Good Friday
On
April 12th, 1963, while Martin Luther King was in the Birmingham jail because
of the demonstrations against segregation, eight prominent Alabama clergymen
(including the Episcopal Bishop of Alabama) published a letter in the local
newspaper. The letter urged people to
cease their support of Martin Luther King as he was inciting violence, despite
the peaceful intent of the protests.
Four days later, on Good Friday, Martin Luther King wrote a lengthy
response to these clergy men. The letter
is referred to as “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” It would be impossible for
me to summarize it as the letter as it is approximately 7,000 words, and they
are all important words.
The
letter was critical of what King referred to as the “White Moderate”—those who
supported desegration but wanted to wait until a more appropriate time. King was also critical of the white
churches. He wrote: “But the judgment of
God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture
the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity,
forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club
with no meaning for the twentieth century.”
It is not a coincidence that he
wrote these words on Good Friday, a day when the church talks the most about
Jesus’ sacrifice, a day when we are reminded of the betrayal of not only Judas,
but Peter and the other disciples who abandoned Jesus when he needed them the
most. At my last church we always did a
drama for Palm Sunday. As the assistant, it was my task to cast the drama. There were of course a few people who I
called on several times. At one point
one man said to me, “How come I always have to be the bad guy?” I responded, “The only good guy in this story
is Jesus and no one wants to play him either.”
It’s true. If you look at all the
people in the story that we hear every Palm Sunday and every God Friday (which
includes Peter, the chief priests, Pilate, the soldiers, the crowd), no one
ever comes out looking good. Only Jesus,
and he gets crucified.
Of course the biggest betrayal comes
from those closest to Jesus--his disciples.
We all know about Judas and his outright betrayal. We know about Peter’s denial. Yet there were 10 other apostles. Where did they go? Where were they during the
trial? Where were they at the
crucifixion? The Gospel of John mentions
that one of the 12 apostles was at the foot of the cross. The Gospel does not name the disciple. It only refers to the “beloved
disciple.” I sometimes wonder if that
was done so that we could all see ourselves in that spot. There were some women (including Jesus’
mother) who were at the foot of the cross, but the other 11 disciples were
missing.
We can’t be sure why they are
missing, but since the Gospel tells us later that they went into hiding because
they were afraid, I assume they were trying to save themselves. They were afraid that if people associated
them with Jesus, they would either be arrested or crucified. I do not blame them. They were terrified and
I would have been as well. They were not
ready for this kind of sacrifice.
I often wonder if I would have been
brave enough to support Martin Luther King as a white pastor at that time. I just heard a pastor talk about the
experience of having to flee in the night because his father had the audacity
to work with African American pastors in the 1960s. His life was threatened. The life of his family was threatened. His father risked a great deal to stand with
African American pastors and he paid a price.
I am not sure I would have been that brave. I would have almost surely
been part of the white moderate.
In the quote I read at the beginning
of this sermon, King said that we need to recapture the sacrificial spirit of
the early church. Yet we can see that
before the early church was born, the leaders of that early church made a lot
of mistakes. They weren’t ready to sacrifice, not until after the
resurrection. They needed to witness not
only Jesus’s sacrifice, but his triumphal re-entry.
It’s hard to reclaim that
sacrificial spirit because we have been comfortable for far too long. Most people don’t come to Holy Week
service. Sometimes it is because work or
family makes that difficult. But
sometimes I think it is because we would really rather just skip over the
sacrifice and rejoice in the triumph of the resurrection. We feel that the sacrifice already happened
and now we can just enjoy the benefits of that sacrifice. Unfortunately, without the sacrifice, as
Martin Luther King said, we forfeit our authenticity. If we cannot stand up for unpopular truths
and marginalized groups, then we are no longer the church that the early apostles
created and ultimately died for.
I am not going to tell you what
sacrifice looks like for you. Only you
can know that. But for me, it means that I can no longer let fear determine my
actions or reactions. I cannot
constantly worry about what other people will think. Good Friday asks us all to consider what
sacrifice looks like for us. If you are
already the kind of person who likes to “tell it like it is,” then doing that
more, isn’t really a sacrifice. For some
of us sacrifice will look like more listening and less talking. For some of us, it will be about speaking out
more. Only you and God can know what sacrifice
looks like for you. But I can tell you
one thing, if the sacrifice feels good and is easy, it’s not sacrifice. If it makes you a little sick and anxious, it
just might be.
While
sacrifice is not easy, it is not the end.
At the end, we have resurrection.
Martin Luther King never gave up on the church and Jesus never gave up
on his disciples. He forgave them after
his resurrection and they were transformed into a new p eople---a people bold
enough to proclaim the Gospel in a hostile environment. The last line of Martin Luther King’s Letter
was: “Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial
prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be
lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow
the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with
all their scintillating beauty.” That is
what Christian hope looks like.
****I encourage you to read the full letter: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
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