IN 1991, FOUR Los Angeles police officers beat Rodney King, a 25-year-old African American man, nearly to death. It was caught on video. All the officers were acquitted of assault with a deadly weapon. The acquittals were followed by six days of rebellion with more than 50 associated deaths. At that time, I and many other white Christians fixated on our desire to see “peace” restored. Even in the face of graphic police brutality, I was unable to see the pernicious racial injustice that created the context for the riots. The white Christianity of my upbringing did not equip me with a biblical lens through which to discern the truth about racial injustice in the U.S. It would be nearly a full decade before I could finally begin to perceive it.

Nevertheless, in light of the role white Christian nationalists played in the Jan.6 riot, the number of pastors who preach against Black Lives Matter and critical race theory, and the deafening silence and stubborn inaction of many white Christians in the face of explicit cries for racial justice, I have to ask: Will this generation of white American Christians be just another in the long line to embolden racial injustice?

Where do we turn to find hope, inspiration, and guidance to help white Christians finally commit to our God-given vocation to do justice instead of holding tightly to our idolatrous commitment to white supremacy? I look to the little-known biblical prophet Zechariah and how he called a generation returned from exile to live out God’s call to do justice.

Zechariah’s call to repentance

LITTLE IS KNOWN about the person of Zechariah, with few details of his life revealed in the book that bears his name. Only two other books in the rest of the Hebrew Bible reference this particular Zechariah — Haggai and Ezra. In Ezra 5:1 and 6:14, we learn that Zechariah was a contemporary of Haggai and that both prophesied to the Jews in the days of Zerubbabel, governor of Judaea under the Persians, encouraging Zerubbabel and the residents of Jerusalem to finish rebuilding the Temple destroyed by the Babylonians 70 years earlier.

Where the texts of Ezra, Haggai, and Zechariah agree is that these two prophets, Zechariah and Haggai, preached to a small band of people under the reign of the Persian emperor Darius I when Jerusalem and Yehud, the small district where Jerusalem was situated, were insignificant and beleaguered communities on the southern boundaries of empire.

While the Book of Haggai records a series of messages intended to persuade this small band to rebuild the Temple, the Book of Zechariah is not so clearly focused on Temple (re)building. Rather, the opening of the book (1:1-6) calls the people to repent, to return to the Lord as the Lord has returned to the people. The prophet Zechariah’s message reminds the people of how the generations prior to the exile refused to respond to the preaching of earlier prophets until it was too late, repenting only after they found themselves in exile and realized that the words of the prophets had caught up to them.

Most of the book’s first six chapters report visions that Zechariah received in a single night, visions emphasizing the Lord’s return to the people. The visions also call the high priest Joshua to walk in God’s ways and keep God’s requirements (3:7) and warn of judgment against thieves and those who swear falsely in God’s name (5:3-4).

When Zechariah awakens, he enacts a dramatic performance, making crowns and placing one on the head of Joshua, signaling God’s promise to raise up a branch from the line of David. But this seemingly positive performance ends on an ominous note — the future blessings depend on the people’s willingness to “diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God” (6:15).

Currying favor is not repentance

THE STORY RECORDED in Zechariah 7-8 has a date stamp, alerting the reader to the fact that this story is two years removed from Zechariah’s original preaching to repent. Sadly, the story told here brings us face-to-face with an apparent exercise in missing the point.

Residents of Bethel sent two emissaries “to entreat the favor of the Lord” (7:2), asking the Temple priests and prophets whether to continue mourning and fasting in the fifth month, as they have done since the early days of the exile (7:2-3). While “favor” sounds like a positive word, asking God’s “favor” does not imply the people’s repentance. This same word is used in Exodus 32:11 as Moses seeks God’s “favor” not to destroy the people after they built the golden calf. And David’s son Amnon asks his father’s “favor” to send Tamar to him, only to then rape her (2 Samuel 13:5-14).

God is unimpressed with the plea for favor from the people of Bethel and with their 70 years of mourning and fasting. Why? Because they were not fasting for God’s sake (Zechariah 7:5); they were not eager to know God and do God’s will. Apparently, the people hoped to have simply worn God down over the 70 years instead of doing what God wanted them to do all along: Repent.

God’s consistent message

THE NEXT PART of the story begins with a bit of prophetic snark as Zechariah asks the emissaries to summarize the message of the prophets who preached before the exile (Zechariah 7:7). If they don’t know, Zechariah is glad to remind them: “Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another” (7:9-10).

God did not exile the people for a lack of sorrow or for a failure to hold regular fasts. God exiled the people because they refused to repent, refused to restore justice to the courts, refused to show compassion and mercy, refused to stop oppressing marginalized people within their society. It’s not like the people did not know what to do. It’s that they refused to do it.

To put a finer point on it, Zechariah reminds the emissaries that the message of the former prophets simply repeated the demands of Torah (7:12). And what did the people do when they heard the prophets call the people to obey God’s Torah? They made their hearts “adamant,” an image of armed guards standing at the door of their hearts to deny entrance to God’s Torah. God is not interested in those who seek God’s favor or even fast for 70 years. God is interested in people who will do what God has asked them to do all along.

The implication of the prophet’s answer to the emissaries is that nothing has changed. People continue to oppress the widow, alien, orphan, and poor. And the Lord has not changed either: God still wants repentance (1:1-6) and obedience (6:15).

Fix the center of power

THE EMMISSARIES COME on behalf of the community of Bethel. But Zechariah sets his sights on the larger problem, shifting the focus from outlying villages and towns to Jerusalem, the historical city of God. If you want to fix the injustices of society, fix the center of power.

And now we come to the good part. Yes, the Lord has big plans for Jerusalem, plans to make it flourish so that young and old alike enjoy life in the city streets (8:4-5). Even more importantly, after generations of people refusing to obey Torah and the prophetic call to repentance, God plans to make Jerusalem “the faithful city” and Mount Zion “the holy mountain” (8:3).

In the night visions two years prior, Zechariah saw a scroll with a curse on those who swore falsely in God’s name — those who took an oath in court in God’s name but lied (5:3-4). This vision saw Jerusalem as a city full of thieves and liars. But God’s zeal intends to change all that, to remake the city so that the city’s reputation is not as a city that perverts justice in the courts. In this new generation, Jerusalem will be known as the place to go to find justice because it is “the faithful city.”

According to the Bible, Zion was another name for Jerusalem even in the days before it became the capital city of the biblical nation of Israel (2 Samuel 5:7). But, because it became known not only as the city of David but also as the city of God, there was a reasonable expectation that it might be a “holy mountain.”

However, according to the prophecies in the Book of Ezekiel, the evils that the people committed prior to exile “polluted” them and, by association, polluted Mount Zion (20:43). But, just as Ezekiel promised that the exiles would return to the “holy mountain” (20:20), Zechariah tells Bethel’s emissaries that, in spite of the evil the people planned in their hearts prior to exile (Zechariah 7:10), now is the time when the people will return from east and west (8:7) and the mountain of the Lord will be “the holy mountain” (8:3).

God has a zeal for Jerusalem, for Mount Zion, a zeal that the city would finally become what God has intended all along, the faithful city, the holy mountain.

God wants people to do Torah

SO, WHAT IS Zechariah’s message to God’s people? In spite of generations refusing Torah, in spite of generations rejecting the prophets, in spite of people dragged unrepentant into exile, God’s call still stands. This generation can decide, today, to be who God wanted them to be all along, to do what God always wanted them to do.

There is a parallelism in the prophet’s reminder about what the people are to do (see 8:16-17):

Speak the truth to one another (A)
Render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace (B)
Do not devise evil in your hearts against one another (A’)
Love no false oath (B’)

The Lord instructs them to “speak truth to one another” (A) instead of lying to each other’s faces while plotting evil in their hearts (A’). Instead of loving false oaths (B’) and, one presumes, all their financial benefits, the people are to render justice in their gates and make judgments that restore the community’s wholeness (B, shalom, “make for peace”). Zechariah proclaims that this is the generation that can finally do what pleases the Lord, if they only will.

Pursuing justice

MORE THAN 30 YEARS after having my own eyes opened to the violence of racial injustice in our nation, I believe and pray that this generation of white U.S. Christians can fulfill our vocation to do justice.

For example, what does it mean to “speak the truth” when faced with a criminal injustice system? The Innocence Project shows that our court system does not deliver the truth as regularly as it should. In the U.S. today, Black people represent 14 percent of the population, but make up 53 percent of the 3,200 wrongfully convicted people exonerated since 1989. Innocent Black Americans are seven times more likely than white Americans to be falsely convicted of serious crimes, according to a 2022 report from the National Registry of Exonerations.

What about “false oaths”? The problem with false oaths in the courts of Zechariah’s time was their association with bribes that perverted justice. In a corrupt judicial system, money and influence too readily impact which cases are prioritized or dismissed. As of 2002, when national data was last collected for the U.S., about 30 percent of people in local jails were “pre-trial,” meaning they were locked up while awaiting trial or a hearing. At that time, nearly 70 percent of those were people of color. In the past two decades, pre-trial jail populations have more than doubled. White Americans with more access to resources can often afford bail and lawyers. Those stuck in jail without funding for bail may only get a 10-minute meeting with a court-appointed attorney before making a plea before a judge.

Long before this land became the United States through violence against Black and brown bodies, the appointed governor of the strongly Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first colony to legalize slavery, preached to those coming from England that his colony would be a “city on a hill,” a shining example to the nations. For generations afterward, white Christians have allowed the sins of racial injustice to pollute the very ground of our nation. And yet, racial injustice perpetuated by white Christians is not an inevitability. God’s zeal for justice has not waned. Today is the day to repent, to obey, to tell the truth, to be a faithful city.