As a teacher I've encountered a lot of attitudes I would never have realized existed if not for the experience. One had to do with Martin Luther King junior.
The class had an assignment to write about someone they considered to be their hero and some students were stumped. They asked me for help and the conversation went something like this.
"Mr. Fontaigne, who was your hero when you were our age?"
I replied with no hesitation.
"Martin Luther King junior."
A couple African American students looked at me like I had just made a rude gesture or told a particularly bad pun.
"But you're white", one of them said.
"And why does that matter?"
"You should have had another hero because he's ours."
Perhaps I was a bit naive at the time this took place but I didn't think most people of any ethnicity or race in the United States thought like that, until then. Black, white, yellow, so what? That was a big part of what King was all about, right? Well guess again.
Living in that area of the United States commonly called "the south" even though it's really the south east I have seen other attitudes that concern me. There seems to be a strong sense amongst some that the south should be forever punished for its past sins and I suspect that if King were alive today he would object to that.
I've been around long enough to already be familiar with the pat response to anyone suggesting what some great person of the past might have to say about today. "You don't know and can't know because your not African American", or whatever the chosen arbitrary group definition may be.
Actually no one can know for sure since no one is him but him, but I believe I can be pretty sure because of something he and I have in common that's a bit more than arbitrary. We're both seminary trained Christians who have studied the same Bible. And while there is a lot of areas of the Bible some have found more meaning in than others, there is one story in the Bible I can be pretty sure we have both studied a lot, Jonah.
The parallels between the story of Jonah and the civil rights movement in the south are plenty and obvious if one just begins to think about it. And I am confident that Martin Luther King junior was a man of thought.
Jonah was asked by God to go tell the people of Nineveh to repent and turn their hearts toward Him, and Jonah didn't want to go. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire and the Assyrians were the most notorious people of their time. They ethnically cleansed all the lands they conquered by torturing the men to death. They didn't just kill them, they impaled them; a gruesome and slow way to die. The impaled bodies would be left on display for the women to see so they could not forget that they were now Assyrian property and less than human. The Assyrians caused so much hate toward themselves that even thousands of years later their descendants -- the Kurds -- are hated by their neighbors.
Now Jonah knew God was prepared to forgive the Assyrians if they would just repent and Jonah's sense of justice was not the same as God's. Thus Jonah tried to run away from God's calling. But as the story states Jonah was ultimately brought to follow God's instructions and the Assyrians did repent and God forgave them.
Jonah was fit to be tied, so to speak and there was no happy ending for him in the book.
The American south's experience with civil rights has great parallels to the story of Jonah, ones I doubt would have been missed by King if he were alive today. Like the Assyrians the American south had been exceptionally cruel and disrespectful to certain groups of people. Though they were not as cruel and disrespectful as the Assyrians it was still a form of the same crime against humanity. And like the Assyrians of Nineveh as described in the Book of Jonah, the people of the south repented. Whatever racism that remains in the south must now hide for the most part because the people of the south have collectively condemned racism.
And it is perhaps no mere coincidence that the south has prospered since the time of its repentance. For over one-hundred years since the end of the civil war the south had largely wallowed in more than an average share of poverty, but starting around the conclusion of the civil rights movement it has been amongst the nation's most rapidly growing economic regions.
God seems to have forgiven the south of its past sins (as such that He deals with groups and regions), but we seem to be infested with modern day Jonahs. They're concept of justice is not the same as God's. He forgives while they still feel the wrongs committed. For them justice will not be achieved until the people wronged are lifted up and others are punished. That's social justice though it's not God's justice and they refuse to accept that they can be different, that their human understanding of justice could possibly not be the same as that of the transcendent God.
Looking back at the Book of Jonah it's interesting and enlightening to note not only what did happen but what didn't happen. When the people of Nineveh repented they didn't do a thing to repay the people they had wronged, and yet God considered this repentance. Like when the corrupt tax collector Zachaeus became a follower of Jesus, it was Zachaeus who volunteered to repay those he had cheated, but Jesus seems to have never asked this of him. God was interested in the individual heart in relation to Him. What each individual did toward others was and is an individual matter. One that flows from a right heart but none the less an individual choice.
Once again the ugliness of social justice reveals itself in attitudes that insist that certain groups of people be punished and never given credit for progress. And that great men like Martin Luther King junior be reserved for a group of people he just happened to be in.
Here's hoping that as we remember Martin Luther King junior that young people of all ethnicities and races will feel free to look up to him, and that part of his legacy can include the eventual death of this evil farce that divides us called "social justice".
The class had an assignment to write about someone they considered to be their hero and some students were stumped. They asked me for help and the conversation went something like this.
"Mr. Fontaigne, who was your hero when you were our age?"
I replied with no hesitation.
"Martin Luther King junior."
A couple African American students looked at me like I had just made a rude gesture or told a particularly bad pun.
"But you're white", one of them said.
"And why does that matter?"
"You should have had another hero because he's ours."
Perhaps I was a bit naive at the time this took place but I didn't think most people of any ethnicity or race in the United States thought like that, until then. Black, white, yellow, so what? That was a big part of what King was all about, right? Well guess again.
Living in that area of the United States commonly called "the south" even though it's really the south east I have seen other attitudes that concern me. There seems to be a strong sense amongst some that the south should be forever punished for its past sins and I suspect that if King were alive today he would object to that.
I've been around long enough to already be familiar with the pat response to anyone suggesting what some great person of the past might have to say about today. "You don't know and can't know because your not African American", or whatever the chosen arbitrary group definition may be.
Actually no one can know for sure since no one is him but him, but I believe I can be pretty sure because of something he and I have in common that's a bit more than arbitrary. We're both seminary trained Christians who have studied the same Bible. And while there is a lot of areas of the Bible some have found more meaning in than others, there is one story in the Bible I can be pretty sure we have both studied a lot, Jonah.
The parallels between the story of Jonah and the civil rights movement in the south are plenty and obvious if one just begins to think about it. And I am confident that Martin Luther King junior was a man of thought.
Jonah was asked by God to go tell the people of Nineveh to repent and turn their hearts toward Him, and Jonah didn't want to go. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire and the Assyrians were the most notorious people of their time. They ethnically cleansed all the lands they conquered by torturing the men to death. They didn't just kill them, they impaled them; a gruesome and slow way to die. The impaled bodies would be left on display for the women to see so they could not forget that they were now Assyrian property and less than human. The Assyrians caused so much hate toward themselves that even thousands of years later their descendants -- the Kurds -- are hated by their neighbors.
Now Jonah knew God was prepared to forgive the Assyrians if they would just repent and Jonah's sense of justice was not the same as God's. Thus Jonah tried to run away from God's calling. But as the story states Jonah was ultimately brought to follow God's instructions and the Assyrians did repent and God forgave them.
Jonah was fit to be tied, so to speak and there was no happy ending for him in the book.
The American south's experience with civil rights has great parallels to the story of Jonah, ones I doubt would have been missed by King if he were alive today. Like the Assyrians the American south had been exceptionally cruel and disrespectful to certain groups of people. Though they were not as cruel and disrespectful as the Assyrians it was still a form of the same crime against humanity. And like the Assyrians of Nineveh as described in the Book of Jonah, the people of the south repented. Whatever racism that remains in the south must now hide for the most part because the people of the south have collectively condemned racism.
And it is perhaps no mere coincidence that the south has prospered since the time of its repentance. For over one-hundred years since the end of the civil war the south had largely wallowed in more than an average share of poverty, but starting around the conclusion of the civil rights movement it has been amongst the nation's most rapidly growing economic regions.
God seems to have forgiven the south of its past sins (as such that He deals with groups and regions), but we seem to be infested with modern day Jonahs. They're concept of justice is not the same as God's. He forgives while they still feel the wrongs committed. For them justice will not be achieved until the people wronged are lifted up and others are punished. That's social justice though it's not God's justice and they refuse to accept that they can be different, that their human understanding of justice could possibly not be the same as that of the transcendent God.
Looking back at the Book of Jonah it's interesting and enlightening to note not only what did happen but what didn't happen. When the people of Nineveh repented they didn't do a thing to repay the people they had wronged, and yet God considered this repentance. Like when the corrupt tax collector Zachaeus became a follower of Jesus, it was Zachaeus who volunteered to repay those he had cheated, but Jesus seems to have never asked this of him. God was interested in the individual heart in relation to Him. What each individual did toward others was and is an individual matter. One that flows from a right heart but none the less an individual choice.
Once again the ugliness of social justice reveals itself in attitudes that insist that certain groups of people be punished and never given credit for progress. And that great men like Martin Luther King junior be reserved for a group of people he just happened to be in.
Here's hoping that as we remember Martin Luther King junior that young people of all ethnicities and races will feel free to look up to him, and that part of his legacy can include the eventual death of this evil farce that divides us called "social justice".
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