"And Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore." - Ex. 14:30

I'm continuing to read a book of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s sermons entitled Strength to Love - a great title. The one I'm reading this mornign is based on the above verse. King recaps the story a bit, telling how evil (personified in the Egyptians) was recalcitrant enough to refuse Moses' pleas, then endure the plagues, and finally to follow the Israelites into the parted Red Sea where the waters then rushed over top of them. King then writes, "The meaning of this story is not found in the drowning of Egyptian soldiers, for no one should rejoice at the death or defeat of a human being. Rather, this story symbolizes the death of evil and of inhuman oppression and unjust exploitation."

I recoiled from this statement at first. How can the meaning not be found in the drowning of the soldiers? Certainly the story symbolizes the death of evil and inhuman oppression, but isn't that necessarily tied up with the historical fact of the death of the Egyptians? Or is he saying it is just a morality tale, a parable, if you will, unhistoric, or at least unimportant in authenticity? Does the historicity of such events in the Old Testament, or the New, really matter? Don't we get the meaning from them the same, just as we get the meaning from Jesus' parables? But even if he is saying all that, doesn't the story, on its own terms, still require the reader to rejoice at the defeat of another human being? These are questions that have always bothered me. The OT is full of rejoicing at the defeat of other humans, by God's hand, no less.

I don't want to explain my view of God's violence in the OT, here, my posts to the blog are too long already. Suffice it to say, for now, that I have some seemingly irreconcilable questons about that. What I want to post is my way of moving forward out of those questions. Regardless of where one comes down on those questions, when one chooses to become a Christ-follower, he chooses a different ethic. The fact is simply that Jesus did not rejoice in the defeat of other human beings. Jesus did not imagine how wonderful it would be to not be under Roman rule, to have freedom of religion and speech and such. He could have rejoiced at that vision. He could have either taken up arms (people around him wanted him to) or taught that one day his followers would have the numbers necessary to take up arms against the evil Roman empire. He would have biblical precident: He could have compared the Romans to the Canaanites. But this is not how Jesus interpreted the scripture, and it is not how he chose to live. Rather, he taught the ethic of love, even love of enemies, and he ended up on the cross. Imaginve not ever having an example of love having power in the real world, having never imagined its transformative power, having only Jesus' teachings that promised love's supreme power. No wonder the early church often understood Jesus' teaching to primarily apply to the hereafter. But within only a few hundred years, the Roman empire had been conquered, not by force, but by love and the way of the cross, and the official religion of the empire was Christianity. How could early Christians have ever imagined they held the key to such tremendous power?

Power, however, corrupts. And the ethic of the most powerful nation on earth is greatly corrupted. When holding such great power, it is very difficult, nearly impossible, to not wield it first. It is so much easier to fly jets over and drop bombs than to wait the long 300 years love might take to conquer. Who can endure evil that long? Don't we have a right, a scriptural mandate even, to act against evil with force? Well, not if we're Christ-followers. Wielding power might win the battle over some current evil, but it never wins the war against evil - only love can do that.

So, in interpreting the above scripture, I agree with King that we should not rejoice at the death or defeat of other human beings (though I think whether or not the Israelites on the seashore could rejoice is another matter). Rather, we can rejoice that in the end God's love for the Israelites overcame all obstacles (after 400 years of slavery), and we can know that the love God has given us for all humanity can have the same overcoming power. After all, the actions of the Black Panthers are not responsible for the victory in the war concerning civil rights. Rather, the Christ-informed love ethic of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is widely-held as the key to overcoming the evils of segregation. The more we fight, the more we are seen by the other side as inhuman. What kind of civil war might have destroyed America if all blacks had taken up arms against the whites? The more we love, the more our enemy will see themselves in us. How many whites began to see segregation as evil because of the example of love that King displayed?