The Roots that Clutch. Thomas Esposito

reading by all people, regardless of color, if we hope to overcome this latest manifestation of racial hatred. What I admire most about this letter is how calmly you set forth your argument. They are words of peace, but written with a sword for a pen. You do not sugarcoat any of the injustices you experienced in the hope of placating “prudent” men who urged you to passivity, and you certainly attack the reluctance of white church leaders to associate themselves with your efforts. The Christian gospel, given to all nations, is by nature blind to color. But habit and hatred, however subtle, are hard to overcome, especially when racism is sanctioned by apparently religious sentiments. There are, I’m afraid, still white congregational leaders today much like the ones you lament in your letter, ministers who are “more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.”35

      That sentence reveals the bold eloquence of a preacher, but the letter as a whole reflects a profoundly learned mind reaching back to the great thinkers of the past for inspiration in the present. Allusions and precise quotations form the backbone of the letter, and the people you enlist for your argument are mighty indeed: Socrates, Gandhi, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Martin Buber, and T. S. Eliot among them. As I read your letter, I wondered whether any political or religious leader today would be capable of marshalling the support of classical authors in defense of a righteous cause, such as overcoming racism. Our preferred means of national dialogue today seems to be a rapid-fire chorus of visceral reactions punctuated by screams and bilious rants on social media. They are a far cry from the reasoned and thoroughly considered letter-writing and speech-making which made your protests so successful. I would hope that the leaders of groups such as Black Lives Matter would return to you constantly to drink at the fountain of your wisdom and foresight, and that all African-Americans, who understandably feel threatened when they see such brutal videos, would continue to be inspired by your peaceful ways of resistance.

      Just days after the shootings in Dallas, I stood at the podium of my church to proclaim the gospel and deliver a homily. The reading assigned for that Sunday was the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). I would like to share that homily with you, Dr. King, because you were the primary inspiration behind it. In fact, the first quarter of my homily is a shameless copy and paste of an unforgettable speech of yours, though I withheld your name until I finished reading the quote for dramatic effect! My goal was to encourage an examination of conscience in my hearers through the characters of the parable, and to get my congregation to ask themselves what they could do to heal the wounds caused by the recent violence. What it lacks in rousing eloquence, I hope it makes up for in honest appeal to a properly formed conscience.

      July 10, 2016

      Cistercian Abbey Church

      “‘We use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn’t stop. At times we say they were busy going to a church meeting, an ecclesiastical gathering, and they had to [hurry along] so they wouldn’t be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that [a priest or a Levite] engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony. And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jericho to organize a Jericho Road Improvement Association. That’s a possibility. Maybe they felt it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect.

      ‘But I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road . . . In the days of Jesus, it came to be known as the “Bloody Pass.” And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking, and he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked, [and] the first question that the Levite asked, was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”

      ‘But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” . . . Jesus ended up saying this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “Thou,” and to be concerned about his brother.’36

      “Those words I just read, dear friends in Christ, are not my own; they came from the mouth of another pastor: Martin Luther King Jr. He offered this meditation on the Good Samaritan parable near the end of his ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ speech in 1968, delivered just one day before his tragic death at the hands of a mad assassin. The Church’s liturgical calendar invites us to ponder this unforgettable parable this weekend, and I felt compelled to share Dr. King’s words with you today, just days removed from the murders of innocent police officers a few miles from here.

      “We have referred to our police officers, those slain on Thursday and those still among us, as heroes, as Good Samaritans, and rightly so. But the gospel parable requires us to examine why they imitate the Samaritan who had mercy on the fallen man, and how they fulfill the command of our Lord, directed at all of us, to ‘Go and do likewise.’

      “Jesus intended to shock his first century listeners with this parable. The Samaritans were distant relatives of the Jews, and both groups hated each other with the irrational wrath reserved only for the closest of human bonds. Saint Luke gives us an example of this revulsion at the parable’s end: the lawyer cannot even bring himself to say the word ‘Samaritan’ when he admits that only the man from that despised group was merciful to the lawyer’s fellow Jew agonizing on the side of the road. A present-day portrayal of the parable might feature a Palestinian coming to the aid of an Israeli, or an illegal immigrant from Mexico caring for a certain presidential candidate.

      “Luke does not provide us with the Samaritan’s motive for doing what he did, nor does he record the reactions of others listening to Jesus speak this parable. But the love clearly animating his actions is reflected in the question Dr. King puts in the mind of the Samaritan: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’ This man did not see race when he tended the enemy of his people lying half-dead on the roadside. He did not hesitate to sacrifice his time, his food, his drink, and his money to restore a fellow human being to life. He overcame the fear that sent the priest and the Levite scurrying to the other side of the highway, and he conquered the anger that must have tempted his heart as he approached the victim, the odious enemy of his people.

      “That same heroic charity animates the hearts of the vast majority of our police officers. In carrying out their work, they reveal their willingness to sacrifice their lives, a willingness shared by Jesus when he took on human flesh to heal our wounds. (Let us also keep in mind that Jesus is at once the Good Samaritan and the victim of the robbers in the parable: he vivifies us as the divine physician, and suffers in our place upon the cross.) Only an unselfish heart can make a sacrifice of this sort. In such a heart as that which belonged to Jesus, the Good Samaritan, and the slain officers, there is no room for fear or anger, because perfect love, as we read in the First Letter of John, casts out all fear, and channels anger to constructive, not destructive, ends.

      “Dear friends in Christ, we all too frequently take the role of the priest and Levite in the parable, worrying about what will happen to us. We are too afraid to inconvenience ourselves, too angry to reflect peacefully, too devoted to our ignorant prejudices to listen to anyone who formulates a different opinion. A dangerous blend of fear and anger, two terrible spiritual cancers, is dominating our public discourse at present. Propagating fear in our community is nothing more than cowardly crossing to the other side of the road. To foment anger in the form of smugly self-righteous rants on Facebook, or to wait for someone else to enact a constructive solution, is to avoid the wounded heap of humanity placed in our path when it is our duty to give a reason to hope and a worthy cause to live for.