Scripture: Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18, Psalm
119:33-40, 1 Corinthians 3:10-23, Matthew 5:38-48
There’s a cartoon I vaguely remember from my childhood or
teen years – I tried to use the Google to find it online so I could put it in
the bulletin, but Google didn’t come through. Probably showing my age; I think the younger
you are, the more cooperative the Google is. Anyway, the cartoon started out with a boss
sitting behind his desk, chewing out one of his flunkees. The flunkee went home and yelled at his
wife. The wife yelled at the couple’s
son. The son pulled his younger sister’s
hair. And the sister kicked the
cat. It really wasn’t a cartoon that was
meant to be funny….more about how anger gets passed on from one person to
another. Certainly the boss in the
cartoon would have had no idea of the impact of his words – he chewed out his
employee in a moment of impatience and went on with his day without giving the
matter a second thought, oblivious to all of the other family members,
including a cat as well, who experienced a miserable day because of his words
to his employee.
In our Gospel reading, we are with the disciples of Jesus
listening to the Sermon on the Mount.
And at this point, the sermon seems to be going from the sublime to the
ridiculous, or at least that’s how we may hear it. To
allow someone who has already hit us to take a second swing at us, to go a
second mile with somebody we wish we’d never met in the first place, to give
someone who sues us all that the court awarded plus a cherry on top, to love
those who hate us….to our ears, this likely doesn’t sound holy as much as it
sounds stupid and dangerous. It sounds
like Jesus is asking his disciples to be masochists, walking around with “kick
me” signs on our backs, groveling and begging for opportunities to be
punished. Or, at the very least, it
sounds like Jesus is asking his disciples to be mega-wimps. And then, at the end of it all, Jesus tells
his disciples to be perfect! Yeah, sure,
Jesus, I’ll get right on it. As if!
Where is Jesus going with all this? Is he just trying to get his disciples killed,
as he would eventually get himself killed?
What’s the point?
A place to start in understanding Jesus’ words is
remembering that Jesus came preaching about the Kingdom of God, the reign of
God in the lives of his followers. The
phrase “Kingdom of God” is often thought to refer to heaven and the afterlife,
but actually Jesus was talking about living as sons and daughters of God here
on earth – which is why Jesus could tell his followers “the Kingdom of God is
among you” or even “within you”. It
goes without saying that we believe we will be with God after we die – but
Jesus was teaching that heaven begins here on earth, that the new life which
Christ offered his followers begins here on earth, right here, right now. The Kingdom of God is in heaven, but it’s
also in Bridesburg, right here, right now – and not only inside the church, but
outside it, everywhere we go. But in
order to experience this new life, we have to leave behind the world’s ways of
doing things – including “eye for an eye” vengeance, including violence of any
kind. Instead, Jesus called his
followers to begin living into the ways of Kingdom of God, even while
surrounded by those who owed allegiance to the Empire of Rome – essentially to
live to some extent as foreigners, with a different language and different
values, the values of the Kingdom of God – as Jesus put it, “in the world, but
not of it.” And of course this foreign language
and these foreign values of the Kingdom of God didn’t fit very well into the
Roman Empire – and they don’t fit so well into the American Empire either. Nor should it – then as now, to say “Jesus is
Lord” is to say that Caesar isn’t – and this goes for our modern-day Caesars as
well.
Jesus began this section of his teaching by saying, “You
have heard it say, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’” This comes from Exodus 21:23-25, and reads
“If any harm follows” – and this would be in the course of a fight – “then you
shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for
foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” As is noted on the back of the bulletin cover
– there’s an excellent article there which I hope you’ll all read on your own
time – the purpose of this was to keep vengeance within proportional limits –
that is to say, to take the offender’s life in retaliation for the life of the
person he killed, not the lives of the offender plus the offender’s whole
family; to take one eye for an eye, not two; one tooth for a tooth, not all the
teeth, and so on. It was an attempt to keep violence from
escalating out of control….but it still permitted violence to continue. And, as it has been said, an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth, if carried out long enough, will leave the world blind
and toothless. At some point, if we’re
to avoid being a world of blind, toothless people, the cycle of violence needs
to be broken.
Those who work with electrical wiring – I don’t, so please
forgive me if I don’t quite have the language quite right – but those who work
with electrical wiring are familiar with circuit breakers, and why they’re
needed – and of course, before there were circuit breakers, there were
fuses. While they work somewhat
differently, the purposes of fuses and circuit breakers is the same – if the
load of electrical current on the wire rises to dangerous levels, perhaps
because too many electrical devices are drawing too much current from the same
outlet, before the wire becomes hot enough to start a fire, a fuse or a circuit
breaker interrupts the flow of electricity so that the current can go no
further, and the wire can cool down. And
of course, it’s a nuisance – the lights go out or the television goes off, and
we have to replace the fuse or flip the breaker, and find some other electrical
outlets or call for an electrician to install heavier wiring – but it’s a whole
lot better than having your house go up in flames. And, at least those of us of a certain age
have likely used similar language to describe not only electrical surges, but
surges of anger and rage, when we may have said that “So-and-so got so mad they
blew a fuse.”
Remember my cartoon from earlier in the sermon – the one
with the boss yelling at his flunkee who yelled at his wife who yelled at the
kid who pulled the hair of the other kid who kicked the cat? Anger and eventually violence pass on from
one person to another, like current through an electrical circuit. Trauma
reproduces itself, passes itself on…that is to say, people who have been hurt, all
too often, go on to hurt other people.
Traumatized people traumatize other people. And this trauma not only passes on across
networks of families and neighbors, but through time, as trauma can be handed
down over generations from grandparents to parents to children, and later to
their children. Without healing, without something or someone
to break the cycle, trauma and abuse will just continue to be passed on. The
task of family therapists in bringing healing involves finding out where trauma
began in the family system and how it has played out over generations. I think in teaching his disciples – teaching
us – not to retaliate, not to strike back in kind, Jesus is asking us to act as
circuit breakers, stopping cycles of escalating anger and violence by not
responding in anger to attackers, or passing on the anger to others. Jesus is asking us, instead of reacting from
instinct, to respond creatively but nonviolently in ways that keep anger and
violence from being passed on, and above all to forgive, as God forgives us.
Jesus’ words about turning the other cheek, going the second
mile, and giving your cloak as well as your coat, are examples that need some
cultural context – and in this I’m drawing from the writings of theologian
Walter Wink, who wrote about the nonviolent ethic of Jesus.[1] Jesus said that if anyone strikes you on the
right cheek – this would have been a slap using the back of the right hand
against the right cheek of the person facing them, a way of insulting or
demeaning someone – Jesus says to turn the other cheek. Well, for one thing, this would be unexpected
behavior – not hitting back, not hanging one’s head and hiding, but turning the
other cheek and looking the person squarely in the eye as if to say, ‘I’m still
here, you haven’t scared me off.’
Obviously not good tactics for a barroom brawl – or for dealing with
spousal abuse for that matter - but Jesus wasn’t talking about a barroom brawl
or an abusive spouse, but about someone lording it over someone they considered
beneath them. For someone to give
someone who won a lawsuit their coat and their cloak would have left them
standing naked – and in that culture would have embarrassed the person who
brought the lawsuit – sort of as if someone sued me for my sports jacket, and I
handed them not only my sports jacket but my shirt and trousers as well. Not a good look for the guy bringing the
lawsuit, standing there holding someone else’s shirt and trousers in his hand. Jesus’ words about going the second mile were
in the context of the Roman occupation, where a Roman soldier by Roman law could
compel a Jewish subject to carry their travel pack – which would have weighed
60 to 80 pounds or more, a significant load – for a mile, but no further. To carry the soldier’s pack a second mile
would have saved someone else from having to carry the gear, but might also
have made the soldier feel increasingly uneasy during the course of that second
mile….”why is he going a second mile? Why
is he being so friendly? What this guy
got up his sleeve? Is he going to give me
back my travel gear?” These teachings of
Jesus, intended in his cultural context for specific situations, have been made
generic and, too often, turned into a license for abusive people to continue
dishing out abuse and a command for abused people to stand there and take it -
not at all what Jesus had in mind.
Rather, Jesus is asking us to find our own nonviolent but creative ways
to respond to those who abuse us, to throw them off balance, off their game so
they reconsider their actions – and nonviolence is crucial. Walter Wink gives his own example of a grade
school classmate of his who early in the school year got picked on by
bullies. Turns out the classmate had
awful sinuses that were constantly running, so that he was endlessly blowing
his nose. When someone tried to bully
the classmate one day, the classmate got a bright idea…he blew his runny nose
into his hand and walk up to the bully and try to shake hands with him – of
course, the bully, not wanting to be slimed, stayed far away from that dripping
hand, and, thanks to his awful sinuses, the classmate always had an ample
supply with which to reload his hand at any time – and it didn’t take long
until the bullies left him alone.
Jesus asks us to respond to oppression and abuse in
nonviolent ways that throw the oppressors off their game – but also, ideally,
in ways that appeal to their conscience, in ways that remind the oppressors
that those they’d oppress are human…which is why Jesus taught us to love our
enemies and pray for them – because even though they’re enemies, they are still
human beings with consciences, however shrunken and shriveled those consciences
may be. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King,
in crafting his boycotts and marches, took Jesus’ words very much to
heart. In the context of loving his
enemies, even as he and his followers were attacked with clubs and police dogs
and fire hoses, jailed, sometimes killed, Dr. King wrote the following:
“To our most bitter opponents we say: We shall match your capacity to inflict
suffering by our capacity to endure suffering.
We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue
to love you. We cannot in all good
conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a
moral obligation as is cooperation with good.
Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and
we shall still love you. Send your
hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and
beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down
by our capacity to suffer. One day we
will win freedom, but not only for ourselves.
We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will
be a double victory.”[2]
Well. I’m not Dr.
King, and neither are you, and those are really hard words to live up to. But then again, at least at this moment, you
and I aren’t being threatened with prison and violence and murder, though who
knows what the future of this country may hold.
For now it’s enough for us to break the cycles of violence in our own
relationships and in our own communities.
Jesus ended this section of teaching with the words “Be
perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Remember that Jesus has just reminded his
disciples that God makes the sun rise on the righteous and the unrighteous –
that is to say, on all. God’s love is
for all, not just some. And in saying
“be perfect”, Jesus is saying, “Be complete with your love, not partial. Loving our friends is the easy part of the
work. Do the hard part of the work as
well by loving our enemies, so that our love may be perfected, so that the work
of love may be complete.”
Perhaps the best way to interpret these teachings of Jesus
is to look at the life of Jesus. He had
no hesitancy whatsoever to confront false teaching and false teachers – but
without violence, and in ways that called them to higher ways of living. He told creative stories, parables, that helped
them see their lives differently. Perhaps his closest approach to violence was
in throwing the money changers out of the Temple – but even then, while some
tables got toppled and some feathers got ruffled, nobody got hurt. And of course, at the end of his life, he
faced arrest, trial, and crucifixion with prayers that God would forgive those
who crucified him, for they knew not what they had done. And after Jesus’ drew his last breath and
gave up his spirit, the centurion who supervised the crucifixion did not say,
“Truly this Jesus was a mega-wimp”, but instead said, “Truly this was the Son
of God.”
Our culture is fixated on a myth of redemptive violence –
that the answer to a bad guys with a gun is a bigger good guy with a bigger
gun. But, of course, while in the movies
the good guy with the gun wins and the credits roll, in real life there’s
bigger bad guy with a bigger gun, and the cycle continues. Jesus calls us from the worship of so-called
redemptive violence to the practice of transformative non-violence. In the words of Paul’s letter to the Romans,
may we not be conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewing of our
minds. And, our lives having been transformed,
may Christ use our example to transform other lives, to transform Bridesburg,
transform Philadelphia, transform our country and our world. Amen.
[1]
Walter Wink: Jesus and Nonviolence: A
Third Way; Fortress Press, 2003
[2]
Martin Luther King Jr., sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery, Alabama at Christmas 1957, written in the Montgomery jail during
the bus boycott. Reprinted in the A J
Muste Essay Series, Number 1 (A J Muste Memorial Institute, 339 LaFayette St,
New York, NY 10012, cited Wink, Walter, Jesus and Nonviolence.
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