Pilgr-image 21 - Nonresistance
You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. - Matthew 5:38
No one ever wins a fight...
- Howard Thurman
Anyone who was an inspiration to Martin Luther King, Jr is someone to whom we should look up. It is said that King carried a book of Howard Thurman’s writings with him wherever he went. Thurman isn’t one of the most well known civil-rights leaders and prophetic voices of the 20th century but maybe he should be. CNN called him the “overlooked civil rights hero.” Even though the most recent of his writings is nearly fifty years old and his oldest are nearly eighty years old, his wisdom is as relevant today as when he first wrote them. But this statement... no one ever wins a fight... has such echoes of truth when so much of life right now feels like it is about who is the absolute winner and who is the absolute loser. Who is voted off the island? Who is utterly defeated in a contest? We even have politicians saying that if they win, they’re going to be “slitting some throats.” I hear all this and I feel all this and, to be fully transparent, I’ve probably felt and said similar things. But Thurman is right... no one ever really wins a fight. (Actually, those are the words of Thurman’s grandmother to him after he came home bruised and battered after a fight that he presumably “won.”) The reflection from Thurman ended with this:
“No one ever wins a fight.” This suggests that there is always some other way; or does it mean that man can always choose the weapons he shall use? Not to fight at all is to choose a weapon by which one fights. Perhaps the authentic moral stature of a man is determined by his choice of weapons which he uses in his fight against the adversary. Of all weapons, love is the most deadly and devastating, and few there be who dare trust their fate in its hands.
As I read these words of Thurman, I thought of how something is always broken in a fight. It might be a bone, it might be a plate, it might be a relationship, it might be a life. But something is always broken and, even if we are unaware of it, something is broken on both sides. Jesus understood this - he understood that (as we’ll see in the next two reflections) retribution doesn’t fix the problem. It just keeps spiraling the cycle. Thurman’s grandmother understood this and she passed that on to her grandson who passed it along to Dr. King. And all of their wisdom still speaks today. Am I listening? Are you?
For more about Howard Thurman, here is an excellent article about him.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/this-theologian-helped-mlk-see-value-nonviolence-180967821/