I am afaid the answer may lie in the fact that too few of us who call Jesus "Lord" and "Master" actualy make a committed and consistent effort to follow in His steps.
Please notice that I have not failed to I include my self in that "us".
It's not about talent, or skill, or wisdom or ability, I think.
There is a degree of courage and self-sacrifice that is required to be like Christ, or Martin, or Mother Teresa.
And I confess that at the moment I am afraid to ask for those "gifts".
Jesus and Martin
By Ched Myers
Rev. James W. Lawson, a retired Methodist minister in his 80s now, has been a major figure in faith-based activism in the U.S. One of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s closest colleagues in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Lawson continues to work tirelessly in the tradition of nonviolent activism for social justice. Speaking at a King commemoration recently in Los Angeles, he said something that caught my theological attention.“If you want to understand King,” Lawson asserted, “you must look at Jesus.” He was acknowledging that King was a committed Christian disciple who understood the call of the gospel as a vocation of advocacy for the oppressed, of love for adversaries and of nonviolent resistance to injustice. King can’t be understood apart from his faith: he organized his movement in church basements, prayed as he picketed, sang gospel hymns in jail, preached to presidents, and challenged other church leaders to join him (most poignantly in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”). But Lawson was saying more than this. He was alluding to the undeniable, if uncomfortable, parallels between the Jesus story and the ministry of Dr. King.
Like King, Jesus was a member of an ethnic community that suffered great discrimination at the hands of a world power. Both of them:
• spent time listening to the pain of the dispossessed and
broken among their own people, and advocating on their behalf;
• worked to build popular movements of identity, renewal and
resistance to injustice;
• proclaimed the vision of God’s “Beloved Community” in ways
that got them into trouble with both local and national authorities;
• were widely perceived as operating in the biblical prophetic
tradition by both allies and adversaries;
• animated dramatic public protests resulting in arrest and jail;
• were deemed such a threat to national security that their inner
circles were infiltrated by government informers; and
• in the end, were killed through an official conspiracy because of their work and witness.
These parallels have been oddly absent from longstanding, abstract theological debates as to whether or not Jesus was a “pacifist,” or whether he was politically engaged, and are thus worth exploring. King not only looked to Jesus; if we want to understand this greatest of figures in the history of social change in the U.S., we must look at Jesus.
It strikes me that the converse also applies, however: If we want to understand Jesus, we would do well to look at King. Indeed, the more I study the civil rights movement, the more the gospels come alive. Remembering the challenges that Dr. King faced trying to build a social movement for racial justice in the teeth of the hostile system of American apartheid can help us re-imagine how difficult it must have been for Jesus to proclaim the Kingdom of God in a world dominated by imperial Rome two thousand years ago.
Most Christians, of course, tend to think of Jesus in a highly spiritualized, even romanticized way, ignoring the fact that he lived and died in times that were as contentious and conflicted as our own. The Nazarene’s world was not the fantasy-scape we so often imagine the Bible to inhabit. It was tough terrain, not so unlike that of the U.S. in 1968: a world of racial discrimination and class conflict, of imperial wars abroad and political repression at home, all presided over by a political leadership that (directly or indirectly) engineered the demise of the prophet, then issued stern but pious calls for law and order in the wake of his “tragic death”….
King, of course, drew his strategic inspiration from Gandhi, who used the term Satyagraha to describe his campaigns. It connoted “the force of truth” that was both personal and political, and was militant but not military in its engagement with traditions and structures of oppression. This explains why public figures such as Jesus, Gandhi or King, although eulogized in retrospect as great “peacemakers,” were in fact accused in their own time of being “disturbers of the peace.” The reality of social change is that in order for prevailing conditions of injustice within a system to be changed they must be first articulated. Thus before conflict can be resolved it must first be provoked….
This nonviolent but militant Jesus is, of course, a far cry from the stained glass window Christ we encounter in our churches. Interestingly, the same could be said of Martin King. His legacy has been widely domesticated today in the U.S., with a national holiday and countless streets and schools named after him. King is routinely portrayed in official prayer breakfasts as a lovable, harmless icon of peace and tolerance, his message typically reduced to a vague and sentimental sound-byte—”I have a dream.” But the historic King, like the historic Jesus, was prophetic in every sense of the word. His oratory was often polarizing, and his campaigns of civil disobedience upsetting to the status quo.
Like Jesus, King was deeply impacted by the plight of the poor he encountered in his advocacy work. This caused him to move from a strictly civil rights agenda to a deeper questioning of war and poverty. We see this most clearly in his famous “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” speech, delivered to a gathering of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about the War in Vietnam on April 4, 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York. By then a famous civil rights leader, having already been awarded the Nobel prize for his work, King here publicly articulated his opposition to the Vietnam War for the first time, against the advice of his closest circle. His incisive analysis of the “giant triplets” that plague American life and politics—racism, militarism and poverty—continues to be relevant to this day. At the time, however, government authorities—most notably the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover—were furious that King had joined his considerable moral authority to the anti-war movement. It is not surprising, then, that exactly one year later almost to the hour, King was gunned down in Memphis….
At the end of their lives, Jesus and King were each hemmed in by all the factions of their respective political terrains. They had to navigate death threats from without, dissent from within their own movements, and had as colleagues only a relatively tiny group of feckless companions. But that is how it always is struggling for the Kingdom of God in a world held hostage by tyrants, terrorists, militarists, and kingpins, unaided by ambivalent religious leaders and insular academics and utterly distracted young folks. Despite all this, however, both Jesus and King chose nonviolent love without compromising their insistence upon justice. They believed that the movement for God’s Beloved Community was worth giving their lives to—and they invite us to do the same.
I want to be clear that I am not contending that Jesus was “just” a nonviolent martyr, nor that Martin King is the resurrected Savior of the world! There is more to the N.T. story than what I have focused on here, and King was a disciple, not the Master. I am simply arguing that there are significant aspects of Jesus’ ministry as portrayed in the gospels that can only coherently be understood through the lens of the kind of nonviolent activism embodied by e.g. King and Gandhi—aspects that are forever overlooked by theologians and churchgoers.
This piece is an excerpt of an essay called “Was Jesus a Practitioner of Nonviolence?” published in TransMission (U.K.), 2005.
Live simply. Love generously.
Care deeply. Speak kindly.
Leave the rest to God.
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