One of the most transformative things that happened to me during my Willow Creek days occurred long before I was a candidate to come on staff there. Back in my early twenties, when I first became heavily involved, I decided I was ready to become a member. Joining a church felt like a very grown-up thing to do.
However, when I looked into the membership process, I discovered that it included an intensive one-on-one interview with someone from the church. While the high bar the church set for membership was inspiring, I was intimidated. I wondered what I might be asked in the interview. And I wondered if my growing faith would stand up under the lights.
Despite my insecurities, I worked up the courage to move forward. I signed up to be interviewed by Rick Shurtz, one of the young-adult pastors. Because he had already interacted with me in a ministry in which we both served, he had a good sense of where he wanted the conversation to go. He opened our time with a prayer and then asked me to share my salvation story.
I told him some of my testimony: As the son of a pastor, I was familiar with altar calls and had given my life to Christ many times as a young person. I also confessed deep regret about mistakes I made during my high school and college years, and I acknowledged that some of my behaviors flew in the face of a God who had extended so much love to me. I then assured Rick that I was aware of the gravity of my sin and that I was set on making amends to God. I told him I would prove first to God and then to Willow Creek that God had not made a mistake when he extended me the gift of salvation. I would make up for lost time, I told him, and I would make the church proud if they included me as part of their membership roster.
I’ll never forget how serious Rick got in that moment. He shut his notebook and took a moment to compose his thoughts. As we sat there in silence, I became convinced that he was going to tell me I was disqualified based on my uneven track record. But that’s not what he did. Instead he said, “Daniel, let’s not worry about passing this interview. You’re already approved to be a member. You’re going to be a fantastic addition to the Willow Creek community. I’m not concerned with any of that. What I’d like to do is spend the rest of our time talking about grace.”
I was surprised to hear him say that, but also relieved. I had been preoccupied with finding out if I would be accepted by the “in” group, and the security of knowing that I was freed me to engage openly for the rest of the conversation.
Rick thanked me for sharing so openly and then lovingly told me he wanted to explore some self-righteousness he had detected in my story. All I could think was, Whoa, self-righteousness? I didn’t know what he meant by that, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be associated with it. I also knew Rick was a caring and compassionate man who wouldn’t say something unless he thought it would benefit me. So I geared up and invited him to continue.
Rick explained what he meant by self-righteousness and shared his view on the big difference between being accepted into the family of God based on the record of Jesus and having an internal pressure to prove that my record was worthy of acceptance. He talked about how big the difference is between embracing the gift of forgiveness without strings and feeling I was forever chained to the mistakes I’d made. He drew a sharp distinction between deriving a sense of righteousness from my identity in Christ and deriving a sense of righteousness from my deeds.
As he shared his thoughts, I was having an out-of-body experience. At some level, what he was saying was not new at all; I had heard presentations of the gospel at every stage of my upbringing. On the other hand, his description of grace, repentance, and identity in Christ was so beautiful that I burst into tears. I hadn’t realized the degree to which I had taken on the burden of self-righteousness, and I felt an unbelievable release when I allowed the good news of the gospel of grace to wash over my soul.
This was a pivotal moment in my spiritual life—the first time I saw the power of self-righteousness and understood how to combat it with the gospel. Little did I know I would need to learn it all over again in my cultural identity journey.
In aviation, there’s a principle called the one-degree rule: a tiny error in direction can make a major difference in the final destination of a flight. If you’re one degree off for a mile, that means a ninety-foot miss; and if the trip is sixty miles, the plane will miss its target by a full mile. If your direction is one degree off from New York to Los Angeles, you end up being fifty miles off course.
When it comes to identifying extreme forms of self-righteousness, the one-degree rule isn’t necessary. After all, it doesn’t require high levels of discernment to recognize when a highly judgmental person has gone off course, right? But what about when self-righteousness presents itself as small and seemingly insignificant? Do we notice it then? Do we even care?
Jesus’ clearest teaching on unchecked self-righteousness comes in the parable of the prodigal son (or actually sons). The father in the parable, who represents God, has two sons. The younger of the two demands his inheritance and then proceeds to squander all his wealth in “wild living” (Luke 15:13). He eventually hits rock bottom when he’s competing with pigs for their food. At that point, he finally comes to his senses. (Incidentally, “coming to our senses” is a very effective phrase for describing conversion.)
By then, the younger prodigal has given up any expectation that he will be accepted back as a son, but he knows that his father is a man of compassion, so he hopes to be received as a servant. He begins the long trip home and is spotted from far off by the hopeful father. Breaking every Middle Eastern protocol for a dignified male, the father runs full speed to welcome the prodigal home.
The over-the-top reception that the younger son got often steals the spotlight, yet the tale of the older brother is every bit as significant. His story is a case study for the one-degree rule: though he dutifully followed the house rules, his obedience wasn’t flowing from a grateful heart. Instead he was driven by his own selfish agenda. Though this distinction was difficult to detect from the outside, it eventually showed itself in the cumulative toll that it took on his soul. By the time it bubbled to the surface, the elder brother was marked by a combination of anger, joylessness, judgment, and most sadly, an inability to internalize the love of the Father (Luke 15:28-30).
I appreciate this parable because it normalizes the ways self-righteousness plays a role in shaping the identity trajectory for each us. Like the older brother, we all have moments along the way when we rediscover that just because our identity can be rooted in the love of the Father doesn’t mean it always is. Every time we base our identity on anything else—such as our own accomplishments, achievements, and/or good behaviors—we begin to go down a path strikingly similar to that of the older brother. Even one degree of self-righteousness is enough to knock us off course, which can send us far off course in the long run. This is true in many arenas of the spiritual life, and it’s especially true in the journey of cultural identity development.
How do we detect when we’re in the self-righteousness stage? This parable from Jesus gives us some very direct answers:
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 18:9-14)
Though this parable is hard-hitting, its straightforwardness has long been a gift to me. Jesus wasted no time making his point, and in his opening line he laid bare what unveiled self-righteousness looks like: “To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable.”
The parable’s subject is a Pharisee, and critique of him begins with the way he (and others) placed confidence in his “own righteousness.” The Pharisees had very specific categories for right living that need not obscure the universal application of what Jesus said here. As human beings, we all consistently do the same thing. We create and recreate our own categories of right living, which serve as failed attempts to prop up an established sense of identity. One’s educational level, racial background, political affiliation, commitment to a social cause, abstinence from a certain activity, adherence to a certain set of doctrines, or any other combination can be the criteria. Our modern tendencies reveal that we aren’t that different from this first-century Pharisee that got the unenviable job of serving as Jesus’ illustration.
After showing the danger of placing our confidence in our own righteousness, Jesus moved on to make evident the telltale, ir-refutable sign of self-righteousness: the Pharisee “looked down on everyone else.”
The brilliance of this statement first popped out at me when I was working on my doctoral thesis. I was required to study a particular field from the social sciences as part of my thesis, so I chose to study social identity theory. This theory relates to the cultural identity themes of this book in that it addresses the ways in which people perceive and categorize themselves in society. Of particular interest is the way a person’s sense of identity is shaped by in-group and out-group association. At its most basic level, an in-group is a social group to which an individual feels he or she belongs, and an out-group is a social group with which an individual doesn’t identify. The in-group we associate with becomes an important source of pride and self-esteem, and it gives us a sense of belonging. However, in an attempt to bolster that sense of belonging, human beings tend to belittle, discriminate against, and hold prejudices against the out-group we don’t belong to.
Hundreds of experiments have been done on in-group/out-group dynamics, and I explored many of them for my thesis project. One that’s often referred to in the study of social categorization wasn’t a formal experiment, yet it verifies common findings. In 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a teacher named Jane Elliot tried something in a schoolroom in Iowa, and the results were strikingly similar to what Jesus addressed in Luke 18.
Elliot focused on the problems of racial prejudice by dividing her third-grade class into groups on the basis of eye color.1 She allowed the “better” blue-eyed children to discriminate against the brown-eyed children. Within minutes, the blue-eyed children sadistically ridiculed their unfortunate classmates, calling them stupid and shunning them in the playground during recess. Then she flipped the situation, and the brown-eyed children exacted the same punishments on their blue-eyed classmates.
As I studied this quasi-experiment as well as dozens like it, I realized they confirmed what Jesus had directly addressed two millennia before. With his parable on self-righteousness, he used the language of in-group and out-group long before modern psychology popularized it. That Pharisee exhibited all the findings of social identity theory when he divided his world into the binary categories of “good” people and “bad” people. He was establishing a pseudo sense of identity by organizing his standing based on his membership in the in-group. And he bolstered that standing by discriminating against the out-group, which he identified by name in his prayer: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11).
We all do this, and the criteria we use for dividing the world into good/bad, in/out can be as diverse as humanity itself. Jonathan Martin, one of my favorite preachers, tells a story of going to a pair of pastor’s conferences on back-to-back weekends and witnessing this division of people into the good/bad binary on opposite ends of the spectrum. The first conference was of a more conservative persuasion, and this group split the world into those who held a traditional view of marriage and those that held another view. Though the conference was supposed to address a wide range of issues, participants were so fixated by the in/out of that one issue that it overwhelmed the rest of the agenda.
On the very next weekend he went to a pastor’s conference that was of a more liberal persuasion, and the same thing happened but with a different set of values. Within this group he found a fixation with those who were concerned about environmental issues and those who were not. They made constant jokes about SUV driving and gas guzzlers, and they seemed unable to take anyone seriously that wasn’t at the same level of environmental “enlightenment.”
I’m not minimizing the importance of holding to a personal opinion or conviction on a topic. Scripture is clear that we as Christ’s followers are to align our beliefs with the teachings of God rather than conform to the ways of the world. The problem comes when we subtly shift from appropriate conviction to sinful comparing. The Pharisee in this parable was sinfully comparing in order to separate himself from the people he judged to be unworthy of God’s love and favor. Self-righteousness points to a deep foundational reality. It has to do with identity and how we pursue an inner sense of belonging. It has to do with our sense of being right with God, with the world, and with our neighbors.
When we allow our sense of belonging to be shaped by the in/out, us/them binary of good and bad, we fall into what entrapped the Pharisee. We exert inordinate amounts of energy trying to prove that we belong in the good group (with earning, achieving, and validating as ways of proving it). We also can’t help but look down on those that are in the other group with judgment and at times even disdain.
Dr. Robin DiAngelo, whose work on white fragility we explored in chapter five, is also helpful when discussing self-righteousness. Though she approaches this topic from a secular perspective, it’s intriguing how clearly her ideas intersect with Jesus’ teachings:
For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist—we don’t engage in those acts. . . . In large part, white fragility—the defensiveness, the fear of conflict—is rooted in this good/bad binary. If you call someone out, they think to themselves, “What you just said was that I am a bad person, and that is intolerable to me.” It’s a deep challenge to the core of our identity as good, moral people.2
There’s a lot in this quote, so let’s clarify it. It’s very difficult to recognize the presence of something unhealthy within us if it isn’t overtly obvious (moral or immoral singular acts). To survive the pressure that self-awareness creates, we develop defense mechanisms in relation to contradictory acts.
One powerful defense mechanism is to judge only what is most behaviorally observable in our lives. However, when we live like this, we protect ourselves from the weight of genuine self-examination and all its implications. For example, if we allowed ourselves to see how deep the roots of greed go into our hearts, we would make changes in how we spend money and what we do with prized possessions. If we instead focus on a singular moral act, such as a financial contribution to a charity, it’s easier to ignore the countless ways in which we take rather than give.
Most of us find it difficult to be at peace with ourselves when we don’t feel that we’re good, moral people, as DiAngelo aptly phrased it. If we’re challenged on this, an immediate instinct to protect our idea of who we are comes into play so we can continue functioning. This is part of what makes us so fragile; something is fragile when it can’t handle weight or pressure without breaking. Her observation is that because white people’s gauge of being good and moral is critical to their sense of identity, there’s an inherent fragility that can’t take the weight of difficult inner realities, such as the presence of racism (no matter how subtle it is).
With this quote from DiAngelo in one hand and the teachings of Jesus in the other, I’d like to draw out a handful of important links between self-righteousness, cultural identity, and the dismantling of racism:
Self-righteousness undermines healthy identity development. The Pharisee split the world into binary categories of good/bad and in/out. So do most white people. According to DiAngelo’s words above, we too often allow our identity to “rest on the idea” that there are good white people with whom we long to be associated and bad white people whom we choose to shun.
I see this tendency in almost every white person seeking greater levels of racial awareness, and my own story is no different. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight, I see that this was the most formative stage of my cultural identity journey. My most intensified awakening overlapped with the period of my most intensified battle with self-righteousness. I didn’t have the awareness to classify it as self-righteousness at the time, but any objective person who applied the tests of social identity theory would have.
The first manifestation of self-righteousness, according to Jesus’ parable, is that we place too much confidence in our own sense of rightness. Whereas the Pharisee did this by drawing a circle around the way his group attended to the detailed obedience of the Torah, I did it by drawing a circle around those I saw as being awake to racial justice. Consistent with classic in-group/out-group behavior, I worked hard to prove that I belonged to this group that I deemed to be awakened to race and active to address it. So I became borderline obsessive about achieving the approval of those whose opinion on race mattered to me. This included just about every person of color I knew and white people I admired who were doing the work of reconciliation and justice. I would brag, pontificate, share tales of my exploits, and do just about anything I could think of to prove to them that I was an enlightened contributor to the movement of racial reconciliation. I was as textbook as they come.
According to Jesus, the second manifestation of self-righteousness, as well as its telltale sign, is looking down on those who live contrary to the values of our in-group. It was obvious to me who belonged to the out-group category of bad people: every white person that didn’t care about racial justice. I took some sort of twisted pride in distancing myself from those I deemed as unenlightened, and I thought this enhanced my standing as one of the good white people who got it. I eventually discovered how dangerous this self-righteousness is and made a commitment to find a way out.
I want to be sure to emphasize the threat self-righteousness poses to healthy identity development. As explored at multiple points, we are our best and most redeemed self when our identity is rooted in our status as beloved children of God. When our sense of belonging rests on anything else, we lose touch with that redeemed self. As important as the racial awakening journey is, we must remain aware of the ways we form an evolved sense of identity based on group identity. We are drawn to prove that we belong to the good/in-group, and we are tempted to judge those in the bad/out-group. This has a major impact on the development of our cultural identity journey, and the faster we can spot the presence of self-righteousness the better.
Self-righteousness undermines our ability to dismantle the system of racism. DiAngelo highlights another very important idea when she alludes to the relationship between cultural identity and the nature of racism: “For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist—we don’t engage in those acts.”
My experience suggests that she’s right when she says that most white people essentially define racism as being about “moral or immoral singular acts.” In other words, we think of racism as an individual person doing or committing an individually bad deed.
If that were all that racism entailed, it wouldn’t be difficult to eradicate. We would just need to sequester all the bad people who do bad things and then trust that the world would move back to a state of equality. This would simplify the cultural identity journey as well, and all we’d need to do is ensure that we remain on the side of the “good” white people and avoid anything that implicates us with the “bad” ones.
That is, of course, a naive view of both cultural identity and racism. Racism is far more lethal than a handful of individual actors committing individual immoral acts. A much more holistic way to think of racism comes when we look at it through the lens of the four interlocking facets that we explored in the “Encounter” chapter:
Only when we view racism through all four of these lenses do we appreciate the depth of its power and pervasiveness of its presence.
At this point we begin to grasp the nuanced relationship between self-righteousness, cultural identity, and the dismantling of racism. The flow tends to go something like this: As human beings, we are always battling self-righteousness. We are caught between the pull of building our identity through our own efforts on one side and rooting our identity in the love and grace of the Father on the other.
More specifically, as white people pursuing deeper levels of engagement with cultural identity, we’re tempted to bolster our sense of identity through group association. The telltale sign of self-righteousness in everyday identity is drawing a circle around the in-group and pointing a judgmental finger at those in the out-group. In the cultural identity journey, this usually manifests as trying to prove that you belong to the group that “gets” it—or as many in my congregation joke, as being the “cool” white person that’s on the side of justice. This inevitably leads to judgment, and at times even scorn, toward those who have the other vices and behaviors.
Finally, self-righteousness undercuts our ability to combat and dismantle racism. Once we’ve committed to a course of identity formation defined by self-righteousness and self-inclusion in the “good” group, we’re susceptible to a watered-down analysis of race. Rather than acknowledging the pervasive way race shapes us all, we look for ways to reduce racism to individual acts of immorality. While this allows us to maintain the illusion of a binary world of good/bad and in/out, it also undercuts our ability to do anything meaningful to combat racism.
Once you’re able to acknowledge the tendencies to drift toward self-righteousness—and I hope we all are—the obvious question is “How do I move out of the self-righteousness stage?” The answer is found in a single word that’s equal parts beautifully simple and frustratingly complex: repentance.
First, let’s embrace its beautiful simplicity. While many theological squabbles tend to partition the church, repentance is one of those wonderful doctrines that unite believers. Christians of every tradition acknowledge that repentance is the key to God’s heart, and we trust that it unleashes God’s grace.
We all agree that repentance is a mandatory discipline for breaking free of self-righteousness. This is confirmed in the parable of the prodigal son, as the father begs the older brother to repent of his protest. The father assures him that the entire inheritance is awaiting him, and he needs to come home to receive the gift of God’s grace. We also see this in the self-righteous Pharisee (Luke 18). We know that if he would just repent for constructing his identity on his good deeds, he would discover the life-altering joy of having an identity built on the grace and love of God.
So repentance is beautifully simple and straightforward. It is to come home to the Father. It is to confess of our sin and to bask in God’s grace. It is to turn away from self-driven efforts to build an identity and to allow the grace and love of God to serve as our foundation.
But as beautifully simple as repentance is—and it truly is—it can also be frustratingly complex. This is especially true when it comes to white Christians’ cultural identity journey. In many areas of life, repentance seems to come with relative ease, but there’s something different about repentance in regard to race and cultural identity.
I learned this in a very public way. In the previous chapter, I told the story of the shooting of Laquan McDonald. A variety of protests and actions ensued in the wake of the release of the video, and the city was tense. In response, a group of pastors from the South Side, where McDonald had been shot and killed, felt God leading them to plan a citywide event that focused on galvanizing Christians. The vision was built around prayer and social action, and the decision was made to host a prayer vigil on the front steps of the Chicago Police Department headquarters, at Thirty-Fifth and Michigan.
Many Christians from throughout the city attended, and I was humbled to be one of the clergy who was invited to pray. Each pastor was given a different topic to address in prayer, with themes ranging from lament for the loss of life to intercession for greater justice in the police system. The topic assigned to me was repentance, and when it came my turn to pray, it felt necessary to include a prayer of repentance for the ways in which white Christians have been complicit in racism throughout American history.
When the event concluded, I assumed that would be the end of it, but the vigil drew significant interest from across the county. The entire nation was embroiled in racial tension, and the raw footage of McDonald’s shooting had put Chicago in the spotlight. As a result, a variety of major news networks attended, including CNN. A CNN reporter called me about an hour after the event and said that a number of the reporters in their studio were talking about how unusual it was to see a white pastor praying about repentance at a Black Lives Matters event. (It was not technically a BLM event, but that was how they portrayed it.) They asked me if I would do a live interview to discuss the topic further.
I felt uneasy about the offer, as it didn’t take much discernment to see how much privilege was being extended to me. Twelve women and men of color had eloquently shared important prayers at the vigil, yet CNN was pursuing the one white pastor for an interview. On top of that, I wasn’t even one of the organizing pastors, and that made me feel even less qualified to speak.
One of the lessons I’ve learned in my years at River City is that when navigating complicated racial terrain, it’s important not to live in my own head. I believe in the blindness-to-sight paradigm and therefore have little regard for my ability to answer questions alone. So before I replied to CNN, I reached out to a number of mentors as well as the organizers of the event. I told them of my uneasiness with being invited as the only white pastor who had prayed. Each person I spoke to agreed that it was an obvious display of white privilege that confirmed a recurring pattern of white people ignoring the voices of people of color.
Despite that observation, they also strongly believed I should seize the opportunity, agreeing that it was a good way to discuss the issue on a larger platform. They said privilege shouldn’t keep me from being faithful to discuss repentance with a national audience. One of my pastor friends gave me the bottom line: “Every black pastor in America says this exact thing from the pulpit every Sunday, but we all know white America isn’t going to listen to them. But they just might listen to you.”
Things progressed quickly, and I was in the CNN studio the following afternoon. I wasn’t given any indication of what we would be talking about or what I would be asked. So I went without an agenda, other than a commitment to do my best to center the conversation on Jesus. That may sound churchy, but it was the truth. I didn’t want to perpetuate a view of social action that’s detached from Christian faith, and I hoped to bear witness to the gospel. I wasn’t sure if I could bring up the name of Jesus, but I was certainly going to try.
It was somewhat shocking and extremely pleasant when the interview began with a full replay of my prayer. I started to feel giddy. I couldn’t believe they were airing a prayer on CNN. It was over three minutes long, and they showed it in its entirety, so I couldn’t help but let my mind wander a bit. I found myself back in my Pentecostal upbringing, remembering our reverence of those saints that found a way to go public with their faith. We often joked in youth group that if one of us ever talked about Jesus on Oprah or could hit the game-winning shot and then bear witness to Christ in our post-game comments, we could retire right then and go straight to heaven. Well, this wasn’t Oprah, but CNN wasn’t a bad second.
When the video of the prayer finally ended, Brooke Baldwin introduced me and then jumped right in. She began by asking why a white pastor had prayed about repentance at a Black Lives Matter event. Then she gave me an uninterrupted space to share. I talked about the biblical importance of repentance, the centrality of grace, and the need to have the mind of Christ regarding our historical relationship with race.
The interview ended shortly after, and as I walked out of the CNN studio, I felt a deep sense of satisfaction. The segment was seven minutes—an eternity in TV time—and it was saturated with the name of Jesus from beginning to end. I was thrilled about the clear focus on prayer and repentance in the midst of troubling times.
Those feelings of excitement evaporated pretty quickly when I turned on my phone. Social media was blowing up with angry responses to the interview, and the overwhelming majority came from white Christians frustrated with what I’d said. Here’s one tweet that summarized the larger body of angry replies: “If you see yourself as a racist, then go ahead and repent for yourself. But don’t you dare repent for me. I’m not a racist, and I don’t need some white pastor confessing for me.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d encountered people upset that I had repented for racism. It’s something I’ve done plenty of times, though never on such a large stage. But what happened after CNN was unlike anything I could have predicted. Not only were thousands of white Christians angry with me, but they were diligent in finding my contact information on every social medium on the Internet: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, the River City website. Angry callers even found the phone number for River City and left hundreds of voicemails. Many of them were threatening enough that the Chicago police had to get involved (which was ironic, since I was doing the interview because of police brutality).
I won’t risk oversimplifying why so many white Christians responded the way they did. But I walked away convinced that the intersection of repentance and cultural identity and race can be very tricky for white Christians in particular.
I was pretty shaken by the angry responses, and I began to wonder if I was relaying the biblical call to repentance accurately. I went back to Scripture, looking for answers, and found guidance in an unexpected place: a party with Jesus.
Luke 5:27-32 provides a picture for repentance—particularly a picture that addresses self-righteousness. Jesus famously called on Levi the tax collector to leave his old life behind and follow him. Levi indeed became a disciple and eventually took the name Matthew (which means “gift of God”).
Shortly after this conversion, it dawned on Levi that while his new life was absolutely amazing, he may have some responsibilities to the friends he’d left behind. Back in his heyday, he’d been known as quite the partier (Luke 5:29), so he figured a party would be a good place to introduce his new group of friends to his old group of friends. Presumably to his delight, not only Jesus was amicable to the idea but also his entire crew of tax collectors.
While the party was a big hit, it also drew the ire of the Pharisees. They were uncomfortable that Jesus so openly associated with sinners, a view that comes as little surprise when we consider the markers of social identity theory. Given the propensity of Pharisees to drift toward self-righteousness, it was predictable that Jesus’ choice to commune with those from the out-group was met with confusion.
Their presence creates the backdrop for one of the most important teachings Jesus gave on repentance. In the first publicly recorded question from Pharisees (which seems to intensify its meaning), they ask, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” To this, Jesus simply replied, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:30-32).
This single sentence is loaded with meaning, as Jesus aimed his response directly at self-righteousness. Though he didn’t technically use the prefix self when he said, “I have not come to call the righteous,” it is the clear implication, since all followers of Jesus are made righteous through faith in him. What’s undoubtedly clear is Jesus’ portrayal of self-righteousness as oppositional to his call.
In the passage, Jesus also didn’t allude to repentance as having to do with a person’s deeds—good or bad. This would have been (and always will be) both confusing and confrontational for anyone oriented to viewing sin through a behavioral grid. In the world of self-righteousness, the only means to prove your worth and develop your identity is by associating with well-behaved people and by avoiding badly behaved people. But if good deeds and bad deeds are no longer the primary markers for belonging, where does that leave repentance?
This leads to the third and most important thing that jumps out from this passage. When Jesus taught on repentance here, he grounded it in a pair of evocative images: sin is likened to being sick (as opposed to being classified as bad), and righteousness is likened to being healthy (as opposed to being classified as good).
For those seeking union with Christ, the implication is clear. While being a Christian always entails seeking right behavior and avoiding wrong behavior, our vision for transformation is always hampered if this is the limit of our sight. Instead our transformation requires that we first are able to take an accurate appraisal of ourselves. We must embrace the fact that we are far beyond misbehaved or immoral—we are sick. A sick person can’t cure her condition with hard work or good deeds. The only hope is a cure from the outside. The only hope is Jesus.
Here I see a deeply spiritual connection between repentance in the life of faith and repentance in the cultural identity journey. If most of us approach the development of cultural identity through a self-righteousness grid—and I’ve done my best to convince you that we do—then there are some dynamics we can assume are happening at an internal level.
First, we can assume that we’re drawing most of our cultural identity from a commitment to group membership. We quickly develop a sense of who the in-group is that gets it and who the out-group is that doesn’t. Much of our success in the cultural identity journey is therefore determined simply by whether or not we can convince ourselves that we have successfully associated with the in-group.
Second, we can assume that the primary test for group membership is our behavior, our deeds. We intuitively identify a set of behaviors we believe defines the in-group, and we work hard to ascribe to those. We also identify behaviors that mark the out-group—much as the Pharisees did with those who were sexually immoral and financially unscrupulous—and we work hard to avoid these. The successful negotiation of these behaviors is a critical dimension of “rightness.” They prove that we belong in the right group and that we have successfully distanced ourselves from the wrong group.
Third, and as a result of the first two, we have a very limited vision of repentance as it applies to the cultural identity journey. While we may respect the fact that bad deeds must still be confessed, our divine imagination is still restricted to behaviors. In the same way that the words of Jesus confused the well-meaning Pharisees, this line often confuses our cultural identity development. Again, “it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
One amazing thing about this conversation between the Pharisees and Jesus is that they all were striving for the same thing: righteousness. They just had very different visions for how to get there. The Pharisees believed they had to earn their way in and then prove that they belonged. They wanted to convince Jesus that they were already healthy.
Jesus, on the other hand, never asked them to prove their righteousness. He already knew they weren’t righteous. And he certainly didn’t ask them to portray themselves as healthy. He had already identified them as sick. Ironically, all they needed to do to be righteous was admit they weren’t. All they needed to do to become healthy was admit they weren’t. The cure was right there.
That’s why repentance is such great news for the hungry heart. Once you realize you’re sick, you stop trying to act healthy. And you go on the search for the cure. When you discover that the cure was already searching for you, an explosion of gratitude makes sense.
That’s why I so regularly and comfortably repent for the sins of white Christians—both for mine and for the sins of my community. It isn’t because I think I’m better than everybody else or that I’m trying to prove that some bad white Christians out there need to be chastised. No, I repent all the time because I believe I’m surrounded by the sickness of racism. I see the sickness in the ideology of white supremacy and have no doubt that it has infected me. I see the sickness in the narrative of racial difference and have no doubt it has infected me. I see the sickness of systemic racism and have no doubt that I contribute to it in ways I’m not aware of. I’m surrounded by sickness, and I am sick. I am in need of the great Physician. It’s the only hope I have to be healthy.
That’s also why I see repentance as the single most important spiritual discipline associated with cultural identity development. I would even say that it’s the single most important spiritual discipline for finding white liberation. This new vision of repentance blows up the self-righteousness grid and brings forth liberation.
Now we no longer have to base our cultural identity on an association with the good group.
Now we no longer have to base our cultural identity on a rejection of the bad group.
Now we no longer have to worry about proving, earning, or achieving acceptance.
Instead we can acknowledge that we’re surrounded by the sickness of racism. And when we expand our definition of repentance to include the intake of toxins from our polluted racial environment, it becomes not only easy but also something we desperately need. We can drop all pretenses, finally, and simply confess our wholesale need for Jesus.