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Good morning. On the 4th April 1968, the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. His civil rights leadership had brought him to the city in support of an ongoing strike by black sanitation workers. He had been about to lead their march in protest against poor wages and working conditions. Two and a half weeks earlier, he had delivered a speech in Memphis on the intertwined natures of racial and economic justice, telling the crowd that all labour which serves and builds up humanity has dignity. He held up the striking sanitation workers as an example – their work collecting rubbish was as crucial as the work of doctors in preventing the spread of disease.

Martin Luther King understood his fight as a prophetic one, rooted in his faith: in his Letter from a Birmingham jail, he wrote that he was ‘compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond (his) home town’, as did ‘the prophets of the 8th century B.C… and the Apostle Paul’, despite knowing he would face opposition and even death. Like those prophets, he sought to reveal truth, which he described as our ‘inescapable mutuality as equal children of God’.

Today, we again find ourselves confronted by our inescapable mutuality: our veneer of independence has been scrubbed away, and we are forced to acknowledge whose labour is essential and whose is not. I believe we’re at a tipping point. The dignity of our essential workers – rubbish collectors, care workers, cleaners, farmworkers, NHS and supermarket staff – is just as easily abused as defended. This week we heard of the death of Thomas Harvey, a healthcare assistant provided only with gloves, who later died after contact with a COVID-19 patient. Making real commitments to the dignity of all requires work. As the Reverend Dr King observed; ‘human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God’.

Tomorrow, Christians celebrate Palm Sunday, recalling Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. The God who came to serve and save, not as a ruler declaring military victory, but as a labourer from an oppressed people, riding to his death. In Holy Week, Christians recall that the healing of the world came through one who knew what it was to labour, to suffer exhaustion and rejection, and to grieve. As a prophetic voice for justice, Martin Luther King’s faithful witness invites us to be co-workers in upholding our mutuality, that we might see more clearly the dignity of all people.

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