To our most bitter opponents we say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.” – MLK Jr.
The core message of Jesus Christ concerns the nature of healthy existence. We exist easily, but existing healthfully (in light of truth) is another matter. Making demands of others (even “sweetly” or “in love” or “for their own good”) will always miss the mark, because the motivation appealed to in the insistence of a demand is simply the law. The law uses words and elicits feelings like: must, should, ought, owe, duty, earned, have to, or else.
MLK Jr taps into the spirit of the gospel when he speaks of the unending forgiveness, persistent love and the refusal to fight against the world’s system of coercion with one’s fleshly ideas about resistance. Healthy existence can only come about when love is the motivator. Love can only be a motivator when freedom is extended. The law is a tutor, and it is needed in the beginning, but the purpose of the pupil is to graduate – not to repeat the course. We cannot have it both ways. We will either come to faith in the power of the gospel alone, or we will invent a new gospel that attempts to fuse man’s natural manipulative inclinations with a few select scriptures in a vain attempt to sanctify those worldly elements of coercion.
Jesus lived the apparent contradiction: the only way to save one’s life is to lose it. Death on a cross – the presentation of himself to absolute suffering – resurrection to a new life beyond the influence of the earthly system…
This is the gospel. And to participate in the presentation of the gospel as something that promotes coercion would be like MLK Jr. cooperating with the evil of unjust laws. Freedom cannot be freedom unless it is whole. Love does not abide coercion even when the name of God is invoked.
January 20th, 2012 at 12:32 pm
[...] can be tremendous. But here’s the key: without the present and pervasive Gospel (see The Gospel According to MLK, Jr) people will always abuse power. I don’t even mean that people have to understand the gospel [...]