An American Holy Week

The Way is Dangerous

55 years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a balcony in Memphis. This year, the anniversary falls on Tuesday of Holy Week. This is significant. Because King was murdered while confronting many of the problems which seemed to occupy Jesus the Tuesday before his Crucifixion. What was Jesus doing on Tuesday?

Render to Caesar: Then and Now

Jesus spent the Tuesday before his crucifixion teaching in the Temple. His authority was challenged. And He wasn’t just teaching “spiritual lessons” about going to heaven. His teaching of sin, of judgment, of righteousness, of salvation, confronted his contemporaries in the world they inhabited, not just the one to come. Jesus showed how the Kingdom of God’s rule disrupted sinful systems of political and economic domination, implicated those who benefited from (or clung to) them, and liberated those who lived under them.¹

During these Temple encounters with authorities, Jesus faced loaded questions. One was should Jews pay the tribute to Caesar? It was a trap. If Jesus said “yes” he’d be seen as “pro-Rome” and risked losing the crowd that shouted ‘hosanna’ just two days before. If he said “no”, then his opponents would surely try to have him arrested for teaching that bordered on insurgency.

Jesus’ response sprung its own counter-trap. Jesus asked for a coin. His challengers produced a Roman coin. “Whose image is on it?” asked Jesus. “Caesar’s” they replied. In The Last Week, scholars Borg and Kinamen point out that during the time of Jesus, many Jewish people opted to carry Jewish currency and avoided Roman currency since it had a sacrilegious depiction of Caesar with his title “son of the God.” They note that the simple fact Jesus’ interlocutors had a Roman coin on their person discredited their line of questioning, exposing them as benefactors of Roman oppression and Jewish exploitation.

Jesus’ next words are famous: “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God, the things that are God’s.” This isn’t a way out of a rhetorical trap. Nor is it a political theory for separation of church & state. It’s a profound political challenge to the claims of Caesar in theological speech. Jesus is surfacing the question of what really belongs to Caesar in the first place.

He’s not carving out boundaries between two kingdoms. He’s suggesting the expansive and determinative rule of God over the powers and principalities.

This is power of the Kingdom. It’s a power Jesus embodied in his faithful death, and victorious resurrection. This Cross threatens the reign of Caesar and is good news to those who dwell in his shadow. Today of all days is a potent reminder of the danger that lines the way for those who seek this Kingdom.

The Three Evils of America: Racism, Poverty, War

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. surfaced some of the deepest contradictions of American life. In his “The Three Evils” speech, he famous described what he saw as three contradictions:

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism.

On race, he said:

Ever since the birth of our nation, White America has had a Schizophrenic personality on the question of race, she has been torn between selves. A self in which she proudly professes the great principle of democracy and a self in which she madly practices the antithesis of democracy.

On poverty:

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people the giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.

On war:

when scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.

In the late 60’s, King was expanding his vision for what God demanded from America if justice was—in the words of Amos— “to roll like waters.” This expanding vision was possible only with an imagination fueled by the Kingdom that Jesus boldly proclaimed and secured.

The Danger of Seeking the Kingdom

The evening before his assassination in 1968, King shared these words as part of his speech “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop” with a local church:

It's all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee.

So many of Jesus' actions during Holy Week were meant to stir up his own people to the ways they had ignored justice, had forsook faithfulness, and had failed to recognize the kingdom "in their midst" -- which was Jesus' own body broken for them.

Jesus came to Jerusalem like the prophets of old. Calling it to seek justice, to refuse to “hide” in the temple, to mask injustice with piety. In a week, Jesus would be crucified, His faithfulness confirmed by the resurrecting power of God.

But less than 24 hours later from saying those words, King was dead. Struck down not just by a bullet, but also by the court of public opinion. A poll in 1966, two years before King's death, found 63% of Americans were disapproving of King.² White evangelicals particularly.

Tim Lahaye (who later wrote the Left Behind books) was a pastor at the time. He spoke for many white evangelicals who saw King as divisive, unAmerican, and a heretic. He wrote the following in a letter of protest sent to Wheaton College on 23 May 1968. Wheaton had hosted a tribute to King after his passing. Lahaye fumed:

Recently this report came into my hands and I find it very difficult to believe. It seems incredible that a Christian college could participate in honoring an outright theological liberal heretic whose “non-violent” demonstrations have resulted in the deaths of seventeen people.³

King was just getting started when he was struck down. But the imagination which fueled him can be found by seeing with fresh eyes the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Holy Troublemakers

Danger lines the way to the kingdom of God. MLK’s assassination on the Tuesday of Holy Week is the right time to recognize this afresh.

For one, it means realizing what this danger is and what it isn’t. The danger that lines the way to the Kingdom isn’t the paranoid persecution fantasies of Whiteness. Don’t mistake the collapse of White Christendom for the end of Christianity.

No, danger lines the way for all who live within the horizons determined by the New Creation, not western civilization.

These horizons have a way of instilling in us a disruptive imagination which sees the love of God and seeks that love—materially, physically, spiritually—for another.

Only by faithfully embracing this danger on the way can we truly and faithfully receive Jesus’ own words to us: “as they persecuted me, so will they persecute you.” This is the way to the Kingdom. As Jacques Ellul observes:

Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.

1. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-last-week-marcus-j-borgjohn-dominic-crossan?variant=32205677133858

2. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/16/politics/martin-luther-king-jr-polling-analysis/index.html

3. https://colorblindchristians.com/2017/01/02/document-of-the-week-lahaye/

The image of this piece is an artistic combination of the work of the Flemish painter, Peter Paul Rubens, who depicts Jesus’ encounter with the authorities, and an image taken of MLK Jr.’s assassination.