Do Black Lives Matter to Jesus

This guide takes one claim from Luke and Acts and asks what it would look like to live from it for a week. The claim is that God made human difference on purpose, Black skin included, and that he honors what he made. A truth like that shapes your worship and your week when it moves through four steps. First you learn it well enough to say it from memory. Then you test it against the text until you can trust it. Then you turn it into praise. Then you practice it in small, specific ways for seven days.

The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Marcus Jerkins, senior pastor of Resurrection Baptist Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, about his reading of Luke and Acts. You can work through this guide alone in about an hour and then carry the practice through the week. A group can cover the first four sections in one meeting and spend a second meeting on how the week went.

Before you read anything, write one sentence

On a card or the first page of a notebook, finish this sentence honestly: When I think about my skin color, or anyone else’s, in relation to God, I assume…

Don’t polish it. Some people will write something hopeful. Others will write that God doesn’t notice color, that color shouldn’t matter to a Christian, or something heavier. Lisa Fields describes meeting young people who concluded from the suffering around them that God had cast their community aside. Whatever you write, keep it. You will come back to it at the end. If you are in a group, nobody has to read their sentence aloud.

Four sentences to learn by heart

Catechesis is the old practice of learning the faith in short, true statements you can recite. The point is not trivia. You want the truth close at hand on the days your feelings or your circumstances argue against it. Here are four sentences drawn from Scripture and from Jerkins’s reading of Luke and Acts. Read them slowly. You will memorize one or two of them this week.

1. Every people comes from one father, so no people has a lesser origin.
2. God made the colors of humanity on purpose, and no color ranks above another.
3. God keeps choosing the people the world sets aside.
4. Christ carried the humiliation the world assigns, and the gospel went looking for an African on the road.

A sentence you memorize should be one you can defend, so the next section asks you to check each one against the passages behind it.

Read the passages that hold the sentences up

Sentence one: Luke 3:23-38 and Acts 17:26

Read Luke’s genealogy to its end. Luke closes the list this way: “Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God” (Luke 3:38). Now read Acts 17:26, where Paul tells the Athenians that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”

Observe: Matthew begins his genealogy with Abraham. Luke goes back further. Where does he stop, and what does stopping there include that stopping at Abraham would not?

Jerkins draws the conclusion plainly. One major purpose of his book, he says, is “to say that every color comes from Adam.” He notes that the history of racism has often tried to say some peoples came from somewhere else. Luke’s list leaves no room for that idea. If you belong to the human family at all, you belong to the line that ends in God.

Sentence two: Revelation 7:9 and Galatians 3:28

Read Revelation 7:9, where John sees “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” before the throne. Then read Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Observe: In Revelation, are the nations still recognizable at the end of the story, or have they blended into sameness?

Lisa Fields reads the two passages together. She notes that people who use Galatians 3:28 to erase ethnic difference rarely use the same verse to erase the difference between men and women. Paul is describing equal standing in Christ, not the disappearance of who people are. Of Revelation she says that “we are who he created us to be,” and that “he created us distinct and for various nationalities and shades to show off his glory and his creative genius.” Jerkins says something similar: “God made black people black.” He then adds the limit that keeps the claim from becoming a ranking: “that color never in any way makes them less than another color.”

Sentence three: Luke 6:20-26 and Luke 16:15

Read the blessings and woes in Luke 6. Jesus says, “Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20), and then pronounces woe on the rich and the comfortable. Then read Luke 16:15: “for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God.”

Observe: Whom does Jesus bless, and whom does he warn? Who would the crowd have expected him to bless?

Jerkins reads Luke as a gospel of reversal. In Jerkins’s words, “God is a consummate script flipper.” Jerkins argues that Luke wants readers to see “that God will choose the ones that we reject.”

Lisa Fields adds two more examples from the gospel story. Women are the first witnesses at the tomb, and Simon of Cyrene carries the cross.

Sentence four: Acts 1:8 and Acts 8:26-40

Read Acts 1:8 and note the four places Jesus names. Then read Acts 8:26-40 in one sitting. Pay attention to what the Ethiopian is reading: “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth: In his humiliation his judgment was taken away” (Acts 8:32-33). Philip “began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus” (Acts 8:35).

Observe: Luke could simply have said the man was reading Isaiah. Instead he quotes the lines. What word in the quoted passage stands out to you?

Start with the plain meaning, because it carries the main point by itself. The servant who is humiliated in Isaiah is Jesus, and the outsider reading about him learns that the servant came for him. Jerkins then proposes a second layer. He argues that many ancient writers linked dark skin with shame. He says Philo of Alexandria, commenting on Genesis, treated Ethiopia as meaning humiliation. Read against that background, Luke shows a man the world called humiliated reading about a humiliation that belonged to Christ. Jerkins concludes that “God through Christ identifies with this man in his blackness, not in spite of it.”

Test what you are about to memorize

A catechism is only as trustworthy as its sources, so before you commit these sentences to memory, sort them. Take a pencil and mark each claim below as the text says this or this is an interpretation.

• Luke traces Jesus’s line back to Adam and to God.
• Jesus blesses the poor and warns the rich in Luke 6.
• The Ethiopian reads Isaiah 53, hears about Jesus, is baptized, and goes home rejoicing.
• Luke means Jesus to be read as a new Adam.
• Ancient readers would have connected Ethiopia with humiliation.
• Ethiopia stood for the ends of the earth, so Acts 8 completes the map of Acts 1:8 in sign form.

The first three are in the text. The last three are Jerkins’s proposals and historical claims. He openly expects some scholars to push back on parts of his reading, and his statements about ancient writers are his scholarly assertions, which a careful reader can check. None of the four sentences you are memorizing depends on the disputed claims alone. That is why they were written the way they were.

Now face the strongest objection. Isn’t it anachronistic to find race in a first-century book? Jerkins grants that the biological racism that came after the Enlightenment was not the ancient world’s system. His claim is narrower. He describes a kind of proto-racism that tied a people’s color to their nation and treated their appearance as a sign of shameful character, a habit scholars call physiognomy. If he is right, Luke was writing into a world that already mocked dark skin. If he is wrong about the extent of it, Luke’s honorable description of the Ethiopian and the pattern of reversal across Luke still stand.

One more test concerns where the emphasis falls. Jerkins does not say God prefers Black people. He says: “God honors this man and his blackness as God honors every person’s color.” His deeper ground is that all people are God’s children, and he names the problem as “we are God’s children, but we have lost our sense of being God’s children.” Jude 3 Project keeps the same order: before we are any adjective, we are Christian. Valuing what God made in you is not the same as making it the first word of who you are. It is one of the things your Maker gave you, and he did not give it by accident.

Turn the sentences into praise

Knowing a truth about God is meant to lead somewhere, and Scripture often moves from knowing straight to praise. Psalm 139:14 is a model: “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works.”

Take whichever of your four sentences landed hardest and rewrite it as something said to God rather than about him. Sentence two might become: You made the colors of the people you love, and you made mine on purpose. Keep it to one or two lines. If gratitude is hard to say honestly right now, write that instead. A psalm of complaint is still worship. Some may want to pray this aloud, some silently, and some not at all yet. Each of those is allowed.

If you sing in a congregation this week, listen for any line that says God made, chose or welcomed people. Notice whether you sing it as if it includes you.

A seven-day rhythm

Each day takes about ten minutes. Recite first, read second, act third.

• Day 1. Memorize sentence one. Read Luke 3:23-38 aloud. Notice how many names you pass before you reach Adam.
• Day 2. Recite sentence one and memorize sentence two. Read Revelation 7:9-10. Pray your rewritten line of praise.
• Day 3. Read Luke 6:20-26. Notice one moment today when you ranked someone, by their clothes, their job, their skin or their neighborhood. Don’t scold yourself. Just name it.
• Day 4. Memorize sentence three. Do one concrete thing that honors a person you were inclined to overlook: a real greeting by name, a thank-you, a question about their life.
• Day 5. Read Acts 8:26-40 slowly. Count everything God arranges to reach one traveler. Recite sentence four.
• Day 6. Pick one moment when you notice a thought that you or your people are less than others. Answer it out loud with one memorized sentence and its verse.
• Day 7. Recite all the sentences you have learned. Then return to the card you wrote before you began.

If this week brings up real pain, whether from racism you have suffered, from a church that stayed silent, or from violence in your community, these sentences are not meant to cover it over. Lament is part of Scripture, and a trusted pastor, friend or counselor is part of how God cares for people.

Questions for conversation

1. Luke stops his genealogy at Adam and Matthew stops at Abraham. What does each choice let a reader see that the other might miss?
2. Where have you heard colorblindness presented as the most Christian way to think about race? Having read Revelation 7:9 and Galatians 3:28 side by side, how would you now describe what those passages ask for?
3. Jerkins’s reading of the Isaiah quotation goes beyond what Luke states outright. What would make you more or less confident in it, and what would you lose if it turned out to be wrong?
4. Luke 16:15 says what people highly esteem can be detestable to God. What does your own setting esteem that might fail that test?
5. How do you hold together two claims: that God made and values Blackness, and that before any adjective a person is Christian? Do they pull against each other for you, or fit together?
6. Which day of the practice was hardest, and what does that suggest about where the truth has not yet reached you?

If you lead a group, give the observation prompts real silence before anyone talks about meaning. Let people disagree about Jerkins’s proposals, and keep bringing the conversation back to what the text itself says. When someone shares pain, receive it before you respond to it. A quick verse can sound like dismissal.

Back to the card

Read the sentence you wrote before you started. Then write a second sentence underneath it, in your own words, about what you now think God sees when he sees your skin and your people. Notice whether the two sentences differ, and how. If they do, ask which verse changed your mind. If they don’t, ask what you would need to see in the text before they could.

Keep the card where you will see it next week. The Ethiopian heard the gospel once, on a desert road, and Luke says he went on his way rejoicing (Acts 8:39). A memorized truth is something to carry the same way, on ordinary roads, into the days that follow.