How Martin Luther King Jr.’s last Sunday sermon speaks to us today

Tomorrow marks the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last Sunday sermon.

On March 31, 1968, Dr. King preached at the Washington National Cathedral. An overflow crowd heard him deliver “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” calling his listeners to join God in a movement that would bring righteousness to a culture divided by racial bigotry and endemic poverty.

In his message, he noted: “On some positions, cowardice asks the question: Is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question: Is it politic? Vanity asks the question: Is it popular? Conscience asks the question: Is it right?”

Then Dr. King stated, “There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.”

Four days later, he paid for his conscience with his life.

Dr. King ended his sermon by invoking a hymn sung earlier in the service as a challenge to America, the church, and all of humanity:

Once to ev’ry man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision,
Off’ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
‘Twixt that darkness and that light.

“God proved his love on the cross”

On this Good Friday, we remember Jesus’ choice “‘twixt that darkness and that light,” his “great decision” to bear the evil of our sin for the “great cause” of our salvation.

You and I have no ability to fathom just what this day cost our Savior.

I am convinced that his physical suffering, as unspeakably horrific as it was, was not the reason he pled with his Father to avoid Calvary (Matthew 26:39). The blood he would shed on the cross was not the reason he “prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44).

I believe that Jesus wanted with all his heart to avoid…