Martin’s balcony, Jesus of Nazareth’s cross, and the cherry blossom festival
Photograph by Maud Bocquillod via Unsplash
Joseph Evans
His widow [Coretta Scott King] in her queenly manner said but within the last few days that it will be fifty years before the full assessment of the life of Martin King can begin to be made in this country, and it will be made.[i]
On April 4, 2026, many citizens mourned the death of Martin Luther King Jr. On Easter Sunday, Christians around the world will contemplate the mysterious resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. It is my hope that Martin’s tragic demise remains on the minds of congregants throughout Easter worship services. I expect preachers will use this weekend to emphasize that resurrection is promised to disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. Resurrection requires a process of transformation. Oh, the resurrection from the dead! It remains a mystery.
Martin’s Balcony
I think of Martin’s balcony as a stage that captures Martin’s Shakespearean-like life. Wyatt Tee Walker was an eyewitness. Walker was not only the architect of many of the Civil Rights movement’s strategies and tactics, but he was also a close confident and friend of Martin.[ii] In addition to Walker being a prophetic preacher, he was a prolific author. Walker intended to write a book about the intersection between his and Martin’s life. The book was to be called “The King of Love.” It was never finished.
Walker shared, “I think part of it was the awe that I maintained for Dr. King, that I didn’t feel I was ready. I still think I need to write about him sometime because I was very close to him, and I had many, many, many conversations with him.” However, Walker did finish a draft that includes a prologue which opens a window into his and Martin’s personalities, identities, and convictions:
[Walker’s connection with Martin] Both of us are legitimate heirs of the African American free church [I have reframed this as the Du Boisian Prophetic tradition]: both of us are sons of preachers; our God-given intellects were honed by the discipline of completing earned doctorates; our nonviolent credo was fashioned in the classrooms of the academy but also in the trenches of the Egypt-land of the Deep South; both of us have created a credible body of published works; and the center of our being is a personal commitment to Jesus Christ as Savior and Liberator. The uniqueness of these similarities provide an opportunity that so far as I know has not yet been seized by any of our contemporaries of our common struggle.[iii]
Their relationship is a quintessential human story. Walker chose to humanize Martin by lionizing himself. Unlike Walker, Martin’s ego was more subtle and nuanced about his social inheritance and intellectual capacities. At a close reading, reviewers will hear Martin’s ego surface time and again. Nevertheless, Martin did have intellectual peers and Walker was among them.
Like Martin, Walker was an organic genius. Unlike Martin, Walker neither believed it necessary to hide his ego nor did he feel it was appropriate to do so. Walker spoke straightforwardly about his family’s pedigree and his unique intellectual gifts. In 1950, Walker graduated from Virginia Union University with a BA degree in Physics and Chemistry. Walker characterizes his relationship with Martin as one of mutual love, respect, and intellectual competitiveness. When their relationship is considered in this way, it reveals that transformation begins with seeds that are planted into human soil, which lay at the root of their kinship. Nevertheless, those seeds must die to form new life – a transformation process.
Just as seeds must die to form new life, resurrection requires a process of transformation.
Another of Martin’s confidants and friends was Andrew Young, who was an eyewitness of what occurred on Martin’s balcony. He recalls that the murderer’s bullet sounded like a car exhaust system that had backfired. Despite desperate efforts to save his life, on April 4, 1968, Martin’s transformation process began:
As soon as I reached Martin I could see he had been shot. A bullet had literally exploded into the right side of his chin. His chin bone had been ripped away as though severed by knife. He was bleeding profusely; there was a huge pool of blood underneath his head. All this took place within the space of no more than half a minute.[iv]
Martin’s death exposed the fear of many Americans to forge a collective democratic future that decenters and deconstructs the privileges and mythologies of whiteness that delay full citizenship of other people. whiteness is anachronistic and belongs to the past. Was it whiteness that demanded Martin’s death on his balcony?
Martin died a premature death because he understood that democracy cannot mature unless racism is eradicated and poverty abolished. Martin’s resistance lifted the metaphoric veil that cloaks the existential threat of predatory capitalism. The Poor People’s Campaign then was a strategic and tactical campaign designed to focus our national attention on income and wealth disparities and unfair labor wages; especially those experienced by sociomarginalized minority groups. Addressing Harvard University’s Class of 1968 mere months after her husband’s assassination, Coretta Scott King shared:
The Poor People’s Campaign in Washington was conceived by my late husband and the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as America’s last hope to deal with the twin problems of racism and poverty. The poor in this nation are entitled to a job or an income.
Martin’s seeds demand full employment and guaranteed income. These policy decisions remain necessary to eradicate racism and abolish poverty. He wrote, “We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty. The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must create full employment or we must create [guaranteed] incomes.”[v] Cornel West observes that Martin was “a democratic socialist who sided with poor and working people in the class struggle taking place in capitalist societies [in America and across the world]…This class struggle may be invisible, manifest or latent. But it rages in a fight over resources, power and space.”[vi]
Martin died a dissenter against predatory capitalism, which maintains an ignorant racist who suffers the most from economic poverty. “The trigger for white rage, is inevitably black advancement,” writes Carol Anderson.[vii] Thus, racism and poverty are employed to maintain the lowest rung of the American caste system.
In thirty seconds on Martin’s balcony, his life ended in a pool of blood, his chin bone ripped away. This was an organized effort to stop Martin. It was also intended to distract and deter formation of coalitions. Democratic organizations that coalesce around economic justice, equality, and equity threaten predatory capitalists. Indeed, the historical Martin envisions democratic socialism, decenters racism, and deconstructs poverty. I, alongside others, see Martin’s balcony as a clear rhetorical link to the idea, hope, and reality of Jesus of Nazareth’s cross.
Jesus of Nazareth’s Cross
Jesus of Nazareth’s cross uncovers evil’s agency, access, and proximity to humanity. Evil seeks humanity’s humiliation and subtle ways to manipulate, exploit, and dominate human nature. Human humiliation causes collective and self-hatred. Evil is not darkness. Evil is pale, anemic squeamishness, nothingness, and hopelessness, as West writes:
Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophical doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards of authority; it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness. The frightening result is a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world. Life without meaning, hope and love breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook that destroys both the individual and others.[viii]
Nihilism is located at the center of our current sociopolitical and economic dilemmas. Further, nihilism lacks moral and ethical absolutes and boundaries. “The moment that nihilism outlines the world for us, its counterpart, science, creates the tools to dominate it…. Nihilism becomes the possibility of science – which means that the human world can be destroyed by it.”[ix] Nihilism neither offers hope nor recognizes resurrection. For the Christian, nihilism can be defeated, but only by and through Jesus of Nazareth’s cross.
Through Jesus of Nazareth’s cross, the apostle Paul takes aim at nihilism. He seeks to explain; the antidote to human death is the Lord’s bodily death and resurrection. “But God gives it a body [resurrection is within the body of the seed] as he has chosen and to each kind of seed its own body. Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for humans…So it is with the resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:38-39, 42). The process of death often entails anxiety and unbearable pain. I think of death as violence. The execution of Jesus reveals that his death was intentionally brutal and violent.
The transformation process that produces the resurrection of new life cannot be cancelled. It defies death and defeats nihilism.
Alongside the sanctioned violence of Roman officials, the Pharisees’ and scribes’ actions are like a mirror that reflects humanity’s lust for power. Too rarely, that same mirror reflects dysfunctional human behaviors that should be recognized as fetishized, sadistic violence. When Jesus of Nazareth’s and Martin’s lives intersect between a balcony and a cross, we intuitively sense hope beyond sin and the grave. We see Martin’s facial disfigurement, caused by an assassin’s bullet. We see Jesus’s bludgeoned and disfigured face, his thorny crown, his wounded hands, his side, and his feet (Isaiah 52:13-15; 53:5; Matthew 27:29; John 19:34). Finally, we turn toward the Cherry Blossom festival.
The Cherry Blossom Festival
“So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power” (1 Corinthians 15:42-43).
April 2, 1968, was a windy day; Washington DC’s Cherry Blossom Festival began with lighting the historic Japanese stone lantern at the tidal basin. The cherry blossoms that year were predominately white with a smaller hint of pink. Each spring, for a brief moment, the blossoms’ reflection paint the top of the Potomac River alongside a similar reflection and image of the Jefferson Memorial. It is a breathtaking sight and not easily dismissed or forgotten.
However, the historic festival was cancelled on April 4, that same day Martin’s transformation process began. Martin’s seeds would die and be converted into a new form of life. The festival’s organizers responded to his death with reverence and fear. Like Jesus of Nazareth’s cross, Martin’s balcony death surfaces nihilism. Death represents agony, pain, suffering, meaninglessness, and hopelessness.
Jesus of Nazareth’s cross reminds me that hopelessness and meaninglessness would rise between the sixth and ninth hour. However, the transformation process defies death and defeats nihilism. In this way, Martin’s balcony intersects with Jesus of Nazareth’s cross. The 1968 Cherry Blossom Festival was cancelled. Martin’s life was prematurely cancelled and the same can be said about the life of our Lord Jesus of Nazareth. Nevertheless, neither the balcony nor the cross could cancel the transformation process that leads to new life. The 1968 Cherry Blossom Festival was cancelled. Still, cherry blossom trees bloomed. The transformation process that produces the resurrection of new life cannot be cancelled.
Joseph Evans is professor of Theology in the Public Square and director, Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Restorative Justice at Berkeley School of Theology. He is also the author of The Polished King: Living Words of Martin Luther King Jr. (Judson Press, 2022).
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[i] Gardner C. Taylor, “The Strange Ways of God” in The Words of Gardner C. Taylor: Special Occasion and Expository Sermons Vol.4. (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 2001), 100.
[ii] Joseph Evans, Reconciliation and Reparation: Preaching Economic Justice (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 2018), 35.
[iii] Joseph Evans, Reconciliation and Reparation, 36-37. See Walker, “Prologue,” King of Love, 10.
[iv] Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 465.
[v]A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King. ed. James M. Washington (New York: Harper One, 1986), 247.
[vi] Cornel West, The Radical King: Martin Luther King, Jr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), xiii.
[vii] Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 3-4.
[viii] Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 22-23.
[ix] Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Civitas Books, 1999), 209.
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