Trinity 1
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 25th May, 2008
Jesus says: ”You have heard that it was said, ”An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” but I say to you, do not resist the evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. And if anyone takes you to court and sues you for your outer garment give your undergarment too. If soemone forces you to carry his pack one mile, carry it two”.
This passage has generally been understood as teaching non-resistance. Do not resist one who is evil has been taken to mean simply let them run all over you. Give up all concern for your own justice. If they hit you on one cheek, turn the other and let them hit you there too, which has been bad advice for battered women. To understand this teaching of Jesus like this suggests that to be a Christian means becoming a doormat that people walk over and abuse should they feel like it.
This does not fit the Jesus of the gospels though. He resisted evil with every fibre of His being. There is not a single instance in which Jesus does not resist evil when he encounters it. The problem begins right there with the word resist. The Greek term is antistenai. Anti is familiar to us in English still, “against,” people can say “I am anti-bloodsports”. Stenai means to stand. So, “stand against.” Resist is not a mistranslation so much as an undertranslation. What has been overlooked is the degree to which antistenai is used in the Old Testament in the vast majority of cases as a technical term for warfare. To “stand against” refers to the marching of the two armies up against each other until they actually collide with one another and the battle ensues. That is called “taking a stand.” Ephesians 6:13 says, “Therefore put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to withstand (antistenai) in that evil day and having done all to stand (stenai).“The image there is not of a punch drunk boxer somehow managing to stay on his feet even though he is being pummeled by his adversary. It is to keep on fighting. Don’t retreat. Don’t give up. Don’t turn your back and flee but stay in there and fight back to the bitter end.
When Jesus says, “Do not resist one who is evil,” there is something stronger than simply resist. He is saying don´t resist violently. Jesus is indicating do not resist evil on its own terms. Don’t let your opponent dictate the terms of your opposition. If I have a hoe and my opponent has a rifle, I am obviously going to have to get a rifle in order to fight on equal terms, but then my opponent gets a machine gun, so I have to get a machine gun. You have a spiral of violence that is unending. Our resistance in life so often turns us into reflections of what we are resisting, as so often we can turn into the people we say we don´t like.
Jesus is trying to break this spiral of violence. Don’t resist one who is evil probably means something like, don’t turn into the very thing you hate. Don’t become what you oppose. The earliest translation of this is probably in a version of Romans 12 where Paul says, “Do not return evil for evil.”
Jesus gives three examples of what He means by not returning evil for evil. The first of these is, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Imagine if I were your attacker and I were to strike a blow with my right fist at your face, which cheek would it land on? It would be the left. It is the wrong cheek in terms of the text we are looking at. Jesus says, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek…” I could hit you on the right cheek if I used a left hook, but that would be impossible in Semitic society because the left hand was used only for unclean tasks. You couldn’t even gesture with your left hand in public. The only way I could hit you on the right cheek would be with the back of the hand.
Now the back of the hand is not a blow intended to injure. It is a symbolic blow. It is intended to put you back where you belong. It is always from a position of power or superiority. The back of the hand was given by a master to a slave or by a husband to a wife or by a parent to a child or a Roman to a Jew in that period. What Jesus is saying is in effect, “When someone tries to humiliate you and put you down, back into your social location which is inferior to that person, and turn your other cheek.”
Now in the process of turning in that direction, if you turned your head to the right, I could no longer backhand you. Your nose is now in the way. Furthermore, you can’t backhand someone twice. It’s like telling a joke a second time. If it doesn’t work the first time, it has failed. By turning the other cheek, you are defiantly saying to the master, “I refuse to be humiliated by you any longer. I am a human being just like you but I refuse to strike. I am a child of God. You can’t put me down even if you have me killed.” This is clearly no way to avoid trouble. The master might have you flogged within an inch of your life, but he will never be able to assert that you have no dignity. To interrupt the cycle of violence is the first step towards justice.
The second instance Jesus gives is, “If anyone takes you to court and sues you for your outer garment, give your undergarment as well.” The situation here is dealing with collateral for a loan. If a person was trying to get a loan, normally they would use animals or land as collateral for the loan but the very poorest of the poor, according to Deuteronomy 24:10-13, could hock their outer garment. It was the long robe that they used to sleep in at night and used as an overcoat by day. The creditor had to return this garment every night but could come get it every morning and thus harass the debtor and hopefully get him to repay.
Jesus’ audience is made up of debtors — “If anyone takes you to court…” He is talking to the very people who know they are going to be dragged into court for indebtedness and they know also that the law is on the side of the wealthy. They are never going to win a case. So Jesus says to them, “Okay, you are not going to win the case so when your creditor sues you for your outer garment, give your undergarment as well.”
They didn’t have underwear in those days. That meant taking off the only stitch of clothing you had left on you and standing nude, naked, in court. As the story of Jonah reminds us, nakedness was not only taboo in Israel. The shame of nakedness fell not on the person who was naked, but on the person who observed their nakedness. The creditor is being put in the position of being shamed by the nakedness of the debtor. Imagine the debtor leaving the courtroom, walking out in the street and all of his friends coming and seeing him in his all-togethers and saying, “What happened to you?” Stripping in court exposes the greed and injustice of the system. You can imagine it is going to be some time in that village before any creditor takes anybody else to court.
What Jesus is showing us in these two examples so far is that you don’t have to wait for a utopian revolution to come along before you can start living humanly. You can begin living humanly now under the conditions of the ways of the world, the old order. The kingdom of God is breaking in the moment they begin living the life of the future, the kingdom of God.
Jesus’ third example is “If one of the occupation troops forces you to carry his pack one mile, carry it two.” Now these packs weighed 65 to 85 pounds, not counting weapons. These soldiers had to move quickly to get to the borders where trouble had broken out. The military law made it permissible for a soldier to grab a civilian and force the civilian to carry the pack, but only one mile. There were mile markers on every Roman road. If — and this is the part we have left out — the civilian were forced to carry the pack more than one mile, the soldier was in infraction of military code, and military code was always more strictly enforced than civilian. So Jesus is saying, “All right. The next time the soldier forces you to carry his pack, cooperate. Carry it and then when you come to the mile marker, keep going.”
The soldier suddenly finds himself in a position he has never been in before. He has always known before exactly what you would do. You would mutter and you would complain, but you would carry it. As soon as the mile marker came, you would drop it. Suddenly, this person is carrying the pack on. The soldier doesn’t know why, but he also knows that he is in infraction of military law and if his centurion finds out about this, he is in deep trouble. Jesus is teaching these people how to take the initiative away from their oppressors and within the situation of that old order, find a new way of being.
It is interesting that Gandhi said, “Everyone in the world knows that Jesus and His teaching is non-violent, except Christians.” What Jesus is articulating here is a way of living in the world without violence, a way of overcoming domination in all of its forms by using a way that will not create new forms of violence. In the past, we have thought we had only two choices, either resist evil or don’t resist evil. Jesus seemed to be saying, “Don’t resist evil,” and, therefore, non-resistance seemed to be the only alternative. Be supine, submit, surrender, flee, give up. It seems as if Jesus were asking us to be a doormat for God, to give up all concern for our own justice as well as the justice of others. Now we see in this passage interpreted in a new light, Jesus is not calling on people to be non-resistant. He is calling on them to be non-violent. He is calling on them to resist, yes, but to resist in a way that is not injurious or harmful to the other person.
How we translate all this into our daily lives is key to our discipleship. Violence has many forms not just physical, it can be mental, emotional, verbal. It effects our conversation, our words, our reactions. It is the Christian calling not to win wars, arguments, disagreements, not to win them, but to end them and to keep human dignity as the best weapon against human depravity. As Jesus asks his followers “what more are you doing than other people?”
