On August 28th, 1955, a young African American man from Chicago named Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was dragged from the house of his great-uncle taken by two white men, torturing him before shooting him and dumping him in the Tallahatchie River.

His crime?

He was falsely accused of whistling at a white woman in a general store—the wife of one of the men who ultimately lynched him.

A horrific, if all too common, story in the South during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. So, while I want to be honest, I also want to be sensitive because people still carry the wounds.

At the time, these sorts of violent crimes against African Americans were a common way of warning Black people to “stay in their place,” and therefore, didn’t usually receive much media attention. Indeed, the silence of White churches at the time sent up its own Bat signal to Black people that they couldn’t even count on their White siblings in Christ—a sin for which the church has not, in my estimation, sufficiently confessed or atoned.

No question that the murder of Emmett Till might have gone unnoticed except by those closest to the crime if it weren’t for his mother. Mamie Till Bradley made the decision to have an open casket. The decision was controversial because those who murdered young Emmett Till rendered his body unrecognizable. But Mamie Till Bradley later said, “There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see."

Tens of thousands of people, mostly Black, gathered at A.A. Rayner Funeral Home in Chicago to pay their respects and witness the racist brutality against a young Black man. The crime was terrifying and affected all Black people. Mamie Till let Jet magazine photograph her son’s body. The photographs were subsequently published in Jet magazine and the Black newspaper, The Chicago Defender. A picture of Mamie Till Bradley hovering over the body of her son was later published in Time magazine.

The photos in The Chicago Defender ignited fury among the city's Black population. Jet and Time magazine's decision to publish the pictures gave the rest of the country a rare glimpse of the unspoken horror and savagery suffered by Black people.

Emmett Till’s murder and the public nature of his funeral sparked the Civil Rights movement. This movement gave us titans of justice such as Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Fanny Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, John Lewis, Diane Nash, and Martin Luther King Jr., which led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Funerals with open caskets are fairly common. I’ve participated in funerals where, despite the condition of the body and the counsel of the funeral director, people have insisted on open caskets, even though others have thought it unwise.

But Emmett Till’s open-casket funeral wasn’t just a ceremony.

Because of the social climate at the time—marked by the ever-present resentments of hundreds of years of exploitation and abuse of Black people—that act meant inestimably more. It carried a symbolic meaning that launched a revolution.

Mamie Till knew: Some acts aren’t just acts; they have much more significant meaning. Her words, “I just wanted the world to see,” were an act of faith that if the world were just confronted with the truth of its sin, it would finally have to acknowledge the truth.

Her decision to display her son's body, to tell the truth about how the world treats the vulnerable and the oppressed, would subject her to the glaring spotlight of public attention and the focused hatred of much of the rest of White America. It cost her the life she had by picking up a cross no one wants.

Mamie Till knew all that, knew it could cost her everything … but she decided to lay down that easy life of silence, to lose her life of quiet anonymity so the world would finally see its offense against those it chose for so long to keep conveniently hidden.

I believe Jesus, in our passage, would understand her decision. In the first eight chapters, Mark places Jesus in various strange locations, among strange people—and that, in itself, makes a theological statement about the reign of God—which always seems to be found in the back alleys and dive bars where the respectable people rarely go—which is to say, where any sensible person would least expect it.

The next eight chapters find Jesus eventually arriving in Jerusalem, a not-so-strange place populated by the powerful and influential.

The contrasts are fascinating: Jesus spends the first part of Mark’s Gospel in Nebraska and then takes a fateful journey to Washington, D.C. Our text for today stands as the threshold—the point at which, in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus makes the first move on his journey to Jerusalem. He’s been here; now he’s going there.

Of course, we’ve read the final chapter, so we know what happens when Jesus gets to Jerusalem—as did Mark’s readers. So, it’s difficult to read our text for today without a sense of foreboding.

We know what it will ultimately cost Jesus as he makes this final prescient speech. So we cover this challenging passage again because somewhere at the center of it all is what we confess about who Jesus is and who we are now because of him.