“God gave us victory over the Brits. He gave us victory over the Indian. God gave us power to colonize the savage and to make a better life for the slave. Surely God is on our side!”
“God gave us victory over slavery. He gave us victory over Jim Crow and systematic injustice. God gave us power to fight for our rights and to win against those who tried to keep us down. Surely God is on our side!”
“God gave us victory over poverty and lack. He gave us victory over sickness and death. God has given us power to build wealth and strength to live in prosperity. Surely God is on our side!”
I remember hearing variations of these statements in three separate settings in one week. The first was spoken in a predominantly White setting with a faith-based interpretation of American history to empower business leaders. The second was a predominantly Black setting where a preacher encouraged Christian activists to persevere. The third was a multicultural, multilingual setting where participants were invited to support a global charity for children. Each group of listeners seemed to require something different to inspire action. All three contexts connected faith to victory, seeking to prove that God was with them, perhaps more than he was with others. Whether they knew it or not, they tapped into exceptionalism to appease the human need to feel special, unique, and chosen. They moved the crowds with reminders of what they believed God had already done to inspire faith in what God might do again. While each narrative was different, some bearing more truths than others, each carried the same thread of triumph stemming from the presence of God on our side.
In some cases, this is true. The omnipresence of God gives all of us the ability to claim God “by our side” at all times and in all situations. But does God’s presence with us validate our actions and experiences? Absolutely not! God is faithful to the promise to never leave us but clear in the expectation that we “act justly . . . love mercy and . . . walk humbly with your God” (Deuteronomy 31:6; Micah 6:8). In the first setting, this means acknowledging where we went wrong to make room for God to help us get it right. In the second setting, this means uplifting the communal success of the past to empower individual responsibility and accountability for the present. In the third setting, this requires honoring God’s presence with us in times of abundance and times of lack, in health and in sickness, knowing that God’s blessings are not limited to the mountain tops alone, but can be visible in the valleys of life as well.
The messages I heard in each setting were the same ones that are often repeated in churches across America each week. The narrative of triumphalism transcends natural divisions, affecting each of us in different ways. Whether we have triumphed because of the height of our success or we have triumphed because of the depth of our despair, our Christian narrative is still the same: we are those who have overcome. Regardless of our context, we can honestly declare that, in Christ, we have truly triumphed. In him, we are truly victorious, and that is a good thing. No one wants to follow a failed God. No one wants to belong to a losing church. Who wants to be affiliated with a faith of rejects whose narrative is that of defeat? No one does, and faith in Christ helps to uplift the downtrodden and give hope to the hopeless. Yet, a careful autopsy of triumph reveals that victory generally comes at the end of a series of failures. Triumph is part of the biblical narrative, but it is not the only part. And the resurrection gloat does not come without the crucifixion groan. Yes, we are winners in Christ, but the way that we win is by dying.
While triumphalism invites us to lean into resurrection, trauma invites us to lean into the cross. Yet what we hear in our churches is often a clear depiction of resurrection glory that somewhat or completely ignores the shame of crucifixion. And let’s be honest: a message of winning is easier to communicate because it’s softer for our ears to hear and for our minds to digest. Our society reinforces the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest, so it’s only natural for us to want victory as a means of survival. The stresses of life make us hanker for a happy ending, and the resurrection story gives us just that. Our challenges and difficulties already make us feel like we’re losing, so we need the triumphant Savior to bring us through. We have enough bad news all around, so why not use faith as the supplemental drug to get us through to the other side?
Here’s the issue: while victorious faith and resurrection power are true and valuable, they cannot come at the expense of the cross.
The crux of our faith rests not only in the reality of the risen Savior but also in the trauma of his crucifixion and death. Some people live this reality more than others.
Those who face socioeconomic and material challenges, working multiple jobs just to put food on the table, find comfort in the reality of the cross. Those whose parents fought through societal and national injustice just to survive find purpose in the power of the cross. In my own family, echoes of “we shall overcome” flow through the veins of each generation, pushing us to go just a little farther, reach just a little higher, and live more successfully than the generation before. If the stress and shame of the cross were unnecessary, we would have never seen the wounds on Christ’s resurrected body (John 20:27). But instead, God chose to raise Jesus from the dead, wounds visible, so that we would know that his trauma was for our triumph and, therefore, our trauma can be redeemed through him. In Christ, we see the truth of victory: that while there is no crown without a cross, every cross can be redeemed by God’s crown.
While there is much to be said about the role that triumph plays into our ability to survive, it cannot come at the expense of redemption through the cross. The only way that we can bring healing through our leadership is to lean into the cross. While the triumphalism of resurrection appeals to us all, it is the apparent failure of the cross that must ultimately define us. We are overcoming and victorious and successful not simply because Jesus rose, but specifically because he rose from the dead. Resurrection is powerful not simply because of the miracle of life, but specifically because of life after death. And it is this death, this trauma, this sorrow and pain that is the best connection we have to traumatized people.
Adapted from Nailing It! by Nicole Massie Martin. ©2025 by Nicole Massie Martin. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.