I interrupt my series—”What Happened to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Dream?”—today with a special entry concerning Juneteenth.
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A year ago, Bonnie Kristian published “Juneteenth: A Truer Independence Day” in Christianity Today. In it she borrows heavily from others to claim that Juneteenth “is a holiday with a built-in tension: It celebrates a delayed and, in many ways, incomplete liberation. But it still celebrates and hopes for a future held by God in Christ. . . . In Juneteenth’s tension we may be reminded of the already/not yet of God’s kingdom: Jesus is already victorious over sin, death, and every evil and oppression that besets us, but this victory is not yet fully realized here among us.” Kristian derives this from a sermon spoken by Ekemini Uwan at Citypoint Community Church (Chicago, 2019), in which Uwan argues, “We live in this present evil age, and as a result, we live in the tension of the already and not yet, meaning that Christ’s kingdom has been inaugurated due to Christ’s advent and finished work of the Cross, but the full manifestation of the kingdom of God hasn’t come yet, and it will not come in its fullness until Christ returns.”
Tempting as it may be to accept Uwan’s high-sounding theological assertion as theologically analogous to and insightful of what is celebrated on Juneteenth, it is less than the most fitting application of the already-not yet relationship between Christ’s first advent to take away sin for many and his second advent when he will come, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to all who eagerly await his coming (Hebrews 9:24-25). How does the analogy fall short? What is the problem? To claim that receipt of the news of emancipation on June 19, 1865, by slaves in Galveston, Texas, more than two and half years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, in Washington, D.C., respectively corresponds to Christ’s already and the not yet advents is to force-fit together two items from different categories. The correlation is neither adequate nor accurate.
Instead, if one needs to find some biblical correlation to the Juneteenth celebration of freedom from slavery a far better one leaps off the page of Holy Scripture from Acts 19. When the apostle Paul arrived in Ephesus on his third journey, which was likely spanning three or more years from A.D. 53-57, he met twelve disciples whom the account leads us to understand were associated with Apollos. Like he, they knew of John the Baptist’s ministry and had received his baptism. Again, like Apollos, they needed additional teaching concerning the Christ for whom John served as the forerunner. Paul inquires and learns that these disciples had not received the extraordinary endowment of the Holy Spirit through Christian baptism at the hands of an apostle (cf. Acts 8:9-25). So, he explains to them, “‘John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.’ On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied” (Acts 19:4-6). Why did Paul rebaptize them? These twelve disciples were an anomaly according to the apostolic gospel. Though they knew John’s preaching, they somehow failed to hear the message that the Messiah, whom John’s preaching prophesied, had already come, had already completed his redemptive mission, and had already bequeathed the Holy Spirit whom John prophesied and whom Jesus promised to pour out upon his people. Without adequate knowledge, the twelve disciples were experientially stuck in the old covenant era. When Paul met them, he delivered the news to them that all that John’s baptism foreshadowed had come to pass with Jesus. They were then brought forward from their anomalous old covenant status into the fullness of the new covenant.
Like John’s disciples who finally learned that Jesus has fulfilled the Baptist’s prophecies, that the Lamb of God has come and has taken away their sins with his sacrificial death, the slaves in Galveston, Texas, were an anomaly concerning the emancipation of slaves. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had been issued January 1, 1863, but not until June 19, 1865, did the message of their liberation arrive for the slaves in Galveston. The message of freedom at last reached them and thrust them forward from the old epoch of enslavement into the new era of manumission.