Today the United States honors the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. We remember his leadership, his powerful voice, and his vision for the world as it should be. We remember his prophetic call to speak a word of Divine judgement to a country held captive by the evils of white supremacy and poverty. And we give thanks for his lasting impact on a country that continues to struggle with racism and oppressive power.
Many social commentators have rightly pointed out that the US myth-making machine has domesticated the dominant culture’s memory of King. In our efforts to assuage our collective guilt for the sins of past and present, we will often use his memory as a prop to congratulate our progress. But make no mistake, Martin Luther King Jr was a revolutionary. Cornell West, in the introduction to The Radical King, writes, “The radical King was first and foremost a revolutionary Christian—a black Baptist minister and pastor whose intellectual genius and rhetorical power was deployed in the name of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
While efforts to reclaim King’s revolutionary character have chipped away at the dominant culture’s attempts to disarm his prophetic life, I do fear that one of King’s most revolutionary positions may get lost in the shuffle – his radical commitment to loving our enemies.
As Cornel West named above, King is first and foremost a revolutionary Christian, and part of that radical reorientation initiated in the life and death of Jesus Christ is the rejection of hatred and the destruction of our enemies. Loving our enemies is not the same as apathy or acceptance of oppressive treatment. It’s the investment in a world of relatedness and justice for all people, and a story of liberation. Liberation for those targeted and wounded by the violence and evil of oppression, and liberation for those bound by the cancerous spirit of the oppressor.
For the King, loving our enemies was the only way to avoid our collective destruction. In his sermon on the topic, he said, “Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies—or else? The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.” This is a word that still, and maybe even more than ever, rings of revolution in a culture that profits from the stories of division, fundamentalism, and self-righteous certainty.
For the church, as bearers of a revolutionary vocation in Jesus, we can honor the memory and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. by refusing to participate in the popular habits of destroying and dehumanizing our enemies in word and deed. We can remind our communities that a revolution worth pursuing rejects the dismissal of other human beings but commits instead to the transformation of all people and our way of relating one to another.
In his sermon, King says that loving our enemies takes at least three things; the capacity to forgive, the knowledge that our enemy-neighbor is not exclusively their evil deeds, and the desire to win our enemy-neighbor’s friendship and understanding. As churches struggle alongside the rest of our community to address and respond to injustice, and to confront racism and white supremacy, we can embody the revolution of love envisioned by Martin Luther King Jr. by practicing this enemy love and attending to these qualities and actions.
This is especially important for churches that are predominately white and from the dominant culture. White supremacy and classism are all too present in our own churches, and it is our responsibility to change that by speaking the radical word of the Gospel among our own communities and seeking the friendship and understanding of the enemy-neighbor in our own pews. We cannot give into the temptation to co-opt the righteous anger of oppressed people as a way of distancing ourselves from this responsibility. The work of justice is family business, and we have some work to do. We can resist self-righteousness, engage our enemy-neighbor with humility and care, and extend forgiveness with the exuberance of Jesus.
Does this mean we ignore our fellow congregant and community member’s racism or ill treatment of another person? No. Does this mean we avoid the hard conversations and let our enemy-neighbor set the agenda? No. Does this mean that we dismiss and smother our experiences of righteous anger? No. I think we’re all mature enough to understand that love is not the same as mindless acceptance of a person’s destruction of self and other. It means that we are committed to people more than our sense of superiority or our need to be good.
I pray that as we remember the radical King, the Christian revolutionary, we too will take up the call to love our enemies because the pervasive hatred present in our culture will swallow us whole. On this day, when we honor the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. may we seek out the enemy-neighbor with a word of commitment and love. May we commit ourselves to the Beloved Community and reject the security of the moral high ground. And may we choose the love of Jesus, the most revolutionary power this world has ever known.
King Jr, Martin Luther. The Radical King (King Legacy). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.
Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash
