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In his book Why We Can't Wait, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. describes one of the most poignant, heart-wrenching scenes anyone can imagine. Listen!
More than twenty-five years ago, one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the human reacted in this novel situation.
The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and the gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words: "Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis ..."
It is heartbreaking enough to ponder the last words of any person dying by force. It is even more poignant to contemplate the words of this boy because they reveal the helplessness, the loneliness and the profound despair of Negroes in that period. The condemned young Negro, groping for someone who might care for him, and had power enough to rescue him, found only the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Joe Louis would care because he was a Negro. Joe Louis could do something because he was a fighter. In a few words the dying man had written a social commentary. Not God, not government, not charitably minded white men, but a Negro who was the world's most expert fighter, in this last extremity, was the last hope. (Pages 119-20, Harper and Row Publishers, 1963)
Our hope and comfort is that God, in the Incarnation, entered into our human scene to willingly participate in and shoulder the burden of our suffering. He identifies with the downtrodden and the unjustly treated. Is that not the meaning of Second Isaiah's suffering servant passage? Is that not what the prophet means when he says the suffering servant (Jesus) will be "cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people"? (53:8) Is that not what the latter day prophet Dr. King did when he went to Memphis, Tennessee, to identify with underpaid garbage collectors -- and paid the ultimate price of his physical life?!
-- Campbell
In his book Why We Can't Wait, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. describes one of the most poignant, heart-wrenching scenes anyone can imagine. Listen!
More than twenty-five years ago, one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the human reacted in this novel situation.
The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and the gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words: "Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis ..."
It is heartbreaking enough to ponder the last words of any person dying by force. It is even more poignant to contemplate the words of this boy because they reveal the helplessness, the loneliness and the profound despair of Negroes in that period. The condemned young Negro, groping for someone who might care for him, and had power enough to rescue him, found only the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Joe Louis would care because he was a Negro. Joe Louis could do something because he was a fighter. In a few words the dying man had written a social commentary. Not God, not government, not charitably minded white men, but a Negro who was the world's most expert fighter, in this last extremity, was the last hope. (Pages 119-20, Harper and Row Publishers, 1963)
Our hope and comfort is that God, in the Incarnation, entered into our human scene to willingly participate in and shoulder the burden of our suffering. He identifies with the downtrodden and the unjustly treated. Is that not the meaning of Second Isaiah's suffering servant passage? Is that not what the prophet means when he says the suffering servant (Jesus) will be "cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people"? (53:8) Is that not what the latter day prophet Dr. King did when he went to Memphis, Tennessee, to identify with underpaid garbage collectors -- and paid the ultimate price of his physical life?!
-- Campbell
