The footage is gut-wrenching: a black man on the pavement, hands cuffed behind his back, slowly suffocating to death under a white police officer’s knee, with three others calmly looking on. George Floyd’s pleas of “I can’t breathe”—a chilling echo of Eric Garner’s dying words in 2014—make no difference. Floyd’s body eventually goes limp; the officers calmly leave the scene. And America is now on fire.

How do we process such tragedies, especially when they seem unrelenting? The horrifying footage of Ahmaud Arbery, hunted and gunned down by two white vigilantes under a sunny Georgia sky, is not even a month old.

Violent rioting and looting is emphatically not the right response, but what is? The status quo is unacceptable; African Americans have been telling us this for decades centuries. How should Christ’s people respond? For starters, it is right to be angry. And, as Phillip Holmes wrote last week for TGC, we need to be uncomfortable. America still has so far to go in healing its racial wounds and pursuing justice for all—in living up to our own stated ideals. But even now, amid the smoking rubble of rage and mistrust, believers have reason to hope. For we know Jesus Christ, the ultimate victim of injustice who suffocated to death for sinners, who will return to right every wrong, and who, in the meantime, empowers us to model self-giving love in a sad and desperate world.