On Good Friday of 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested during a march against segregated public facilities in Birmingham, AL. He spent eight days in the Birmingham City Jail from which he wrote one of the most important letters in American history. Although the time of legal racial segregation has passed, the letter resonates today as a call for faith based nonviolent direct action for justice in the face of government sponsored oppression. His letter was a response to eight prominent white clergymen who criticized Dr. King and others in the Birmingham movement as “extremists” for their nonviolent public demonstrations. Dr. King reminded them that on the original Good Friday, Jesus was executed as an extremist by religious and civil authoirities:
Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” …So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime–the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
This call to be creative extremists for love and justice is urgent sixty three years after Dr. King’s letter. At a time when Jesus is being called on to support war and nationalism by some parts of the American Church, the true message of Good Friday is that Jesus was executed for his faithfulness to God’s nonviolent inclusive love that breaks down barriers of separation based on religious purity or national identity. Jesus’ resurrection on Easter is God’s vindication of nonviolent, inclusive, redemptive love as the revelation of the heart of God and the purpose of humanity. In the New Testament, the letter to the Ephesians puts it this way: (Eph. 2: 14-16)
14For Jesus himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, 16and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.
The cross and resurrection are not about overcoming God’s hostility toward humanity. Rather this was the way by which “divding walls of hostility” among people are overcome through God’s nonviolent, inclusive, redemptive love embodied by Jesus and empowered by the Holy Spirit. The message in Dr. King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail is that we are called and empowered to be “extremists for love” at a time when our government is implementing policies and practices that create barriers of hostility and separation.
The first video posted below provides the context for Dr. King’s 1963 letter. The second video is the trailer for a film called “Jesus Was a Migrant.” Please watch and reflect on them this Good Friday/Easter.