Seventh Sunday after Epiphany
Luke 627 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.
32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
37 “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 38 Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
When the Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December of 1955, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was just 26 years old.
It’s one of those aspects of the history of civil rights that gets lost, or overlooked: that Dr. King was a young adult surrounded by other young adults seeking change. Of course, he defines the idea of “a young man in a hurry.” Having skipped both the ninth and twelfth grades, he entered college at 15 and theological college at 19. A doctorate followed, awarded shortly after accepting a call to serve Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
In the aftermath of Rosa Park’s arrest—for failing to give up her seat to a white passenger—Dr. King was selected to head the committee to lead the bus boycott. Rosa Parks, writing in her memoir, said “The advantage of having Dr. King as president was that he was so new to Montgomery and to civil rights work that he hadn’t been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies” (Parks, 136).
It was from this position that Dr. King became well-known in the United States and beyond. And as the boycott dragged on—it would end up lasting 380 days—leaders, thinkers and activists flocked to Montgomery to lend a hand and become eyewitnesses to history. Among them was Bayard Rustin, who (along with others) helped Dr. King merge the struggle for civil rights with the nonviolent philosophy of the late Mahatma Gandhi.
Dr. King was already familiar with the way Gandhi used nonviolent civil disobedience in the struggle for Indian independence, but it fell to mentors such as Rustin to help him integrate Christian theology, civil rights, and this mode of resistance that began on the Indian subcontinent. I’ll say more about this in a moment, and the link to our reading, but I want to share one more story about Dr. King.
In the years after Montgomery, Dr. King was anxious to visit India and see first-hand this land that inspired the movement. He had a church to serve, of course, and the pressures of national leadership in the movement. He was invited to Ghana to help mark the birth of the country. He was also finishing his memoir on the bus boycott, Strive to Freedom. And while promoting the book he suffered a near-fatal stabbing, which required a long recovery time.
Eventually Dr. King and Coretta Scott King made it to India, meeting members of the Gandhi family and staying in his former home. The Kings toured universities across India, learning about this generation and discussing nonviolence with them. They visited the famous ashram where Gandhi began his Salt March to the sea, and they met with Prime Minister Nehru, the Indian Vice-President and others. Dr. King compared it to “meeting George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison in a single day.”[1]
It would be a meeting of the minds, an opportunity to compare the Gospel to the tenets of Hinduism (and Buddhism and Jainism) that formed the root of nonviolence—the belief (Ahimsa) that all living things contain a spark of the divine. And if all living things contain a spark of the divine, to hurt another being (or creature) is to hurt yourself. Or as Mahatma Gandhi was fond of saying “an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.”
And this, of course, takes us to Luke 6:
27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.
These verses are part of the Sermon on the Plain. They began with blessings and woes (from last week), continue with Jesus’ own reflection on nonviolence, and conclude (in years with more Epiphany) with the command to get the Douglas Fur out of your own eye before you reach of the sliver in someone else’s eye. Scholars call them “hard sayings,” commands that seem impossible for regular people like you and me, but remain possible through God.
More than hard sayings, Jesus' words become part of a program or philosophy best explained by Dr. King. To turn the other cheek (he would call this “nonviolent resistance”) is not a form of cowardice, or passivity, or “deadening complacency,” but an attempt to win over the aggressor. Dr. King said, “The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community.”[2]
In other words, the aim to is to disarm to the aggressor through such an unexpected response. Dr. King concedes that the aggressor may feel some shame after a refusal to strike back, but the goal is always reconciliation. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you, and they will be so confused by your response, they just might stop and think.
The next section—let’s call it Jesus’ masterclass on human nature—digs deeper into the human dynamics at work here. It’s like Jesus has been hanging out at the White House:
32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full.
Would that be Deutsche Bank or the Russians? Okay, nevermind that. In effect, Jesus gives us some of the interpersonal implications of ‘turning the other cheek,’ this time extended to loving and lending. If you follow the conventions of reciprocity, returning love for love, returning favours, lending with a guarantee of return, then you live without risk. And most people live risk-free lives of quid pro quo: love me and I will love you in return. Help me and I will help you. ‘Did we get a Christmas card from the Smith’s last year, ‘cause I don’t think we did. Look at the price of stamps!’
Jesus is commanding a new way of relating to others, not just as individuals, but as part of a system. It’s easy enough to make this personal: most of us know what a bully looks like, or those who take advantage of others. It’s easy enough apply labels to the bad behavior we witness, and then put them in categories: adversary, oppressor, evildoer. But using the disruptive strategy of loving, forgiving, and turning the other cheek, we remove the labels and try to see people in a new light. Dr. King explained it this way: “We had to make it clear also that the nonviolent resister seeks to attack the evil system rather than individuals who happen to be caught up in the system.”
This, then, is the key to reconciliation. To turn the other cheek means to reject the system of domination it represents, to end the cycle of ‘eye for an eye,’ and to seek to live differently, with both friends and enemies. It means to seek ‘the beloved community’ Dr. King described, where reconciliation is the goal and, if successful, redemption is the result.
After India, Dr. King would be back in the US and resume his work. He was arrested 29 times. He participated in actions in Birmingham, Selma and numerous other locations across the south; he gave one of the most famous speeches of the last century; he won the Nobel Peace Prize (at age 35) and was assassinated at just 39 years of age.
It was a violent end for someone who preached and practiced nonviolence, but he had a perspective on this too, something he shared the night before his death: “I’ve seen the Promised Land,” he said. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy tonight; I'm not worried about anything; I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Amen.
[1]https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/india-trip
[2]http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-power-of-non-violence/
posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 5:17 AM
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