(ChurchLeaders) A jury in Minneapolis handed down the verdict the entire country has awaited for almost a year: that police officer Derek Chauvin is guilty of the murder of George Floyd. This conviction comes at the end of a year of memorials and protests and marches, not just all over the country but all over the world. This also is a day for all of us who belong to Jesus Christ to reflect on the meaning of it all.
First, we must recognize that ultimate justice was not accomplished, and never is this side of Judgment Day. No jury can resurrect George Floyd—or any of those who died as he did—from the grave. George Floyd is still gone; his family still grieves. The fact that sentencing cannot ultimately answer our sense of the wrongness of what was done is itself a signpost. We are created for a different sort of cosmos than the one in which we live, where violence sometimes seems to create its own morality. Jesus taught us that our sense of justice is embedded in us precisely because we were created by a just God, a God before whom every one of us will one day give an account, where all the secrets of the heart will be revealed.