Martin Luther King's Final Speech, 3 April 1968: "I've Been to the Mountaintop"

 

[For the full text of his speech, see here; for the video of the entire speech, see here.]

"Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord." With this citation of the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. turned, physically and emotionally drained, and walked away from the podium at the Mason Temple in Memphis on the evening of the 3rd of April, 1968. He would be dead less than 24 hours later, assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by a sniper's bullet.

I have often written about Dr. King over the years―his "I Have a Dream" speech (here), his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (here), his powerful, prophetic calls for justice and against war (here), his 1960 Christian Century article, "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" (here)―perhaps as a reflex to my evangelical background's at best marginalization of him, and at worst disparagement or disowning of him as a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yes, he was no evangelical (the fundamentalist preacher and future Left Behind author Tim LaHaye, in a letter to Wheaton president Carl Armerding protesting the school's holding a memorial to the slain civil rights leader after his assassination, referred to him as "an outright theological liberal heretic"). Yes, he had documented academic and moral failures. But, as one who lived through the time period and knows the people who most disparaged him, I greatly suspect the real reason lies elsewhere. After all, significant moral failings have not diminished their assessments of such other monumental historical figures as Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson, and Winston Churchill.

What still strikes me, as it has struck nearly everyone over the years, is that King, in alluding to the experience of Moses on Mt. Nebo (Deuteronomy 34), appears to have foreseen his approaching martyrdom for the cause of civil rights. What showed his true greatness was his courageous refusal to shrink from what he saw to be the mission he had been given to do ("I just want to do God's will") in the teeth of implacable opposition. As I have often reflected, King saw himself, first and foremost, as a minister of the gospel. And, for those of my evangelical friends who might demur, let me remind you that the genuine, "biblical" gospel is the gospel of 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, yes, but it is also the gospel of Mary's Magnificat; it is also the gospel of Jesus' Nazareth Manifesto in Luke 4. In other words, the New Testament gospel is not the pinched, desiccated, dualistic, "soterian" "life-after-death"-exclusive gospel of much popular evangelicalism. As I argued, ten years ago now, in a 9-part series on this blog, the New Testament gospel is the announcement of the inbreaking, through the events of Jesus' death and resurrection, of the long-awaited kingdom of God/new creation promised in the Hebrew scriptures. It may include such elements as substitutionary atonement and justification by faith, but it cannot be limited to such things, divorced from ultimate social, and societal, ramifications. As Dr. King proclaimed, prophetically as it were, "Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord."

One more thing strikes me. It has been close to 54 years since Dr. King spoke these words. He claimed to have "seen the promised land." There are some, indeed, who, seeing laws passed in the wake of the civil rights struggles of the '60's, believe the promised land to have been reached. This, of course, was the rationale of Chief Justice John Roberts and the four other conservatives of the Supreme Court, who gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1965 by striking down its Section 4(b) in their Shelby County v. Holder ruling in 2014, believing it no longer to be necessary. The results could have been predicted: many southern states have once again acted to purge registration rolls, enact voter ID rules, end or restrict early voting and same-day registration, shuttering polling locations in minority districts, etc., in efforts to hold the vote down. The manufactured crisis over "critical race theory" in schools, or even the more general issue of "systemic racism," is yet another issue. Many people―I won't mention their race to protect the guilty; hint: it's the same as mine―continue to insist, in what must be a vain attempt to salve guilty consciences, that the problem is only a matter of the individual prejudice of a few bad actors. What a load of rubbish. And nothing will change until a large enough number of the majority community in this country comes to grips with the problem and acknowledges it. But there's the rub: such would involve the actual teaching of history, something many in this country are not really in the mood for these days. 

Today, in the wake of Donald Trump's refusal to acknowledge his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, multiple "red" states have passed laws both restricting the vote and placing the elections in charge of partisan Republican legislatures in transparent efforts to game the system for future potential steals. In each case, the target of their vote suppression are the very demographic King fought, and ultimately died, for. Biden and the Democrats in Congress, of course, have a voting rights bill ready to counteract these measures, but thus far it remains stalled. The problem? Of course, the anti-democratic Senate, split 50/50 along partisan lines, even though the 50 Democrats represent 40 million more people than the 50 Republicans. The fly in the ointment, however, remains the two recalcitrant "moderate" Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who, though they say they believe in voting rights, pledge ultimate fealty to the traditional, though not constitutional, institution of the filibuster. Hence, since they can't get ten (!) Republicans to vote for the bill, they won't either. Better, I guess, incipient authoritarianism than unilaterally-sanctioned democracy? I won't pretend to guess as to the motivation for Sinema's and Manchin's bull-headedness on this matter. Certainly they can't be as naïve as they appear. But my only question is this: if 51 votes is OK to pass Trump's tax cuts for the rich and confirm Supreme Court justices, why not voting rights to secure democratic outcomes to our elections? 

Such seems like a no-brainer to me. And it would be the most fitting tribute to the memory of Dr. King. Don't honor his memory unless you mean it.

T. S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" (1927): A Brief Reflection for Epiphany

Today (Jan 6) marks the Christian Feast of the Epiphany, which in the Western Church celebrates the visit of the gift-bearing Magi to Bethlehem narrated in Matthew chapter 2. In Matthew's narrative, the Magi, who "prostrate themselves" before the one "born King of the Jews," represent, as the late New Testament scholar Raymond Brown argued,* the firstfruits of the eschatological pilgrimage of the nations and their submission to the true God. This richly evocative story called forth this wonderful poem by Christian convert T. S. Eliot in 1927:

 

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times when we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wineskins.

But there was no information, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

 

Three elements of this poem stand out for me. The first is the reference to the "three trees on the low sky." This, transparently, is an allusion to the three crosses on Golgotha 36 years (on the assumption of a 33 CE date for the crucifixion) after their visit. The second is the line, "Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver," likewise alluding to the soldiers' dicing for Jesus's garments (Mark 15:24 et par.) and Judas's betrayal of his Lord for 30 pieces of silver (Matt 26:15). Elliot's point in these two allusions is manifest: Jesus's death is already foreshadowed at his birth. And by doing this Eliot is, I believe, faithful to the theological intent of Matthew's narrative, in which "all Jerusalem" is "terrified" of the news of the birth of the King (Matt 2:3) and the "chief priests and scribes" "of the people" "assemble" in response, in deliberate foreshadowing of the "high priests and elders of the people's" decision to put Jesus to death at the climax of the story (Matt 27:1; cf. v. 25). Even in Matthew's story, in other words, the shadow of the cross hangs over Jesus's life from the beginning. For in truth Jesus was a baby born to die for all, Jew and Gentile alike, who submit to him as did the Magi of old.

The third element I would like to highlight comes at the end: "We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods." This highlights the all-important New Testament theological emphasis on inaugurated eschatology. The birth of Jesus―indeed, his birth, ministry, death, and resurrection viewed as a whole, the entire complex conveniently referred to as the "Christ-event"―changed things, indeed changed things fundamentally and eschatologically, inaugurating the promised kingdom and fulfilling, in an initial sense, the Abrahamic, Davidic, and New Covenants of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Second Exodus, the New Creation―these have arrived, but not completely, not as they will be at the consummation. The new age co-exists in "eschatological" tension with the old, a fact which gives the apostle Paul's theology its particular dynamic and dynamism. What matters is what today's followers of Jesus do with this eschatological tension. As Eliot, through the words of the Magi, suggests (rightly), the Christian, as a citizen of the kingdom of God, should never be totally at ease "here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods." As an American, it may be uncomfortable to have to say this, but America, like Britain, like Canada, may be a fine country to live in, but it is a human country, and that means it is a fallen country. It is not an outpost of the kingdom of God. And it has its own idols, chief among them being, as I heard Ron Sider say a number of years ago in a fine commencement address at Messiah College, an "idolatrous nationalism" that runs rampant in evangelical circles in today's America. As Christians, our job is to work for the kingdom of God, for that is where our true citizenship resides.

Soli Deo Gloria!