In June 1966, less than two years before he was killed, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached from his Atlanta pulpit of the dynamic dance between Good Friday and Easter, between death and resurrection, between despair and hope.
“The church must tell [people] that Good Friday is as much a fact of life as Easter; failure is as much a fact of life as success; disappointment is as much a fact of life as fulfillment,” he said. Dr. King added that God didn’t promise us that we would avoid “trials and tribulations” but that “if you have faith in God, that God has the power to give you a kind of inner equilibrium through your pain.”
These are the first two paragraphs of an article by Michael Eric Dyson, We Forgot What Dr. King Believed In, published March 31 in the New York Times and shared with me by my friend, “Meach” Meacham.
We can do our best to avoid disappointment and failure and pain. Jesus could have … by not going to Jerusalem, by not following the path of obedience, by not putting the kingdom of God first, by not caring about people, all the people.
For Jesus, Good Friday was a choice, a choice to be where God called him to be and to do what God called him to do. And we too have a choice: to follow Jesus, or not.
“The great tragedy is that Christianity failed to see that it had the revolutionary edge,” Dr. King said, two months before he was killed.
If Christianity is not revolutionary, then what good is it? To keep us mollified, while the world and our neighbors go to hell? Jesus was revolutionary, preaching and enacting a kingdom of God that was and is turning the world upside down — not to upset it, but to make it right!
If we choose to follow Jesus, if our faith is genuine not merely a pacifier, then we cannot remain complacent. The church of Jesus Christ cannot stand by watching as people suffer, as whole peoples are marginalized, as whole classes of humanity are deprived of life and liberty and happiness whether by malice or by apathy.
Dyson’s article is good and timely reading …
As America in its present incarnation, with its present leadership, teeters toward an arrogance, isolationism and self-importance that are the portals of moral decline and political self-destruction, the nation must recall the faith of Martin Luther King Jr. He saw faith as a tool for change, a constant source of inspiration to remake the world in the just and redemptive image of God. On this holy day, instead of shrinking into the safety of faith, we should, as Dr. King did, bear the burdens of the less fortunate and rise again to serve humanity.
