(ABP) — This week marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In this column I want to honor Dr. King by offering reflections about what his life and work mean to me today. I aim to be appreciative — but unsentimental — in reflecting on one of the Christian leaders whose work has had the deepest impact on my own moral vision.
King was murdered when he was not yet 40 years old. It is bracing for me to think that Martin King was an exact contemporary of my father. With good health he might even be alive today, just like my own beloved father. Think about what he could have done with 40 more years!
Jesus was right in saying that we kill our prophets and then honor them after they are dead. I am very glad that the United States honors Martin King with a holiday and a street named after him in most every major city — but that cannot erase the hatred and contempt that he experienced during his actual lifetime. I am sure that Dr. King would have much preferred a positive response to his message in his lifetime rather than posthumous sanctification.
Any who would seek to follow the example of Martin Luther King should expect fierce opposition. Their presence brings not peace but division, because their message exposes injustice and challenges the status quo. That opposition can take a variety of familiar forms, from rejection to assassination. If our stance as Christians in a brutal and unjust world evokes no opposition, we are playing it too safe — not living as we ought to live.
King teaches that these often-hateful responses to a fight for social justice should be expected as a kind of structural consequence of such advocacy, almost like a law of nature. When you push against wrong, it stirs up the hornets.
This reaction is so predictable that there is no need to over-personalize it, and certainly no need to respond in kind to the hornets themselves. This realism about how social change happens contributed to King's ability to remain in the fight for justice without giving in to despair or hatred of those who hated him.
I have learned from King to appreciate the difference between platitudes and concreteness in ethics. Just about everyone now says they are “for peace,” or “for justice,” or “for reconciliation” — platitudes all. But when the conversation turns to the concrete — like provisions requiring that all public schools offer quality education through redistribution of tax revenues — then you have a fight on your hands.
The lesson is that if you want praise, offer high-sounding words in favor of universal platitudes. But if you want justice, tackle specific wrongs, propose specific remedies, and resist the move to platitudes so often employed as a deflection strategy. Then the praise will soon end and the real fight will begin.
The recent flap over Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama's controversial pastor, raised, among other issues, the question of patriotism. Can you love your country while also criticizing it intensely?
Of course you can. King already showed us this during his lifetime. He loved America –but he opposed America's racism in the name of what he loved about the United States. That was the genius of the “I Have a Dream” speech. This dream, in part, was that America “would rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.”
King had not given up on the creed despite the many cruel ways Americans had violated it over the years. There was a kind of eschatological expectation in King — surely shaped by his Christian faith — that this nation could one day reach its own professed values.
There is a difference between criticism of a community from within or from without. If I criticize, say, Saudi Arabia, I do so as a foreigner and stranger. If I criticize the United States, I do so as a citizen who loves this country and wants what is best for it. King loved America enough to criticize it and to work for its internal reform. Somehow, there is a brittleness about our patriotism that often seems unable to accommodate both love and critique. King can help us do better.
Martin Luther King keeps in front of me the issues that he dealt with most directly — racism, poverty, war — while training me to attend to other expressions of social evil. Those who would honor Dr. King should oppose – concretely — particular instances of racism, economic injustice, and needless wars. And so I, for one, want to talk about racism in our criminal justice system, our cruelly flawed health-insurance system, and the misbegotten war in Iraq.
But I also want to try to stretch to think about which victimized peoples might have caught Martin Luther King's attention if he were with us today. I personally think that they would include aborted, abused, abandoned, and neglected children; people who can't get basic health care; homosexuals who have been rejected and loathed by society; victims of environmental degradation here and abroad; our mistreated terror detainees; Darfur's refugees and so many more.
Finally, Martin Luther King teaches me about what it means to follow the real Jesus rather than the culturally comfortable Christ. So often we turn Christ into little more than “my atoning Savior” or “the object of my doctrinal speculations” or “the one who makes me happy (and rich)” or “our national God” or “my personal friend.”
There is certainly a place for atonement, doctrine, happiness, and intimacy with Christ. But the Jesus of Martin King was the one who, in his actual ministry, advanced justice, loved the loveless, attacked social evil, taught peacemaking, and was met with crucifixion.
I want to adore Jesus Christ. I want Jesus to be absolutely central in my life. But not just any version of Jesus.
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— David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. www.davidpgushee.com
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