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.
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In His Own Words
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