Yesterday (Jan 15) marked what would have been the 84th birthday of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. And while King was a man in search of justice and peace, most importantly, he was in search of the man from Nazareth - the Prince of Peace, the Crucified King.
On April 15, 1967 Dr King discussed justice and our pursuit of communal peace. As King said, "There are people who have come to see the moral imperative of equality, but who cannot yet see the moral imperative of world brotherhood. " Justice and peace are only possible when we see the other and their needs before we push our own wants and desires to the front. We have to elevate the "ought" of humanity.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said it like this:
You remember one day a man came to Jesus and he raised some significant questions. Finally he got around to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" This could easily have been a very abstract question left in midair. But Jesus immediately pulled that question out of midair and placed it one a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. He talked about a certain man who fell among thieves. Three men passed; two of them on the other side. And finally another man came and helped the injured man on the ground. He is known as the Good Samaritan. Jesus says in substance that this is a great man. He was great because he could project the "I" into the "thou." He was great because he could surround the length of life with the breadth of life . . . . May it not be that the problem in the world today is that individuals as well as nations have been overly concerned with the length of their individual lives and concerns, devoid of the breadth? But there is still something to remind us that we are interdependent, that we are all somehow caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Therefore whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a million dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy even if I just got a good checkup at May clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent. We are interdependent.Peace and Justice are brought about by and through our faith-filled acts. See for Dr. King, peace and justice on earth are in themselves evidence of the eternal peace which Christ on the cross establishes between God and humanity. For the Christian, therefore, a plea for justice is a plea to God himself. When the church becomes a witness to God’s performance, in Christ through the Spirit, it points beyond itself and into the communion of love. In so doing we become active participants in the revealing of and living out of the Kingdom of God here and now.
Christian love is rooted in the overflowing love of the Father, Son, and Spirit, who have poured out this very love into the hearts of the body of Christ. It is only in this love that the church finds the ability to pour itself out into the lives of the "other," bearing witness to Christ so as to bear witness to the abundance of life. In this faithful performance of love, mercy and grace, we raise the "ought" of humanity to the realm of reality. We live out the hope of tomorrow today when we elevate the other to be what they ought to be so that we can all live out the "ought" of humanity. Amen Jesus!
No comments:
Post a Comment