Jesus said to his disciples: “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing! There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished! Do you think I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.” (Luke 12.49-51)
In the early 1960s, a group of young activists, many college students, decided to ride Greyhound and Trailways buses into the South where segregation was still enforced, although the Supreme Court had already ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. Ignoring the Court’s rulings, governors and law officials and citizens in the South refused to enforce the law, preferring to keep in force the Jim Crow laws that had required segregation since the end of Reconstruction in 1877.
Dubbed “the Freedom Riders,” these young people wanted to challenge the status quo and the local laws that enforced segregation. The first Freedom Ride began on May 4, 1961, with thirteen young riders, seven black and six white making up the group. They left Washington, D.C., their plan to ride through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, ending in New Orleans.
Their plan was to have one interracial pair sitting in adjoining seats and at least one black rider sitting up front where seats were reserved for white customers by local custom throughout the South. Other volunteers came from 39 states, representing different economic classes and racial backgrounds. The first attack came in South Carolina, where John Lewis—later a representative in the House–was attacked.
Arrests followed in Charlotte, North Carolina, Winnsboro, South Carolina, and Jackson, Mississippi. In Birmingham, Alabama, the police commissioner, in league with the Ku Klux Klan, organized violent attacks against the Freedom Riders, inviting local Klan chapters to orchestrate the attacks. On Sunday, May 14, a mob of Klansmen, some still in their Sunday suits, attacked the first of two Greyhound buses, slashing the tires.
The mob followed the bus to a stop several miles outside town where they tossed a firebomb into it. As the bus burned, the mob held the doors shut, their intention to burn the riders to death. A shotgun–fired from someone outside the bus–caused the mob to retreat, but when the Freedom Riders escaped the bus, they were assaulted by the mob. Again, only warning shots fired into the air by highway patrolmen prevented the riders from being lynched.
Injured riders had to be removed from a local hospital at 2 in the morning for fear of a mob gathered outside the hospital. When a Trailways bus arrived at the terminal in Anniston an hour after the Greyhound bus had been burned, it was boarded by eight Klansmen who beat the Freedom Riders and left them semi-conscious in the back of the bus.
The remainder of the journey was much the same, with attacks all along the way, riders beaten by mobs with baseball bats, iron pipes, and bicycle chains. One rider required more than 50 stitches to his head. Upon arrival in New Orleans, the riders could not find accommodations, so the President of Xavier University, a black college, housed them on campus in secret at St. Michael’s Hall, one of the college dormitories.
Horrific stories of abuse began to filter into the larger society, riders telling of ambulances that refused to take them to the hospital, reporters and cameramen attacked and their equipment destroyed, and a mob of more than 3000 white people attacking First Baptist Church in Montgomery where the Reverend King was speaking. The events sent shock waves through American society. The work done by and the harm inflicted upon the Freedom Riders bolstered the Civil Rights Movement, eventually resulting in legislation that brought equal rights to African-Americans in the Deep South.
If we are to understand Rabbi Jesus’ words that we hear him speak today, then there is no better way than to imagine the Rabbi as an early Freedom Rider, someone determined to shake up the social order, loosen the chains put on suppressed peoples, and demand the right treatment of all, regardless of state, status, or place. If we cannot see Rabbi Jesus on that bus, then we have not paid close enough attention to the gospel. On those pages, we will always find him providing for the poor, protecting the powerless, and picking up those put down by society. So, yes, he would have been on that bus to the South in 1961 to help the persecuted blacks in a social order defined by whites.
“I have come to set the earth on fire,” Rabbi Jesus says to his disciples, “and how I wish it were already blazing! Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.” Prima facie, the Rabbi’s words seem to be those of an arsonist and an agitator, someone intent on destruction and demolition.
And, in many ways, this was his intention and his purpose as he understood it. Mandated by his Heavenly Father to return the world to the right ways–the way that its Creator intended it to be–the Galilean Rabbi finds a world as opposite to the plan of God as it could be, a world where the rich enslaved the poor, where the sick were treated as outcasts, and where the powerful followed no law except their own desires.
No surprise, then, that he says “There is a baptism with which I must be baptized,” clearly recognizing that the road he is on promises persecution. No one enters a fight without expecting to be beat up. And, clear-eyed as Rabbi Jesus was, he had every reason to believe, given the power of the powerful, that he would be nailed to a cross as an example of what happens to somebody who challenges the status quo.
As Pilate drank a glass of wine while Rabbi Jesus gasped his last breath on the cross, the Roman governor, like the Klan leaders in the South, surely felt a sense of satisfaction, believing that he had rid himself and Rome of a troublemaker in his midst, someone stirring up the crowds, a nuisance trying to upset the apple cart. He slept well that night, sure things would be back to normal when he woke up in the morning.
Of course, things didn’t go as expected, as Pilate learned soon enough and as Klansmen in the South learned to their dissatisfaction. Rabbi Jesus had exposed the rottenness of the social order and when the sewage had come to the surface, a lot of other people saw what he had seen, demanding a change in the way things were done, no longer blind to the cruelty of the status quo.
“Do you think I have come to establish peace on the earth?” the Galilean Rabbi asked his followers, answering the question himself, telling them, “No, I tell you, rather division. From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three.” As he saw it, the division was inevitable because men’s hearts were divided, the conflict between good and evil continually at war within each person’s chest.
Entrusted with his Father’s vision for the world, Rabbi Jesus saw the contrast as few others could, a world wrapped up in evil ways, people choosing greed instead of generosity, the rich man eating sumptuous meals while the poor man starved at his steps, those with the power pushing to the sidelines those without power. This was not the way it was supposed to be.
Preaching and pointing to his Father’s original plan, he immediately encountered opposition, the satanic hold over people’s hearts not easily dislodged. Bracing for the inevitable fight to the finish, Rabbi Jesus chose his side–alongside his Heavenly Father–and was willing to die if it meant opening the eyes of the world to its waywardness.
So, as he rode that bus towards Jerusalem, he wept for the wrongs done to poor people; he wrapped the wounds of the leper; and he wondered aloud about a world where the last might be first and the first might be last. These were his thoughts as he looked out the window of the Trailways bus, hearing the heated rhetoric of people filled with hate, his heart heavy because of the darkness that reigned at midday.
Interesting, when Matthew the evangelist tells the same story, his text differs slightly from Luke’s. Whereas we hear in the Lucan text Rabbi Jesus say that he came not to bring peace, but division, Matthew’s recollection is that Rabbi Jesus said he did not come to bring peace, but the sword, an even more emphatic symbol of the fight of good against evil.
In 1961, a young college man went with a friend to a small gathering between white and black students from separate Tennessee schools where the young man, Franklin McCallie, heard stories of discrimination and began to question his upbringing that stressed inequality and racism. Returning home and talking to his family, he was told he was an embarrassment to the family name.
Later, he moved back to Chattanooga to take a teaching position with the McCallie School that had been named after his family, where he insisted that the school be integrated. His father refused, so he took a job with the all-black Howard School. He continued his work for integration and equal rights. His father, for his part, continued to criticize young Franklin, assuring him he was ruining his reputation.
One day Franklin heard that the local Kiwanis Club had accepted its first black member. Surprised, Franklin visited the head of the club to thank him and to ask him how he had been able to convince the other white members to accept a black man as a brother. The man seemed surprised at the question and said to Franklin, “Don’t you know? It was your father who influenced the club to change.”
Franklin went to the McCallie School to find his father and heard his father say something he never thought he would hear. “Son, I’ve been wrong about black people all my whole life.” A short while later, the elder McCallie opened the McCallie School to boys of all races and soon after all the private schools in Chattanooga followed their example.
“From now on,” Rabbi Jesus said, “They will be divided, father against son, and son against father.” He would have been happy to know that one day things would change and, when that day came, it would be father and son together again, as God had intended it to be from the beginning.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 