January 30, 1956, while Martin Luther King Jr was speaking at the First Baptist Church, his home in Montgomery was bombed. Just a few days later he delivered a sermon to his Dexter congregation, which scholars think was based on this outline.
The heart of the sermon is the contrast between the Good Samaritan and those who passed by the man left for dead in the road from Jericho:
The question of the Levite & Priest: What will happen to me if I stop to help this man. The question of the Samaritan was; What will happen to this man if I dont stop to help him. Ultimately the thing that determines whether a man is a Christian is how he answers this question.
King’s sermon concluded with this call, which should’ve been unmistakable: “Taking up the cross is the voluntary or deliberate choice of putting ourselves without reservation at the service of Christ and his kingdom; it is putting our whole being in the struggle against evil, whatever the cost.”
Almost exactly twenty years later, Karl Rahner published an essay, “On the Unreadiness of Church Members to Accept Poverty,” in which he lamented the fact that MLK’s radical faithfulness has been appropriated by the majority as an excuse for the shirking of responsibility:
Again and again we find ideological justifications to give the Christian a good conscience for doing the opposite of his duty (in a given situation). (We may recall the theological justifications adduced for the apartheid policy.) The obligation is divided up among everyone in such a way that no one can be held responsible for discharging it. The preaching of high ideals is made an alibi for real deeds. Those individuals who do fulfill radical demands of the situation of this kind, at least in so far as they recognize them or are able to fulfill them, are held up as an excuse for the rest. (We may think of a Peter Claver or a Martin Luther King and similar figures in Church history.) Even today we are still setting up monuments to the prophets in order to avoid having to obey what they preached. There is a tendency to feel that we have established that something is impossible even with the best will in the world before we have really tried every possible course. The doctrine of original sin is invoked, or that of the inescapable dialectic of all human realities, or the statement that the poor are always with us, the doctrine of the sublime meaning of suffering and misfortune (even when, at basis, it is solely the outcome of our own fault), or the doctrine of eternal life, the recognition that absolute social equality is neither beneficial nor possible, these and a thousand other reasons are adduced merely to avoid having to take the course of action which a given situation really prescribes.
As we’ve all heard, in the last speech MLK gave, only hours before he was killed, he ended with what can only be called prophetic words:
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
Rev Samuel Billy Kyles, who had been seated only a few feet away and had helped an exhausted King to his seat that night after the sermon, recalled it as an ordeal: “He preached himself through the fear of death. He just got it out of him. He just... dealt with it. And we were just standing there. It was like, what did he know that we didn't know?”
A few years ago, I did this painting of MLK, an homage to an icon I learned about from reading Rowan Williams’s poem “Pantocrator: Daphni”:
Today, I’m sitting with the realization that what Rowan Williams said of this Christ is also true of King, and that it’s true of King because he was true to Christ. There is a difference, of course: Jesus “sees a black unvisitable place/where from all ages to all ages he will die”; King sees the Promised Land created by that dying. But they share the all-consuming devotion to the will of the Father, their vision made possible by a common commitment that allowed them to see what the Good Samaritan saw, what I so often thoughtlessly overlook or purposefully look away from. “I just want to do God's will.” That’s what King said in the end. And that’s all that needs to be said. That says it all.
Thank you for this and for so simply putting what it means to take up our cross—what will happen to this man if I don’t stop and help him. Though I wonder if we are allowed to have boundaries. How do we sort it out? I guess working out our salvation with fear and trembling.
Okay, here’s a non sequitur for you. Whenever I see these icons of Jesus I think of this article. Thought you might be interested. His fingers are often in one or more of these positions. https://www.bibhudevmisra.com/2017/11/yoga-mudras-in-orthodox-christian-art.html