injustice. How far this is true is unclear. Scripture, after all, insists that he predicted the destruction of the Temple, which would probably have made him guilty, at least, of blasphemy.
But there is mileage in emphasising Christ’s victimhood, advancing the current tendency to see victimhood as a kind of moral privilege in a world that has become a giant conspiracy against those who see themselves as innocent.
Victimhood counts politically. President Trump claims that other countries have raided the United States; Marine le Pen claims that she has been unjustly censored. Scripture does not valorise victimhood in quite the way that we tend to.
Job is the victim of injustice, but it is not human injustice. The uncomfortable truth is that Job is a pawn in God’s bet with Satan. He is right to refuse to accept that his sufferings are his own fault, and insists that God come to court to explain himself. Eventually, God appears, “out of the whirlwind”, and both rebukes Job — “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” — and vindicates him, restoring his family and fortune. Job’s role, it appears, is to bear witness, to challenge the divine ordering of things, and yet, in the end, to submit to the providence of God.
The uncomfortable lesson is that bad things happen, and we have no absolute right not to be hurt, deprived, or assaulted in this life; nor can we always expect compensation for the bad things that happen to us. When claim meets counter-claim, the main beneficiaries are lawyers.
Early Christian preaching, following Jesus himself, offered salvation not only to victims, but to perpetrators. When Peter preached to the Jews that “that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified”, has become “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2.36-8), his hearers were, as the King James Bible puts it so vividly, “pricked in their heart”, many of them gladly repenting and receiving baptism. The resurrection implies the forgiveness of sins.
Victimhood comes with an unsought moral challenge, which no victim has to accept, though all may. This was well understood by the remarkable Holocaust survivor Eva Kor, who, as a child, had been brutalised at Auschwitz by the sadistic Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Fifty years later, after years of witnessing to Nazi atrocities and supporting other survivors, she chose publicly to forgive Mengele, along with Hitler. For her, this did not mean that her torturers were not guilty: rather, that it was time to liberate herself from the burden of victimhood.
As Christians, we need to acknowledge that there is no easy justice in the world of God’s creation. The scandal of the cross and resurrection is that they offer hope to victim and perpetrator alike.