An Activist Faith Week 1: Why Care?

How Jesus’ Woe about Tombs Applies to Martin Luther King

Luke 11:47-48 (NRSVUE):  47 Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your ancestors killed. 48 So you are witnesses and approve of the deeds of your ancestors, for they killed them, and you build their tombs. 

Especially here in Silicon Valley, when so much is oriented toward tech, it’s sometimes a pain to be asked what I do for work. When I mention the King Papers Project, I oftentimes get politely confused responses along the lines of nice or unique (because I clearly am a fabulous unicorn, thank you). If I am to guess, some of these replies stem from their own disinterest in King: like yeah he did something fifty-sixty years ago, but what from that is actually relevant to today rather than just trivia.

To be fair, this is a generic struggle for academics. Still, a good portion of that comes from deliberate efforts to make King seem irrelevant. One of the more thought-provoking books I read last year was sociology professor Hajar Yazdiha’s The Struggle for the People’s King. She argues that, when it comes to King, “dominant kingmakers – the elite white class, state institutions, media conglomerates – become powerful purveyors of historical revisionism through their misuses of memory, strategies that are picked up by right-wing organizations and developed over time.” For example, MLK essay contests usually emphasize an aspect of dreaming, personal responsibility, and treating others with respect, not about the persistent wealth gaps, abolishing the police, or addressing militarization, even though King addressed the latter issues much more than the former.

And the end result is that, generally, we give a lot of praise to King, but we don’t actually take his life into account, and that has resulted in a symbol almost devoid of meaning, one that’s often twisted to justify things that are categorically counter to his historical life. The historical King, after all, endorsed literal racial quotas in employment, launched vehement protests against police brutality, and called the United States the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, yet somehow today people can, with a straight face, say he would oppose affirmative action, refuse to protest, and would champion apartheid states.

And in so doing, America honors King like the Pharisees honor the Hebrew prophets: poorly. Admittedly, this is not the clearest verse in Scripture: Jesus’ logic, at surface level, doesn’t make sense. It’s not a given that the gravedigger is an accessory to a murder, after all. 

So why does Jesus pronounce woe against the Pharisees, then, for their attempts to honor the prophets? The few commentaries I’ve read equate the Pharisees with those who opposed the prophets, but if we’re being fair, most Pharisees would see themselves as being on the same side as Jeremiah and Elijah. Instead, Jesus argues that the Pharisees are memorializing the prophets incorrectly. Despite these impressive structures they built honoring the Prophets, they’re not carrying out the Prophets’ teachings in their own day. After all, Jesus’s own summary of the Prophets is literally Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12): In everything do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

And, one of King’s contemporaries, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, noted that the prophets displayed what he called a “divine pathos,” sensing God’s concern on many issues that society was ignoring. For example, the prophets chastise judges and leaders for catering to the powerful and ignoring the orphan, the widow, and the oppressed in the society. 

And if this is the test, then the Pharisees, at least based on Scriptural evidence, fall short. In contrast to Heschel’s point about hearing God’s voice, what the Pharisees wanted was to claim God’s authority. By being the ones to build such monuments, they also appointed themselves as the arbiters of what it looks like to honor them. We actually see this directly in Scripture: in John 9, after Jesus heals a man blind from birth, the Pharisees come onto the scene and make a mess of things, contending that the man should be suspicious of the miracle and distrust Jesus. When the man continues to insist that Jesus is good, the Pharisees state specifically that they, as the disciples of Moses, can be trusted, but Jesus cannot, and they end up excommunicating the man for challenging them. 

And that type of behavior is despicable enough that I can then understand Jesus pronouncing woe. Yet we do the same with King: we build memorials in his honor, but fail to actually follow in his footsteps. We render him an inoffensive saint, ignoring the struggle, the difficulties, and the controversy that he stoked during his lifetime. And in so doing, we then fail to rise to his challenges and build a more just, equal, and, I would argue, a society closer to the Kingdom of God. 

So all this begs the question: what does King preach? That’s going to be the focus the next weeks: the idea is weekly blog posts based off of King’s book of sermons Strength to Love for this Lent season. In some ways this is King’s most personal book: not ghostwritten, and drawing from the messages that he preached most every Sunday.

But in passing, I would argue that King preaches a message of altruistic activism sustained through faith in an active God who sees and cares for all humanity. As he notes elsewhere, love and power really have to work together: “power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

And of course, King himself is human: after two decades, I can and will be the first to tell you that a lot of the things the textbook narrative valorizes about King just simply isn’t true. He’s not actually a brilliant strategist (some things don’t work out, Google Albany, Georgia), he definitely was a man of his era (Google Ella Baker), and he too often sacrificed principles for pragmatic purposes (Google Bayard Rustin). Like any historical figure, there’s flaws, character failings, and problematic behaviors: to use religious speak, King like all of us struggled with sin as well. 

Those failings, however, also make his positives stand out and remind us that we also can create change. Despite his weaknesses, King remained dedicated to nonviolence and to the goal of serving humanity. He didn’t enrich himself (as easy as that would have been), nor did he give up altogether even though he experienced continual setbacks. And there’s something empowering in that: to know that positive change doesn’t necessarily require strokes of genius or natural character but that stubborn determination, hard work, and sincere love can be of help.