Woe to you lawyers

“Woe to you [lawyers], because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your forefathers who killed them.  So you testify that you approve of what your forefathers did; they killed the prophets, and you build their tombs.”  –Luke 11:47-48

I found myself recalling this perplexing and troubling statement last week when, in the course of driving my 15-year old son to a soccer tournament in Tulsa, we pulled off I-55 to take a quick peek at the National Civil Rights Museum.  The museum preserves the façade of the old Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King’s assassination took place in April 1968.   The front of the museum preserves not only the site of the assassination, but the scene made famous by this photograph:

Here are a couple of pictures of the museum. Note the replicas of the cars parked as they were on the morning of Dr. King’s assassination. The wreath marks the place where Dr. King fell.

The most surprising thing about the site (not adequately captured in these photographs) was how pristine and gleaming it is, especially on a sunny June day.  The hotel sign and the cars, in particular, made me feel as if I were on a studio lot or even in a theme park.  The neighborhood is now gentrified and prosperous; there is a convenient and spacious parking lot to the right of the museum in the picture.  After our quick tour of the crime scene, my son and I enjoyed salmon sandwiches at a little café about two blocks away from the balcony on which Dr. King was brutally murdered.

Jesus’s charge against the lawyers of his day seems to have been that though they wished to be understood (and no doubt understood themselves) as honoring the prophets, their actions in building the tombs were, in fact, an effort “to keep them in their graves whom their fathers had hurried thither” (Matthew Henry)– dead prophets being far less inconvenient than live ones.   In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus goes on to note that the legal experts claimed that had they lived in the days of the prophets, they would not have taken part in the killings.  This claim, he said, merely showed that they were “the descendants of those who murdered the prophets,” presumably because their parents would have said the same thing.

One hopes that the take-home message from memorials like this one is that evil isn’t just done by people wearing white hoods and wielding baseball bats, but also by respectable people, as it were, two blocks away eating salmon sandwiches and that, by the same token, the costly choices of a brave and determined few can matter a lot.

That said, I wonder whether most visitors to the Lorraine Motel are personally challenged by what they see.  They are no doubt grieved to think that such a crime was committed at the very place where they are standing; they may also leave impressed by the bravery and sacrifice of the men and women who stood against injustice; they may be moved with gratitude for what was accomplished.  But my guess is that most visitors who are young enough not to have played a role in the civil rights movement (which is to say most visitors) will also leave with a sense of righteousness– convinced that had they lived in those days, they would have been on the side of justice.

To be sure, the squeaky clean Disneyland setting blunts the reminder that a great man was gunned down in a bloody pool because he sought basic justice for his people and that lots of people were glad to see it happen.  However, the Puritan commentator Matthew Henry takes Jesus’s words to mean that the problem runs deeper than that:

“The deceitfulness of sinners’ hearts [in Henry’s view, this includes everyone] appears very much in this, that, while they go down the stream of the sins of their own day, they fancy they should have swum against the stream of the sins of the former days; that, if they had had other people’s opportunities, they should have improved them more faithfully; if they had been in other people’s temptations, they should have resisted them more vigorously; when yet they improve not the opportunities they have, nor resist the temptations they are in. We are sometimes thinking, if we had lived when Christ was upon earth, how constantly we would have followed him; we would not have despised and rejected him, as they then did; and yet Christ in his Spirit, in his word, in his ministers, is still no better treated.”