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Henry Nowak: It's Deeper Than Left Vs Right || SLP658 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: I can't breathe, said George Floyd.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: I can't breathe, said Henry Novak.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_05: 18-year-old Henry Novak was stabbed by this man, Vikram Digwa.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_05: In a 999 call, Digwa and his brother claimed that he was the one who'd been attacked that night, telling the operator he'd been racially abused.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_05: When officers arrived, it was Henry that they handcuffed.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_08: You've been stabbed, whereabouts?
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_04: With his final words, he told officers that he could not breathe.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: I can't breathe.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: Familiar words.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: And people are noticing both the similarities and the differences.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: George Floyd died saying I can't breathe.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: Henry Novak died saying I can't breathe.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Henry Nowak actually was who the left tried to make George Floyd out to be.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_06: And I think this is a George Floyd moment.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: In both cases, there's a helpless victim, there's an uncaring authority.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, essentially, that officer dismissed the pleas of a dying man.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: There are accusations of prejudice.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_06: Do you believe there is systemic racism in law enforcement?
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not just a law enforcement, it's across the board.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: We brought in what is called positive discrimination in favor of ethnic minorities.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: There are eruptions of anger.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_03: Mostly a protest.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: It is not, generally speaking, unruly.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_08: Black lives matter! White lives mother! White lives matter! Black Lives Matter! White Lives Matter!
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: And these helpless victims become icons of a movement.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: But the crowd that cried, I can't breathe in solidarity with George Floyd seem politically very different from the crowd that cried, I can't breathe, in solidarity with Henry Novak.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: As a slogan, Black Lives Matter is being met by different slogans.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: White lives matter just as much as black lives.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_05: I don't want to hear about Black Lives Matter.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_05: I don't want to hear about White Lives Matter.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_05: We all matter.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: Do we need a new racial awakening?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_06: And now is the time!
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: I ain't waiting! Or do we need to rediscover a colour blind society?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_06: Are you suggesting that now there has been an over-correction?
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think what the police needs to do is they need to come in colourblind and say, look, is there a crime?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Can we enforce the law and do it?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: The phrase I can't breathe has convulsed society again and again, and the reason for that goes very deep.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: In this video, we're going to look at how the I can't breathe of George Floyd is both similar and very different to the I can't breathe of Henry Novak.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: We'll answer the question why it is that both these movements convulse the West and have the power to convulse the West.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: And we'll see, as always, how the lenses of Jesus Christ will actually help us to understand our world.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, really.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: Because it seems to me that the phrase I can't breathe is so resonant because of Jesus Christ Himself.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: The reason why we look at a helpless victim being crushed by a careless state, the reason why we do not side with the institution, but we do side with that individual who's choking to death.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: That has everything to do with the fact that we have meditated on such an image for 2,000 years.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: I can't breathe could have been a sentence from the lips of Jesus on that Good Friday.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: He was famous for seven sayings from the cross.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: I can't breathe could have been the eighth, and in fact the Gospel writers record that he breathed his last and gave up the ghost.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: And it is Christians who have insisted for century after century after century that the one on that cross, though he appear a helpless victim, yet he is the victor, yet he is the Lord.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: And the uncaring apparatus of state that is putting him to death is actually the unrighteous one, while the victim is the innocent one.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: That is the story that has shaped my moral sensibilities and your moral sensibilities and the moral sensibilities of pretty much everyone you meet, whether they've ever been to church or not.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: Christianity has been that impactful.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's the subject of the book that I wrote back in 2022, The Air We Breathe, How We All Came to Believe in Kindness, Progress, and Equality.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: We did so because we have been meditating on the Jesus story.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: And as Antonio Garcia Martinez has said, the Western mind is like a tuning fork calibrated to one frequency, the Christ story.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: Hit it with the right Christ figure, and it'll just hum deafeningly in resonance.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: What did we see in 2020?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: What have we seen in 2026?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: Culture humming deafeningly in resonance with the cry, I can't breathe.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: But both of those draw their significance from the I can't breathe of Christ, though they draw it in different ways.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: Let me tell you what I mean.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: In the book The Air We Breathe, I talk about seven different values that we have learnt from meditating on the Christ story.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: We've learnt equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, and progress.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just going to focus on three of those, the first two and the last one.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: The Christ story teaches us equality because Roman culture was a vertiginously steep hierarchy of being with the emperor at the top, the gods above him, and the slaves at the bottom.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: And what could ever hold this hierarchy in place except the threat of extreme violence?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what the cross was.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: It was known as the slave's death, and only certain people could be crucified.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: Certainly Roman citizens could never be crucified.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: There is a caste system in which citizens and nobles could not be killed in such a way, but people like Jesus could.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: And the powers from on high had the right to, in fact, the duty to crush rabble rousers like Jesus, who would seek to threaten the peace of Rome.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: And into that culture comes a very different story.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's the story of Christ crucified, where we are meant to believe that the one at the very bottom of society, the one who is dying that slave's death, is in fact the innocent victim, and that the apparatus of state power, wielded by that centurion, thrusting the spear up into Jesus' side, the state is wrong and the victim is innocent.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: And this is a revolution in our thinking.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: The highest has descended to the deepest depths in order to invite the world into a family in which the only Lord is Christ Himself, and we are all brothers and sisters in the same family.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: This is a profoundly equalizing story, and there is nothing like it in world history, and nothing else has had the same impact on giving us egalitarian instincts.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: If you believe that every single human being is the moral equal of every other human being, no matter whether they're rich or poor, whether they're a citizen or a barbarian, whether they're male or female, gay or straight, rich or poor, black or white, we're all equal.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: If you believe that, chances are you trace back the intellectual genealogy of that idea and you'll find a man bleeding to death on the cross at the heart of that idea.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: Equality comes from this story of Christ and him crucified.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: Compassion also comes from this story of Christ and Him crucified.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: If you believe that kindness is a superpower and that we should judge a society by the way it treats its weakest members, then again I suggest to you that it's the Jesus story that has been shaping your moral sensibilities.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: Because nature, read in tooth and claw, does not operate according to compassion, it operates according to competence and according to dominance.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's the survival of the fittest, and therefore the sacrifice of the weakest.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: But at the cross, it is the fittest Jesus Christ who is sacrificed for we the weakest, so that we the weakest might survive and not only survive but thrive and pass on a compassion revolution to the world.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: The Jesus story has taught us in the West what it is to be glorious.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: And actually to be glorious is not to be on the soldier's side of that spear.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: To be glorious is the one who is the victim.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that's given us a certain picture for equality, compassion, and then progress.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: At the cross, what we're seeing is the order of this world, kind of represented by the Roman Empire, is being very subversively upended by that figure on the cross.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: Because so the story goes that that one on the cross rises up again.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: The victim becomes the victor.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: And within three centuries of this event, the empire that had crucified Christ calls him Lord.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: And somehow, through the greatest evil, the greatest good has been done.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: Somehow, through Good Friday, Easter Sunday happens, through the cross, there's resurrection.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: And we can progress through the darkest valley and out into a future hope that is better than anything we had ever experienced before the valley.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: Christianity is incredibly progressive.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: It has a vision of history that passes through the darkness of Good Friday, but comes out again into the light of Easter Sunday.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: And the compassion revolution that was birthed by this story has led to progressive movements to reform the evils of the past and work towards a more just future.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so people shaped by the Jesus story started to outlaw the evils of infanticide and pioneer a new kind of orphan care, to outlaw pederasty, child sexual abuse, and to enshrine the rights of children, to outlaw the gladiatorial games and pioneer a new way of society.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: Christianity has always been progressive in that sense, that you can really move forwards in history, that you can really reform the evils of yesterday.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so Christians meditating on this figure who said essentially, I can't breathe on the cross, has given us many different values, but three of them are equality, compassion, and progress.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: What now happens in a quite post-Christian society that likes the values that we've received from meditating on Jesus story, but has lost connection with Jesus himself?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, a hundred years ago, the author G.K.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: Chesterton wrote this.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: The morals that we had lived with century after century were the morals to a story, a very particular, very peculiar story, but they were the morals to a story, the story in which Jesus Christ dies on the cross.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: When you detach those morals from Christ and from one another, they start to take on a different character.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Those virtues just become more abstract values, and then the values become slogans, and the slogans become a cudgel with which you beat your opponent.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: Be kind, we say, because we've got the slogan that is labeled compassion.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: We might not have a scintilla of compassion as a virtue within ourselves, but we've learnt that compassion is a value.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: We wield it like a slogan and we beat each other down with the cudgel of hashtag be kind.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: Because our moral system has not been connected organically and vitally to Jesus Himself.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, these virtues, they are detached from Christ and detached from one another.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: And here's what it means for those who are more on the left of politics.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: We like the idea of equality, but instead of the biblical vision of all being invited to one table to feast with one Lord Jesus Christ as brothers and sisters in the family, we have, through a number of different developments, become very individualized in the West, and we've taken the discourse about rights, which has a profound Christian genealogy to it, and we've conceived of ourselves as individuals who are rights bearers.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: And whereas in a Christian frame, my rights are a shield that protects me from the state kind of crushing me, modern discourse about human rights is much more about our rights as a sword that I can wield against other people.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: I have the right to X, Y, and Z.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: And we come to think of ourselves less as protected by rights, more as entitled by rights.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Then when it comes to compassion, instead of having a space for and an honoring of the victim, there can be the desire to simply become a victim or claim victim status.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so there is such a thing as competitive victimhood.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: There is such a thing as the oppression Olympics.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: And there can be such a thing as claiming victim status simply as a power play.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: The murderer of Henry Novak knew that well.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: He claimed a victim status in order to cover over the profound evil that he had committed.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: That happens, right?
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's possible for that to happen, and it's possible for that to be a huge problem.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: But it's a huge problem because there is such a thing as true compassion.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: There is such a thing as true empathy.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: But sometimes empathy can become toxic, right?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes compassion can be twisted and used cynically and manipulatively.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: So there is equality, there is compassion, and then there is a kind of a post-Christian sense of progress as well.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: The Christian sense of progress is that we go down into death and sacrifice, and then through those ordeals, we we might be raised up by God on the far side.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: And the Christian sense of progress is that the person who most stands in the way of the good future that God is bringing is probably me.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, what I need to do first and foremost is to repent and believe again.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: And in me going down and up, then yes, perhaps we can progress to a better world.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_02: But divorced from the Jesus story and divorced from my own sense of sin and complicity in the evil of this world, divorced from a sense in which I need to repent and believe, the progressive narrative can become a utopian ideal whereby we are being shackled and held back by structures that simply need to be burnt down.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_07: When will the government?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_07: When will the police?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_07: Enough is enough!
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: We need to burn the s are, of course, uh the worst tendencies of progressive liberationism.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: Don't worry, we will get to the worst tendencies of the right in just a second.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: But add together these kinds of sensibilities, rights as a sword to be wielded against others, competitive victimhood and the race to claim victim status, and then a kind of progressivism that means utopianism and burning down the old thing, this is a heady cocktail.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: And there are a bunch of people since 2020 who have said to themselves, no, we are now anti-woke.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: If we describe that progressive liberationism as wokery, which is what those uh who are against it are liable to call it, if they call it wokery, then you see the birth of the anti-woke, and it is a reaction against the excesses of everything that 2020 kind of represented.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: There tends to be an allergic reaction to all rights speak, whether it's rights as sword or rights as shield, and instead the anti-woke just say, let's just get everything back down to the individual.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: And if those on the left have sought a kind of equality by appealing to this notion of rights, just sort of hanging there in the ether.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness, that sounds so esoteric.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: Let's bring things down to the very earthy blood and soil.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: And as a reaction against some of the excesses of the left, lots of people want to boil things down to ethnicity, race.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: By no means is that everybody on the right, but it is some.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: And this is part of what's going on at the moment.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: And then you come down to the next level and compassion.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: On the left, sometimes compassion has been cynically deployed as a cover for kind of competitive victimhood.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: So on the right, there is a great tendency to say, I will mistrust every appeal to compassion, and instead let's just go back to competence.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_02: And for some on the right, it's not just competence, let's just let's just go for dominance.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: Let's go full Roman.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: And then thirdly, on the progress issue, interestingly, because those on the anti-woke side of things have seen the utopianism of the left, many of them have thought, okay, let's head in the opposite direction, and they go for trad values.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: Or at least a kind of a trad chic.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting that, you know, trad wives is a very aesthetic movement that is largely living online, and it's very much about the ins Instagram aesthetic of going back to the 1950s.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: But there are also more serious desires to get back to a sense of rootedness and history, and part of that is a reaction against the utopianism of the progressives, and let's get back to tradition.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, part of that tradition might be caught up in blood and soil as well.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not saying that everybody on the right goes there, but in the same way that I'm talking about the excesses of the progressive liberationists, I'm also talking about the excesses of those on the right.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: And notice that most of the time we are hurling accusations against one another that have a long-lost biblical foundation, but now the biblical foundation is forgotten, and all I remember is that I've got an enemy on the other side.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_08: Black Lives Matter! White Lives Matter! White Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter! White Lives Matter!
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_02: And then when George Floyd dies, I've got an avatar.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: An icon of this particular vision.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: And when Henry Novak dies, ah, I've got an avatar, I've got an icon of my particular vision.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: And no wonder the family of Henry Novak says, please don't use our son as an avatar of your politics.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_04: We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred, or tension.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_04: We want his story to make our street safer for everyone.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: But if that's some kind of analysis of where we've gotten to, I just want to give you four things to think about as we finish.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: And the fourth one is definitely the most important.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: Number one, when George Floyd or Henry Novak are the icons of your highest sacred ideals, you have displaced the highest ideal, the most sacred vision of our ideals.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: And politics has supplanted the place that faith is meant to hold for all of us.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: So no wonder the temperature is too high.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: When we've gotten rid of Christ as the icon of compassion, he is compassion himself, bleeding his own heart's blood for the world.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: But when we get rid of Jesus, then either this avatar or that avatar gets thrust up into the highest place.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: And notice that it's an avatar that is about opposing the other side.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: So no wonder politics will become overheated because it is now in the highest place, the place that should be reserved for God.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: Attending to the one who properly belongs in that highest place genuinely is the solution at the personal level and at the cultural level.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: Secondly, when the other side is the enemy, and it's all about the woke, no, it's all about the anti-woke.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: Back and back and forth it goes.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: When you become defined by what you are against, you are so stuck at that point.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: Once again, displacing Jesus Christ means we start to be defined by our hatreds rather than our love.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: And thirdly, we become blind to the problems that are within us.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm not actually properly attending to the depths of the problem when I think that the problem is political.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: When Nigel Farage talked about the problem, it was opportunistic, it was inflammatory, it was profoundly unwise.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: This is not helping.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: Henry's family have responded to this in just the most extraordinarily dignified way.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: But I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure, cold rage.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_02: There's a deep sense in which I want to say, really, the problem is that that rage is misdirected.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: There is a deeper enemy that we must all face, and it's a deeper enemy that is at the heart of you and I.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't it obvious that the deepest enemy is sin and death?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't that isn't that obvious?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: People get angry at two-tier policing and two-tier care, and people get angry at certain documents that were written for the police, and they get angry about that police officer.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so many people seem to forget that Henry Novak was bleeding out no matter what that police officer did.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: He shouldn't have done what he did, that police officer, but that police officer almost certainly could not have saved Henry Novak because of a thing called sin and death.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Vikram Singh Digwa was the murderer of Henry Novak.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_02: The life of Henry Novak was seeping away, and there was nothing actually that that police officer could have done.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: He shouldn't have done what he did in that moment, but there was nothing that could be done.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: Because of sin and death, because sin and death is the far deeper problem that we should be enraged by.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: But we don't know what to do with that rage, and so we direct it at the police force, or we direct it at the Sikh community.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: Ridiculous.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: Or or we direct it at the murderer himself.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, sure.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: That is a far more appropriate place for outrage to be directed.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: But as soon as we name sin and death as the problem, then we've got, you know, three fingers pointing back at ourselves.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: There is sin and evil in me, and there is a death sentence upon me, and all the protests in the world won't overturn that.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: So then what do I do with this problem that is bigger than me?
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_02: What do I do with this rage that is overwhelming to me?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: And again, this is the final thing I want to say.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: You gotta take that to Christ.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: You gotta take that to that original story.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: There's nowhere else for it to go.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's too big for us.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: And the left is not gonna solve the problem of sin and death.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: And the right is not gonna solve the problem of sin and death.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus Christ has solved the problem of sin and death.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: He has taken my murderous impulses on himself.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: He has taken my selfishness and my antipathy to others and my tribalism and my rage.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: And Jesus dies even for me.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, as Jesus was choking to death on that cross, he was surrounded by all sorts of political intrigue.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: There was the soldiers representing Rome, there's the Pharisees and the Sadducees who are totally different kind of tribes within Israel, and then there were the members of the crowd, some of whom were supporters of Jesus, many of whom were crying out, crucify him, crucify him.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: He's surrounded on left and right by thieves who have very mixed views about him.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: And in the midst of a culture war, Jesus bows his head and says, I will take it.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: And with his dying breath, he says, It is finished.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: And he comes to accomplish the deepest work of atonement.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: He comes to accomplish the deepest work of reconciliation, reconciliation with God, reconciliation among ourselves.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: He does all that work and he just says, It is finished.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: He takes the sin and the death unto himself.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: He takes it down to the hell that it deserves on that cross.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: And with his last breath, he says, finished, done.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: And he rises up again.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: And you know the first word he always says to his followers when he comes through that sin and death.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_02: He comes to the far side and he just says, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: This is what we really need, and it goes so much deeper than left or right.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: It goes so far above our tribal tendencies to identify the problem as the other side.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: It was a tragedy when George Floyd died.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_02: It was a tragedy when Henry Novak died.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: And don't get into the competitive victimhood of which victim was greater.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: We are all helpless, actually.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: Our life is seeping away.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: All of us.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: We are in the grip of sin and death, and there is a problem far greater than any of us can cope with.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: But that's the whole point of why Jesus went to that cross.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: To be our helpless victim.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: To be our innocent sacrifice, to take that sin and death on himself and rise up to give us peace.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know this story?
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: This story will recenter you in times that are so tribalistic, that are so full of rage.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: This is the antidote.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: And if you want a fresh experience of this story, why don't you go to 321Course.com right now and hear again the Jesus story.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's life according to Jesus in 321.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: What do the numbers mean?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: You'll have to go to 321course.com to figure it out.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: But it's all about recentering yourself again on this Jesus story.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that'll do us uh for now.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: If you've got this far in the video, it's certainly worth a like, I would have thought.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you share it around with some friends who might need this message at this point?
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: And do subscribe to us so that we can catch you on the next video.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: God bless.