Juneteenth marks the day—June 19, 1865—when enslaved people in Texas learned that they were free. More than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had declared slavery legally abolished in the Confederate states, General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston with federal troops to announce and enforce what had already been declared. Freedom had been proclaimed, but its full realization had not yet arrived. For Christians, Juneteenth is not merely an occasion for historical remembrance. It is a summons to solidarity. We worship the God who heard the cries of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt and who, in Jesus Christ, identifies with the oppressed and the marginalized. To follow Christ is to stand with the victims of every form of state-sanctioned dehumanization and injustice and to bear witness to the dignity bestowed upon every person by God. Yet Juneteenth also bears a profound eschatological significance. Those who were enslaved in Texas were, in a real sense, already free before they ...