Return-Path: cms@dragon.com
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.catholic
Date:         Fri, 8 Jan 1993 22:15:58 EST
From:         "Spawn of a Jewish Carpenter (Cindy Smith)" <cms@DRAGON.COM>
Subject: Re: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Prophets of Israel

 I wrote this essay for a class I took in Old Testament Prophets.
During the course, I became interested in the way black leaders
applied the theology of the Prophets to the Civil Rights Movement.
In the end, after some research, I focused on the teachings of Martin
Luther King Jr.  Since King's birthday is coming up, I thought this
was an appropriate time to post this essay.


             Martin Luther King Jr. and the Prophets of Israel



     Martin Luther King Jr. was a prophet in the black community
who brought words and imagery from Scripture to further his cause
for righteousness in the black civil rights movement.  He drew a
great deal of his imagery from the Old Testament prophets,
although much of his imagery was also drawn from New Testament
prophets (frequently apostles).  He regarded Jesus primarily in
his prophetic role as one who called all people to repentance and
justice, who pled for nonviolance and practiced what he preached,
and who was crucified for civil disobedience.  From the Old
Testament prophets King drew his themes of justice and
righteousness, from the New Testament prophets he drew themes of
the coming New Age, and from Jesus he drew his themes of peace --
not the negative peace of oppression, but the positive peace of
justice and righteousness -- and love and brotherhood.
Furthermore, King not only describes Jesus in his role as
prophet, but also exhorts Christians to play the role of prophet,
to imitate the prophet Paul, to imitate the Old Testament
prophets who differentiated between just laws (God's laws) and
unjust laws (often the laws or ordinances of the king), and to
fight for the same justice that the Old Testament prophets fought
for.  King encouraged political and church leaders to be
prophets, to practice prophetic injunctions against injustice and
oppression, to be patient sufferers of the Kingdom as the
prophets and apostles were, and to be spiritual guides for the
oppressed.  King preached sin, repentance, and redemption,
equality not domination of whites, and the importance of one law
for all people.  All of these calls to be prophets were
intimately related to spiritual battles, not just physical
battles, fought by every brother and sister in the Kingdom of
God.

PROPHETS AND JUSTICE

        Martin Luther King frequently called the civil rights movement
a "struggle between justice and injustice, between the forces of light
and the forces of darkness" (The Power of Nonviolence, 1957).  The
role of the prophet in ancient Israel was to be a messenger from the
deity.  The messages which the prophets gave from God frequently
involved calls for justice.  When Israel was unrighteous, the prophets
were the first to say so and call for remediation.  After punishment,
the newly just Israel was called by God to fight their unjust
oppressors.  Time and again, the prophets called Israel to do right
and abhor wrong.  King also called on America to do right and abhor
wrong, labeling the struggle the same as the prophetic struggle for
justice.  As Isaiah said, "Justice will bring about peace; right will
produce calm and security" (32:17).  Above all, King wanted peace in
the streets of America, but rightly felt that peace could not be
achieved without justice, calm and security could not be achieved
until America did right and gave all her citizens equal rights under
the law.  When this happened, King felt it would be a "victory for
justice, good will, and democracy" (ibid).

        Early in his career, King felt a strong desire to eliminate
social evil.  Like the Old Testament prophets before him, King did not
see a distinction between the sacred and the profane when it came to
evil.  Evil had to be rooted out of society, and it was the
responsibility of the prophet to call to his society's attention the
nature of the evil and the means of its removal.  Segregation, King
felt, was a moral evil that had to be rooted out of American society,
and it was incumbant upon him to call for its removal (Pilgrimage to
Nonviolence, 1960).  Though he never expressed it directly, it is
obvious that King felt "called" to call America to repentance (which
is the duel meaning of "prophet":  the caller and the called).  In his
struggle, King felt the presence of God, saying that the compatriots
in his struggle "had Cosmic companionship" (Power of Nonviolence,
1957).  He called upon America "to let judgement/justice roll down
like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream," a quotation from
Amos he cites at least half a dozen times in his essays.  Amos
proclaims the judgement of the nations "for three crimes and for
four," who, though punished, still did not return to the Lord their
God.  Eventually, however, when Israel repents, Yahweh restores her
fortunes.  In this way, King sought repentance from American
businesses.  King punished American businesses by calling for
boycotts, and when the businesses repented and agreed to hire more
Negroes, or allow them to ride at the front of the buses, or sit at
lunch counters, then Yahweh, acting through the Negroes, restored
their fortunes by bringing Negro customers back.

        King acted as a prophet in comforting his oppressed people,
pleading with Yahweh on their behalf.  He cried that, for the Negro,
"the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be
plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the blackness
of corroding despair" (Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963).  He
encouraged young students who took "the deep groans and the passionate
yearnings of the Negro people and filtered them in their own souls and
fashioned them in a creative protest which is an epic known all over
our nation" (The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness, 1960).  As the
prophets often took the groans and cries for justice of the
Israelites, so the Negro prophets took the groans and cries for
justice of the Negro people and laid them before the throne of God.
Yet King complained that the oppressors cannot "understand or
appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have
been oppressed and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice
must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action"
(Birmingham Jail).  As the Israelite king's prophets often threw God's
true prophets in jail, so God's Negro prophets suffered the indignity
of jail for their faith in the God of Justice.  When a prophet hears
the word of God, he must speak; when a prophet hears the groans and
passionate yearnings of his people, he cannot remain silent.  God
commands him to speak and to act on behalf of his people.  Though
"seared in the flames of withering injustice" (I Have a Dream, 1963),
the prophet has faith God will set his people free, just as the
Emancipation Proclamation "came as a joyous daybreak to end the long
night of their captivity" (ibid).

        King, as a prophet, called on his fellow Christians to also be
prophets for the Kingdom of God by calling upon them to embrace
nonviolence as a way of life (Pilgrimage to Nonviolence).  As the
prophets called for justice in both the northern and southern kingdoms
of Israel, so King frequently called for justice in the North and
South of the United States of America.  King said it would be much
harder to overcome prejudice in the North than in the South, because
Southern institutions are so easy to point to and say "this is wrong,"
whereas in the North prejudice is a matter of deep-rooted belief not
visibly manifest in Northern society as a whole.  Though the prophets
were often abused and thrown into jail or the pit, they did not
violently retaliate, and King sought to emulate this and encouraged
other Christian prophets to emulate this.  As the prophets fought with
words, so the Negro prophets fought with words; the pen is mightier
than the sword.  But King also said that prophets must put their
bodies where their words are, "always...willing to talk and seek fair
compromise, but...ready to suffer when necessary and even risk our
lives to become witnesses to the truth as we see it."  He regarded
physical death as "the price that a man must pay to free his children
and his white brethren from a permanent death of the spirit," but
"nothing could be more redemptive" (Rising Tide of Racial
Consciousness).  A prophet, he contended, must prepare his body "as a
means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and
national community" (Birmingham Jail).  And, again, to those who
claimed that social concerns were no business of the Gospel, he
responded by pointing out that prophets of old did not make a
distinction between the sacred and the profane -- to them, that would
be as strange a distinction as between the soul and the body
(Birmingham Jail).

        As a prophet, King called on the leadership of his country to
be true to God.  "The urgence of the hour," he said, "calls for
leaders of wise judgment and sound integrity -- leaders not in love
with money, but in love with justice; leaders not in love with
publicity, but in love with humanity; leaders who can subject their
particular egos to the greatness of the cause."  The prophets of
Israel could not have said it better, who called for their kings to do
exactly the same thing.  King urged leaders to place "their moral
power behind their law" (My Trip to the Land of Gandhi, 1959).  For
King, this trip was his purification in the desert before he began his
powerful mission for justice and righteousness.  King complained that
our religious and civic leaders urged white citizens to integrate
"because it's the law," but rarely because "it's morally right."  This
distressed him greatly, since he frequently urged his followers only
to obey just, and not unjust, laws.  The prophets frequently flouted
the king's laws, told the king when he was unjust, called for
repentance from the king as well as all of Israel, and urged for the
institution of just laws in conjunction with their just application.
Without good leadership, good laws are worthless.  King called for
"strong and aggressive leadership from the federal government" (Rising
Tide), challenging them that "injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere" (ibid).  What may have distressed King move than
anything was the lukewarm leadership of white church leaders, or
sometimes downright opposition.  He accused them of staying safe
behind their stained glass windows (Birmingham Jail).  He urged them,
as God's prophets often urged the king's prophets, to be true to their
faith and their God and accept the call to repentance.

        King called on all of us to confront evil by the power of love
(Land of Gandhi), saying it was better to receive violence than to
inflict it.  He claimed that nonviolent, direct action was a better
and more successful method than violence.  Any prophet of old could
have told him that.  Like Jeremiah in the pit, he called on us to go
to jail to help make America righteous (Time for Freedom Has Come,
1961).  He pointed out that unearned suffering is redemptive (I Have a
Dream), and that "right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil
triumphant" (Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1964).  He called on us,
like the New Testament prophets, to love instead of hate, since "he
who hates does not know God" and "love is the key to ultimate reality"
(1 John).  "Seek the highest good."  Like the New Testament prophets,
he called on us to rejoice whenever we found ourselves suffering in
the cause of righteousness.

        In "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence," King reveals how he became a
prophet.  He came to believe in a personal God, to believe that God is
a "living reality validated in experiences of everyday life."  His
suffering, he found, drew him closer to God, helping him to achieve an
inner calm and strength only God can give.  God, he realized, is the
ruler of the universe and in our struggle for righteousness, we have
cosmic companionship.  In "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," he likens
himself to the 8th century prophets who left their little villages and
carried their "thus saith the Lord"s far beyond the boundaries of
their hometowns.  He compares himself to the Apostle Paul, who "left
his little village of Tarsus and carried the Gospel of Jesus Christ to
every hamlet and city."  King himself carried the Gospel of Freedom to
the people of his nation, black and white, Jew and Gentile.  Like
Paul, he constantly responded to the Macedonian call for aid.  Like a
prophet, he condemns his people out of love, and urges their
repentance for the sake of his love for them.  He asks, "Who is their
God?  Where were they when God called for justice?"  King wept over
the Church as the prophets wept over Israel, because of love.  He
said, "We've blemished and scarred the Body through social neglect
and fear of being nonconformists" (Birmingham Jail).  God-intoxicated,
King suffered for his faith, and proclaimed that the judgment of God
was upon the Church as never before.  Right defeated, he often
claimed, is greater than evil triumphant (Eulogy for the Martyred
Children, 1963).  King not only called upon us to do right, but to do
right for the right reason -- right kavvanah.  There is no greater
treason, he claimed, that to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

        King condemned America, as the prophets condemned Israel, for
defaulting on their promise to blacks, "that all men are created
equal."  He called on his nation to "make justice a reality for all
God's children" (I Have a Dream), but not to slake our thirst for
justice with the cup of bitterness and hatred, but with dignity and
the discipline of nonviolence.  He urged us not to wallow in the
valley of despair, but to march for justice, and to have the courage
to vote and send to Washington "men who will not fear to do justice,
love mercy, and walk humbly with their God" (ibid, quoting Micah).  He
called on America to be born again (Where Do We Go From Here?, 1967).
He called upon us to be "dissatisfied until the governor does justly,
loves mercy, and walks humbly with God" so that justice will "roll
down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream" (ibid, quoting
Amos).  "God is not mocked," he told us.  "Ye reap what ye sow"
(ibid).  "God did not call America to Vietnam," he warned us (The Drum
Major Instinct, 1968), condemning America's involvement in the Vietnam
War much as the prophets condemned Israel's wars that were not
ordained by God.  Preachers must say with Jesus, "The Spirit of the
Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to deal with the problems
of the poor" (I See the Promised Land, 1968).  As Jesus was a prophet
to the poor and the oppressed and the outcaste, so King was a prophet
to the poor, oppressed, and outcaste Negro people.  King claims that
God said to the Hebrews, "Don't play with me, Israel.  Don't play with
me, Babylon.  Be still and know that I am God.  And if you don't stop
your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your
power" (Drum Major Instinct), which is, of course, exactly what God
did, acting through the prophet King, when he broke the back of Jim
Crow.  "God sent us," King announced, "...to say to you that you're
not treating his children right."  King then promised God's punishment
on behalf of God's children until righteousness prevailed.

        Martin Luther King Jr. was a great prophet who urged all of
us to be prophets of God, to proclaim a righteous Kingdom under
Heaven, and he showed us the way.  He told us to "blot out the hate
and injustice of the old age, and bring in the love and justice of the
new age" (Facing the Challenge of a New Age, 1957).  The end of the
struggle, he said, is reconciliation, redemption, and the creation of
a beloved community.  In this new age, the universe is on the side of
justice.  We must "protest injustice to bring in the new age" and the
"blood of martyrs will be the seed of the tabernacle of freedom"
(ibid).  "The old systems of exploitation and oppression are passing
away, and the new systems of justice and equality are being born"
(Pilgrimage).  If we follow his prophecy, King claimed that we would
"emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to
man into the bright and glowing daybreak of freedom and justice for
all God's children" (Rising Tide).  Then "the heat of injustice will
be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice" (Dream), and
"every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain made low, the
rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places shall be made
straight and the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh
shall see it together" (ibid, A Time to Break Silence, 1967, quoting
Isaiah).  Then our land will be "a better land because people were
willing to suffer for righteousness' sake" (ibid).

        Thus, King was a prophet who called us to repentance, called
us to imitate the prophets, called on us to imitate the prophet Jesus,
the prophet Paul, and the prophets of the Old Testament.  He called on
the leadership of our nation to do justice with courage, he called on
us to obey the just laws of God, and to disobey the unjust laws of
Satan.  He called on us to be nonviolent as the prophets were
nonviolent and were thrown into the pit for their faith and their
demonstrations by word and deed of their faith.  He condemned our
sins, called us to repentance, and prayed for America's soul, helping
to bring about our salvation -- which is still continuing to this day.
King, as a prophet, guided his oppressed people, but also guided the
oppressors, that they might see their sin and repent of their wicked
ways.  He knew better than anyone that America, like Israel, is a
chosen nation whose image abroad reflects our behavior at home (The
Time for Freedom Has Come, 1961) and, while privileged groups seldom
give up their privileges voluntarily, he helped us to do just that,
taking away our reproach from among the nations.

In Jesus Son of Mary,

Cindy Smith
cms@dragon.com

Rely not on your wealth;
   say not:  "I have the power."
Rely not on your strength
   in following the desires of your heart.
Say not:  "Who can prevail against me?"
   for the LORD will exact the punishment.
Say not:  "I have sinned, yet what has befallen me?"
   for the LORD bides his time.
Of forgiveness be not overconfident,
   adding sin upon sin.
Say not:  "Great is his mercy;
   my many sins he will forgive."
For mercy and anger alike are with him;
   upon the wicked alights his wrath.
Delay not your conversion to the LORD,
   put it not off from day to day;
For suddenly his wrath flames forth;
   at the time of vengeance, you will be destroyed.
Rely not upon deceitful wealth,
   for it will be no help on the day of wrath.

Ecclesiasticus/Ben Sira 5:1-10

What then shall we say?  Shall we persist in sin that grace may
abound?  Of course not!  How can we who died to sin yet live in it?
Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were
baptized into his death?  We were indeed buried with him through
baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead
by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.  For
if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we
shall also be united with him in the resurrection.  We know that our
old self was crucified with him, so that our sinful body might be done
away with, that we might no longer be in slavery to sin.  For a dead
person has been absolved from sin.  If, then, we have died with
Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.  We know that
Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer has power
over him.  As to his death, he died to sin once and for all; as to his
life, he lives for God.  Consequently, you too must think of
yourselves as [being] dead to sin and living for God in Christ Jesus.

Romans 6:1-11
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.catholic