In His Own Words

Commentary by Paul Greenberg -Every year he grows more ceremonial, distant, symbolic, less alive. It is the fate of heroes. Their pictures are relegated to banners, their words become clichés, their very names become streets and boulevards instead of a living presence. Icons. Washington, Lincoln, Lee, Martin Luther King. . . . Our familiarity with them may not breed contempt exactly, but a kind of boredom, and indifference. Haven't we heard it all before?
Maybe, but have we listened before? How long has it been since we've really heard his words and felt their force? And their continuing, insistent relevance. Instead our heroes become fit subjects for dry-as-dust doctoral dissertations and the endless re-evaluations called historical revisionism.
Listen to what he said in the midst of his first confrontation with the already crumbling power of Jim Crow. How easily he could have cast out these demons and proclaimed the moral superiority of Us over Them. But he knew better, and he tried to get those he led to understand better, too:
"A boycott is just a means to an end. A boycott is merely a means to say, 'I don't like it.' It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor but the end is reconciliation. The end is the creation of a beloved community . . . the creation of a society where men will live together as brothers . . . not retaliation but redemption. That is the end we are trying to reach."
His cause wasn't just a boycott. It wasn't just a political or economic or social struggle. The powers and principalities involved were of a different order, and so would be the victory.
In July of 1956, Martin Luther King would carry the same message to the American Baptist Assembly, but with a twist. The church, he proclaimed, "is the Body of Christ. So when the church is true to its nature it knows neither division nor disunity. But I am disturbed by what you are doing to the Body of Christ."
Martin Luther King went on to contrast segregation not with integration, but with redemption. If racial segregation, he said, "is a blatant denial of the unity which we all have in Jesus Christ," then reconciliation will be the proof that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor gentile, Negro nor white, and that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth."
Then there were the others -- the young and impatient, the proud and angry, the ideological and sophisticated. They tended to snicker at this nice preacher innocent of their dialectic, and called him De Lawd behind his back. What could he know of the world who preached nothing but love?
But whatever Martin Luther King was, he was anything but naive. If he was gentle as the dove, he was also cunning as the serpent. Indeed, he would prove far more cunning than those who thought themselves worldly wise. If by now we have forgotten the hope he preached, if his words sound strange and new when we hear them again, maybe that's because we weren't listening the first time.
Martin Luther King's time, it turns out, is all times. That is the great advantage of a biblical point of view; it does not age. That is why his words can still take us to a whole other dimension. They are words as old as the Prophets, as urgent as today.Read full column

In His Own Words