May 13, 1939. The MS St. Louis departed Hamburg, Germany, carrying 937 passengers—almost all Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. They had Cuban landing certificates purchased with their life savings. They had suitcases containing everything they owned. They didn’t have any other place to go.

Cuba turned them away. The United States, despite desperate pleas from passengers and advocacy groups, turned them away. Canada turned them away.

For over a month, this ship of desperate families wandered the Atlantic—children, grandparents, parents holding infants—people whose only "crime" was existing while Jewish in Nazi Germany. They knocked on every diplomatic door they could find. They pleaded with every official who would listen. They sent telegrams, letters, petitions. By the diplomatic standards of the day, they were shameless in their persistence.

When the ship finally returned to Europe, historians estimate that over 250 of those passengers later died in the Holocaust. Not because there was no room in other countries or resources were unavailable. But because every nation pulled out its calculators to tally the costs—political costs, economic costs, reputation costs—and decided that the shame of refusing was less than the shame of accepting.

Notice the pattern here: every decision got run through the shame calculator.

"How's this gonna make us look?"

"Will the neighbors start talking?"

"What if the donors get nervous?"

Every plea for help, every cry for mercy got held up to the light—not to see the humanity in it, but to see how it might tarnish the brand.

It wasn't about what do they need? It was about what will this cost us?

And when your moral compass is calibrated to public approval instead of mercy, the decisions you make tend to look a whole lot less like Jesus and a whole lot more like damage control.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. looked at America's treatment of its Black citizens and saw the same pattern: desperate people knocking on doors, seeking justice, being told to wait while institutions calculated the social costs of helping.

Dr. King preached a sermon called "The Knock at Midnight," based on this same biblical text. But he didn't see this as a story about prayer technique. Instead, he saw it as a revelation of God's character—one that stood in stark contrast to human systems.

Martin Luther King made a devastating observation: the church itself had often become the reluctant neighbor in Jesus's story. When desperate people knocked on the church's door asking for the bread of justice, too often they heard the same response the Jewish refugees had heard: "Don't bother us now. This isn't convenient. Come back at a more appropriate time."

But here's what Dr. King understood that we often miss: God doesn't operate by cost-benefit analysis. While human institutions—including churches—weigh the costs of helping, calculate the risks of involvement, and worry about their reputations, God operates from a completely different set of principles.

Dr. King wrote: "God is able to give us the interior resources to face the storms and problems of life."

Why?

Not because God overcomes a reluctance to help, but because generosity is who God is. Dr. King saw that the civil rights movement wasn't about convincing God to care about justice. God’s very nature is justice. The question wasn't whether God would help but whether God's people would reflect God's character.

Dr. King challenged the church directly: "The church has too often been an echo rather than a voice, a taillight rather than a headlight." Not because we weren't praying hard enough, but because we weren't becoming like the God we claimed to worship.

I mean, and here’s the tragic irony: After witnessing the Holocaust's horrors, the international community created the modern asylum system specifically to ensure that what happened to Jewish refugees would never happen again. The 1951 Refugee Convention, established by the United Nations, created the legal framework for protecting people fleeing persecution. We promised: "Never again will we turn away people whose lives depend on our protection."