He opens his bible. A special bible given to him by his mother on the day he got his doctorate. “Doctor Martin Luther King Jr” In the background he hears Coretta in the background putting the children to bed as he opens his bible to John chapter 20 verses 1 to 18 and begins to prepare his sermon for Easter Sunday. he’s ahead of himself, but it’s good to be prepared because there’s some big political speeches to do in the mean time
He likes Easter Sunday. They flock to hear him anyway - he is Martin Luther King and everyone wants to hear him… but on Easter people flock because it’s Easter and they want to hear about Jesus. They want to hear that “the ultimate destiny of man [is not}]a rendezvous with the dust” “The spint of man [is not]extinguished at death like a candle guttered by a passing wind” “That is the meaning of Easter. That is the question that Easter answers-that death is not the end!” (1)
He picks up his bible and reads “on the first day of the week, while it was still dark”
“while it was still dark”
It has been years now, the struggle for freedom, and sometimes it still feels so dark. He has been preaching love, and still they send out state troopers to beat innocent protesters, to beat them black and blue just because they ask for a land where black and white children go to school together, where anyone can sit on any bus seat and where no one is deprived of the vote because of the colour of their skin. So much is dark...Why did children get murdered, like those four little girls addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, killed in Sunday school in their baptist church when Klu Klux Klan members bombed. And yet like Mary Magdalene encountering the rolled away stone, he sees hints of something better come
“When it was still dark”
“Where in your life does it feel dark? Where does it feel as if injustice and evil are triumphing? Where do you feel squashed and dead?”
“The stone rolled away” - he thinks of prison guards surprised by the way he treats them as human beings, surprised by the way he asks after their families, surprised by the way he treats them like Mary was surprised by the stone, and Martin Luther king is surprised to, although he knows this is the way it should be, to see some of them begin to change. Surely this is a stone rolled away, a hint of Easter to come!
That’s what he’ll say that Sunday -
Where do you see the stone rolled away? Where do you see in your life the hint the hint of Easter coming? Where in the darkness to you see Sunday breaking through?
“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb”
He thinks of Mary Magdalene
A woman. Jewish and Roman societies were as prejudiced against women as the Southern whites were against blacks. In a court case you needed two women’s evidence to be worth just one man’s. Like the laws that said every person was free to vote … once they had passed through a series of hoops that was easy for the white woman or man, but no negroe man or woman could ever pass.That battle had been won in 65 in part because of the many women who had joined the struggle.
He thought back particularly to Rosa Parks, the woman whose refusal to give up a seat had led to the Montgomery bus boycotts, that after 385 long days had led to the ruling that segregation of buses was illegal. " the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice"
Yes, that’s what he could preach on on Sunday, Rosa Parks as a modern day Mary Magdalene, the first to bear witness to the new order breaking into the world. Are you the next Mary Magdalene? and all the sisters would scream “Amen”
that was the message for the pulpit, thought Martin guiltily. Because he knew that Mary Magdalene was shocking not just because she was a woman. And he knew, what not many other people knew, that Rosa Parks was not the first woman to refuse to give up her seat. That nine months earlier, Claudette Colvin had also refused to give up her seat, but she was 15 pregnant and unmarried. It wasn’t “expedient” to use her as an example. Wait for someone else respectable, wait for a Rosa Parks, that’s what we did thought Martin guiltily, but Jesus didn’t wait for someone respectable, he took Mary Magdalene
Martin turned back to the bible
“Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first”
“the other disciple, the disciple who Jesus loved” - the youngster among the twelve. No wonder he could outrun thirty year old Peter. He was Young
martin thought back to his own youth
he remembered his father Revd Martin Luther King Sr - preaching away, and how as a teenager he hated it. He remembered as a 13 year old standing up in Sunday School and saying the resurrection was a load of tosh. He was precocious at 13. He could quote all the philosophers to say why he denied the resurrection. He could still quote the philosophers today. But over the 5 years that had followed that outburst, something had grabbed him. The truth had grabbed him. Jesus had risen from the dead. Nothing else could explain the explosion of Christianity across the world, Nothing could explain it, except a love that could not be defeated by death. "an inner urge to serve humanity" had grabbed him, he had made peace with the church, and gone forward to seminary
He wonders about the youngsters in Ebenezer baptist church on Easter Day. Those teenagers - are they even listening when he preaches. Are they like him as a 13 old rejecting the whole package, or they like him as an 18 year old realising that this truth is one that he Martin Luther kIng Jr cannot live without, “profound truths that one cannot escape”
Then there’s Peter - Peter who denied Jesus. Why is that he does not rush so fast to the tomb? Is it because he is still so torn up inside. King knows what he will say on that Sunday.
“Who are we the Peter to? Who are you the Peter to? Who is your relationship broken with, like Peter’s was broken with Jesus? Is it like Peter broken by death, things you wished you had said before they went, but it is too late. Or so Peter thinks when he comes to the grave. But it isn’t Good Friday no more, Easter’s come!”
and there will be Amens and Yeah’s and they’ll love it…
… But really Martin is preaching to himself.
He thinks of those he has disagreed with, so often separated by the assassin’s bullet.
He thinks of Malcolm X … how that man frustrated him, undermining all that he, Martin Luther King was trying to achieve with nonviolence. Undermining the whole freedom struggle, ahh … if he didn’t believe in non-violence he could have hit Malcolm himself, and then an Assassins bullet cuts down Malcolm X… of course he wrote a letter to the widow, Martin tried to make things better but like Peter with Jesus, it seems death has cheated them of any chance of reconciliation… or has it? He looks again at this passage, and has to hold on to this truth that death is NOT the end!
Peter and the beloved disciple depart.
“But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb”. “weeping outside the tomb”. There have been so many people who died. He thinks of Revd George Lee, murdered back, back in 1955. The white officials had promised to protect him. All he had to do was stop - stop campaigning for voter registration. But he didn’t stop, and they didn’t protect him, and the assassin's bullet came.Medgar Evers, who directed NAACP operations in Mississipi, June 12 1963, shot and killed by a sniper in his own home. Rev. James Reeb, a white minister who joined the Selma marches, killed by Klansmen as he walked back through the streets of Selma.
So many others - Lamar Smith
Willie Edwards Jr
Herbert Lee
Cpl. Roman Ducksworth Jr
Virgil Lamar Ware
Louis Allen
Johnnie Mae Chappell
Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore
Oneal Moore
Samuel Leamon Younge Jr.
Back in 1957, before he’d really joined the struggle, Martin had preached on Easter then.
What was it he preached, he has it somewhere in his notes, ah yes, here it is!
“And there is something deep down within our souls that revolts against saying goodbye forever We begin to ask, Is the ultimate destiny of man a rendezvous with the dust2 Is the spirit of man extinguished at death like a candle guttered by a passing wind? We begin to wonder if death is a state of nothingness that leads us finally to a meaningless existence wth no reality Then comes Easter to answer the question Easter comes out nothing in terms that we all hear if we seek to hear it, that the soul of man is immortal Through the resurrection of Jesus Chnst we have fit testimony that this earthly life is not the end, that death is just something of a turn in the road, that life moves down a continual moving river, and that death is just a little turn in the nver, that this earthly life is merely an embryonic prelude to a new awakening, that death is not a [full stop] which ends this great sentence of life but a comma that punctuates it to more loftier significance That IS what it says That is the meaning of Easter That is the question that Easter answers-that death is not the end” (1)
For most of the congregation that is the question they want to hear answered. They may not have lost anyone in the struggle for civil rights. But everyone has lost someone, everyone knows grief - and they all need to hear those words
This “is the meaning of Easter [this] is the question that Easter answers-that death is not the end”
And then Mary sees this man sees this man who she thinks is the gardener.
Bleary eyed Mary mistakes Jesus for a gardener.
He can say that on Sunday
“When have you not seen Jesus at work? When have you had Jesus standing right in front of you … and you haven’t noticed him there”
That’s a question that can be asked to any congregation
“When have you had Jesus standing right in front of you … and you haven’t noticed him there”
But Martin knows he is preaching to himself
When he first got involved in the civil rights movement, he was all ready for taking up violence to seize back the Negro man’s rights. Because he couldn’t see what Jesus was saying
It took a Non-Christian Mohendra Gandhi to point him back to what Jesus was saying. It took an encounter with Gandhi's teaching to point him to the sermon on the Mount and to lead him to embrace the path of non-violence. Oh yes, he Martin Luther King, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, yet it was Ghandhi he felt who really deserved that for pointing him back to Matthew chapter 6 and the sermon on the Mount.
he thinks of Mary Magdalene. It’s her, the woman of ill repute, that Jesus chose to appear to. Of course he knows what the bible commentators say - how we can’t seriously link Mary Magdalene with the prostitute who washed Jesus’s feet. But that’s the reputation she has, and whether or not she was that woman, something in Martin hopes that if she had been Jesus would have picked her.
Because in his heart, Martin feels ashamed, he knows the other women he has gone with, the ways he has let down and betrayed Corretta. To the people in the congregation, he is perfect. He is the great leader. Doctor King … Martin Luther King Jr … nobel prize winner … almost a messiah. They look up at him in adulation, and in this story where do they put him? They put him as Jesus. But he knows he is no Jesus. He is Mary Magdalene. He is John. He is Peter.
he has to cling to that fact that out of the tomb comes forth…. forgiveness.
“precious Lord” he sings to himself
“Precious Lord, take my hand
Lead me on,
Let me stand
I'm tired, I am weak I am worn
Through the storm, through the night
Lead me on through the light
Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home”(2)
The Tomb.
Makes him think about death. Everytime they come to a new place. Atlanta, Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham Alabama,Selma, Washington … he and his friends will say to one another “It’s as good a place as any to die” Gallows humour. It deflects the tension. But like Jesus telling his disicples that “the son of man must be handed over to the gentiles, and be mocked and insulted and insulted and spat on. And after they had flogged him they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise again” (Luke 18:31-32) - Martin knows that it is only a matter of time. Now its still the end of March. can he even make it to the end of 1968? Can he even make it until Easter Day 1968?
Yet this he knows...
“I still believe that love is the most durable power in the world “
“Over the centuries men have sought to discover the highest good. This has been the chief quest of ethical philosophy. This was one of the big questions of Greek philosophy. The Epicureans and the Stoics sought to answer it; Plato and Aristotle sought to answer it; What is the summum bonum of life? I think I have discovered the highest good. It IS love. This principle stands at the center of the cosmos. As John says, “God is love ’” (3)
A few days before Easter on April the 3rd he’ll be giving his Mountain top speech
“We've got some difficult days ahead. But it 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”(4)
And so Martin know, even if he never gives this sermon he is writing tonight,even if he doesn’t make it to Holy Week, even if an assassin's bullet strikes him down, yet still he knows … EASTER IS COMING.”
Alleluia Christ is risen
he is risen indeed Alleluia
(1) quoted from “The Questions that Easter answers” http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol6/21Apr1957QuestionsThatEasterAnswers,SermonDeliveredatDexterAvenueBaptistChurch.pdf
(2) A quote from his favourite hymn sung at his funeral
(3) quoted from "The most durable power" [peached 6 nov 1956 http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol6/5June1957TheMostDurablePower.pdf ]
(4) quoted from The Mountain top speech preached on April 3rd, the day before he was shot http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm
thank you also to many wikipedia articles including http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.
