(Another from my liberal episcopal friend…)

Rehearsal
John 11: 18-44
By Harry T. Cook
In June 1963, the late Martin Luther King Jr. came to Detroit to lead a civil rights march along the city’s premiere street known as Woodward Avenue. Nothing like it had ever occurred in the Motor City. Some 125,000 people, including such luminaries as the late Walter Reuther, then head of the United Auto Workers, joined King at the head of the phalanx that covered all eight lanes of the thoroughfare.

Later that day, Dr. King delivered himself of a speech typical of the period and of the man, calling for freedom not only for America’s black people but for all. The world took little note of nor much remembered that speech – until it was given two months later from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It was the now-famed “I Have A Dream” speech that some say was the turning point of the American civil rights movement.

During that summer of 1963, Dr. King was making a several-city tour of the United States to recruit people to his peaceful revolution along the lines of Gandhi’s passive resistance movement of an earlier generation. Detroit was one of the last major stops on that tour. The nation’s capital was the end-point. It was there on a steamy August day that Dr. King reached the apex of what would be his truncated public career. Less than five years later, he would be assassinated. He had demonstrated too much power for a type who was by popular wisdom supposed to be servile and, hence, powerless.

Do not miss the similarity of that trajectory to the likewise brief public career of Jesus, whom we find in today’s gospel reading at Bethany, a town on the way to Jerusalem. And in Bethany Jesus is depicted as, in effect, rehearsing what the church would come to proclaim as his own resurrection. In Bethany at the home of his friends, Martha and Mary, Jesus retrieved Lazarus from death. In Jerusalem, as we will hear a couple of Sundays from now in the Easter legend, Jesus himself was retrieved from the grip of death.

What makes the careers of Jesus and Dr. King similar is that they emerged in their own times as unlikely figures of power and were cut down at the height of it by malign forces that feared what they could do to empower the poor. Yet, both Jesus and Dr. King live on – resurrected, as it were, by their followings and held in living memory as heroes of freedom.

Detroit was Dr. King’s Bethany, Washington his Jerusalem, Memphis his Calvary. What he represented – a peaceful but determined force insistent upon claiming basic human freedom – is what Jesus essentially represented 1,900 years earlier.

Dr. King called out his people’s long repressed aspirations simply to be free – he called them from the grave their oppressors had dug for them, just as Jesus was depicted calling out Lazarus from his tomb – what an image!

Both King and Christ paid with their lives for giving others life. Both, then, are personifications, embodiments, even, of freedom. They represent the truth of human life, which is to be free to be and to become, unfettered by others’ selfishness and greed.

As the gospel says: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.
Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.