While the delegates were drafting and signing the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, quite a crowd had gathered outside the courthouse. There was a buzz of heightened anticipation that something big was about to transpire. Thomas Polk, the founder of Charlotte Towne and its most prominent citizen, came out onto the steps and read it aloud for the crowd. Just imagine hearing those stunning words about the dissolution of all political bonds to the Mother Country.
“RESOLVED! We do hereby declare ourselves a free and independent people, sovereign and self-governing” – and much more. A swirl of emotion must have ensued. Pride, excitement, fear and trembling, confusion, hopefulness. How precisely would a few dozen folks actually pull off their vaunted independence?
Copies were made to be taken to Philadelphia to share with the colony’s delegates at the Continental Congress, and also the House Speaker. While they were being copied, the delegates found their way to the place where most important deliberations were carried out and plans were hatched: the local tavern. The tavern owner, James Jack, was 44 years old, not a prominent leader in Mecklenburg. The delegates knew they needed a strong horseman, someone who was brave, and not so famous as to be recognizable. I love David Fleming’s clever remark: “Luckily, they didn’t have to look far. He was right behind the bar.”
Jack, nicknamed “Captain,” volunteered to be the one to ride some 550 miles on horseback to Philadelphia. Fleming declares that “His anonymity was his armor. His selfless sense of duty, his superpower.” Our friend and neighbor Chas Fagan created the massive sculpture (at the corner of Kings Drive and 4th Street) of Captain Jack just as he’s turning his horse toward the north.
Interesting local history – but we catch a glimpse of how God has spoken and how the Gospel was spread. Obviously, in Bible times, the only way news or messages got from one place to another was by curriers on foot, camels, or boats. A whole cluster of words associated with such transporters of words are key in Scripture. We have kerux, “messenger, herald,” one who would stand in the street and proclaim. The verb kerusso means “to proclaim, to reveal, to preach,” and the noun kerygma is to this day a shorthand way of naming the core of the Gospel message of salvation.
Angels in the Bible were messengers who spoke for God; the noun angelos originally meant “messenger” before it applied to angels. The word for Gospel, euangelion (do you see “angel” in there?) meant originally “good news, a blessed message.” The Hebrew for “messenger,” mal’akh, appears over 100 times, usually for one entrusted to deliver a message from God (Malachi 3:1). Of course, many were prophets, who weren’t fortune tellers, but people who, like Captain Jack, were granted words from God which they were to deliver to the people – often at great risk to themselves. Our title “apostle” comes from apostolos, one who is sent as an envoy to speak for the one with the real authority. John the Baptist stands forever as God’s #1 messenger. All these speak not on their own authority. Their words are from God, or from eyewitnesses to what God had done. And those words are revolutionary!
Sadly, the closest parallel between Captain Jack and the Bible’s messengers of God’s good news was that when he arrived in Philadelphia, no one was really interested. The Mecklenburg delegates were trying to placate and cave in to the British – so to them it was no time to stir up anxieties about absurd notions like independence! God’s prophets, and Jesus himself, similarly got chilly receptions. Prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel were a laughing-stock. Jesus lamented the way Jerusalem threw stones at God’s prophets. And Jesus? “He was the true light who came to his own home, and his own people received him not” (John 1:11).