In God’s Image, All
20 February 2011
Seventh Sunday After Epiphany Year A
Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18; 1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23; Matthew 5:38-48; Psalm 119:33-40
Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”Matthew 5:38-40
In today’s Gospel, Jesus teaches us, “Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. To be perfect as God is, don’t reserve your good wishes and love only to your own kind, to those who love you and wish you well.” He says we are not to use violence to retaliate for violence, and gives three examples: “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him also the other one. If someone sues you for your outer garment, give to him your inner one as well. If a soldier compels you to carry his gear for one mile, carry it another one as well.”
Does Jesus here mean for us to not try to respond to situations of abuse? Is he encouraging a passive victimhood? By the beginning of the second century, it was common for Christians to pass on Jesus’ teaching as it they were rules for winning God’s favor and eliminating one’s defects. Some early Christians used today’s passage as if it were a guidebook of how to become “perfect.”
One of the earliest accounts we have for the order of the Eucharist, the Didache, or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, dates from shortly after the year 100 C.E., the time that the Revelation of John was written. In it, we read,
“There are two ways: one of life and one of death; and the difference between the two ways is great. The way of life is this: first, you should love God, who made you; secondly, love your neighbor as yourself; and whatever things you do not desire to be done to you, do not do them to someone else. Now the words of this teaching are this: Bless those who curse you and pray for your enemies, and fast for those who are persecuting you. For what credit is it if you love those who love you? Do not the Gentiles do the same thing? But love those hating you, and you will not have an enemy. Keep yourself from fleshly and bodily cravings. If anyone hits you on the right cheek, turn the other one to him also. And you will be acting maturely. If someone should force you to go one mile, go with him two. If someone takes your coat, give him your shirt also. If anyone should take from you what is yours, do not demand that he give it back, for you cannot. … Blessed is the one who gives according to the commandment, for he is innocent.… Assemble yourselves together frequently to seek the things that benefit your souls, for all the time of your faith will not profit you unless you are perfect at the last.”(Didache, chapter 1, chapter 16).
Despite its early pedigree, this way of reading these sayings—turning them into moral rules for us to gain the approval of God—weakens, I think, what Jesus was actually arguing.
The Greek word here for “perfect” is teleios. This means “in conformity with your telos,” or intended purpose. Rather than primarily meaning “without defect or flaw,” it means “in accordance with what God intended when he created you.” The Aramaic word that Jesus probably actually used, tam, had roughly the same semantic scope. The point is fullness of life, shalom, in keeping with all of the intentions of a good and loving Creator, the Creator who made “humankind in his own image.” Just as God gives the blessing of rain to good and bad alike, so should you, who bear God’s image, reflect God’s beneficence and intend good things for all of God’s other creatures who bear his image. In order to be the person God intends, you need to surpass “fair,” you need to go beyond mere “justice.” He introduces an idea of treating all people, regardless of whether they are good or bad, with the dignity and worth that they possess because they bear the image of God.
Jesus starts by saying, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ He is quoting here from the Torah’s rule that vendettas and vengeful escalation of violence should not be pursued, the lex talionis or the law of measured retaliation. Wherever harm is committed—whether intentional (Leviticus 24:20) or deliberate (Exodus 21:24)—the Law said the response was not to surpass the original damage committed. You could put out the eye of someone who had put someone else’s eye out (an "eye for an eye") but not take their life. The principle is one of proportional response, and of punishment fitting the crime, and embodies what the Torah sees as justice (Deuteronomy 19:21).
But Jesus says that in order to enjoy fullness of life, we should be more than merely just. We should not respond to violence with violence. Jesus proposes another strategy for dealing with evil: overcome it with good, one way or another.
This is not a teaching of passive submission to abuse. It is more like the idea of Satyagraha, or Truth Force, which Gandhi developed from this very saying of Jesus, or of peaceful active resistance or direct action developed by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who also worked from this very text. The goal is to overwhelm the evildoer by an exposing of the evil through a show of good. In the shame-based society in which Jesus lived, he advised that we respond to humiliation by shaming those who abuse power. We should respond to an unjust loss of face by forcing a just loss of face. And this is done precisely through the mechanism of not stooping to the level of the abuser.
Walter Wink (in Naming the Powers) has done us all a favor by noting a crucial detail in the text—“if someone strikes you on the right cheek.” In that society, you only would have used your right hand for interacting with others. So mentioning the fact that it is the right cheek that is being struck implies a haughty overlord giving a brutal but dismissive backhanded blow to someone seen as much lower in the social pecking order. Jesus says “Don’t strike them back. Instead, stand up tall and turn, forcing them to use their open palm on your left cheek as they would a social equal.” In Chinese terms, we would have added—“thus making him lose face.”
Jesus uses a second example of his strategy for engaging people with God-like good will. “If a creditor sues you for your outer garment, give him your inner garment as well.” The outer garment was used for warmth and as a cover at night. The inner garment could be worn alone without shame, but there were no underclothes beneath it. By saying “throw in your inner garment as well,” Jesus was saying to strip naked before the creditor, shaming him before all and revealing the true dynamic of the exploitative system of large landowners forcing all small farmers off their land. (It was only because these ancient middle-easterners “went commando” that he could argue for such “guerrilla theater.”)
The third example Jesus gives is being compelled to carry baggage for the Roman Army. The Roman Military had the right to force local people to carry their substantial baggage. Remember how in the Passion narrative they simply compel a passerby—Simon of Cyrene—to carry the crossbeam for Jesus’ cruxifixion when Jesus himself collapses under the task. But abuse of this right produced situations where riots might break out when a large group of people thus impressed found themselves a day’s walk back to their homes. So the authorities had issued a limitation—only one mile, a thousand broad paces, was allowed. There are recorded cases of severe punishments being meted out to Roman legionaries who broke this rule and provoked unrest. “If you are impressed to carry baggage a mile, walk on another mile as well.” One can imagine the humorous situation of the soldiers, afraid of breaking regulations and being punished, begging with a head-strong follower of Jesus to please lay down his load after the required 1,000 steps. Again, an insult and demeaning is turned on its head by an aggressive, but peaceful act.
Jesus here is teaching that God is above the fray in some ways, and very actively involved in others. And we must be similarly detached (not following a gut instinct to react in kind) but all the while very, very actively engaged.
The reason for this is simple. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference, cold, uncaring indifference. Jesus wants us engaged and actively responding to evil with the same active love of the loving, but sometimes perhaps bothersome God who has sought us out and found us. He wants us neither to hate nor to be indifferent. He wants love, burning, attractive, painful love.
A common and traditional way of seeing Jesus in these verses is thinking that he taught his disciples to be docile and accepting victims of abuse. If that were so, one of the few historical facts that we actually know with certainty about his life—his execution at the hands of the Roman authorities—makes little sense. If he taught gentle and tidy submission to all authority, even abusive authority working against God’s purposes, it is highly unlikely the Romans would have used crucifixion to kill him. This particularly brutal and refined form of public torture and slow suffocation was the punishment they reserved for those found guilty of sedition and rebellion, a charge that is certainly implied by the title they fixed over Jesus’ writhing nailed body, “King of the Jews.” Had Jesus simply taught acceptance and peaceful submission, the Romans probably would have let him pass him as an odd, but welcome voice that helped them maintain control of their restive Empire. But that was not the case. They basically put him to death for disturbing the order of things, for subverting in sayings like these the basic social order of an Empire. The Romans put Jesus to death because he taught that the value of each of every person was greater than the need to maintain proper Primate grooming rituals in a military dictatorship.
I heard the best sermon I have ever heard in my life here in Beijing in the late summer of 1989. It was by a layman in a House Church, and it was on a text from today’s Gospel.
During the somewhat liberal period of religious openness in China prior to the June 4, 1989 crackdown, local Chinese had begun attending services with expatriates. After the crackdown, the Chinese security and political control apparatus was brought to bear on Beijing’s Chinese Christians as well as any other group seen to be too closely identified with foreigners. Old rules that had remained on the books forbidding Chinese nationals from attending “foreign” worship services started to be enforced with a vengeance, rules that are with us still. The pressure brought to bear on our Chinese congregants became almost unbearable. Finally our congregation decided that the local people and the expatriates in our congregation would go their own ways and worship separately. The secular law, previously somewhat murky, had become clear, and we intended to obey it. It was very hard on all of us, because we had become close friends.
One of these Chinese members of our congregation spoke at the last service we held together. He started his sermon, in Chinese, by noting that separate worship would be hard, since “gathering together each week is like drawing individual pieces of firewood together, to make a blaze that can warm us through the week.” Pulling apart the critical mass of fuel for the fire posed the risk of extinguishing the flame, especially if the individual pieces of fuel were isolated, put aside, and kept alone in the cold, where their flame would die for want of heat. But we had no real choice in the matter, given the pressures that were being brought to bear.
My friend took as his text Matthew 5:44: “But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” He said he had always thought that this was a little over-dramatic, “for why should Christians have enemies?” he said he now understood the passage much better. “If I could be so bold, I’d like to refer to a passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.” Since in all probability our meeting place had listening devices in the walls, most of us shifted uncomfortably.
He continued. “In this book, Solzhenitsyn is the labor camp system in the Soviet Union. He becomes more and more dehumanized by his torment, but then, in a chapter called ‘Resurrection,’ regains his Christian faith and begins the long road to true freedom, even within that system. In the key passage of that key chapter, Solzhenitsyn says that he realized at that critical time that no matter how tightly his interrogators constrained him, he always had a choice—though they always eventually could force him to say what they wanted, he could do so willingly or unwillingly, cheaply or expensively in terms of the suffering he endured before giving them what they demanded.
Police photograph of Solzhenitsyn, 1953.
“He also realized that the too were constrained to do what they did, and that they too had a choice in how they did what they were constrained to do. In a system where all were compromised and all were victims in one degree of another, he realized the great truth that the line between good and evil is not found between one country and another country, between one economic class and another, between one political party and another, between one religion or another, or one race and another. The line between good and evil, he says, is fine but very definite, and runs down the middle of each and every human heart. It is found in that space of the heart where we exert our choices, no matter how constrained our choices may be.
“So Solzhenitsyn realized that he needed to pray for his interrogator, and for all of God’s creatures, even Stalin. It is where my faith begins as well. This is the reason, I believe, that we must pray for our enemies. They, like us, are in God’s image, and have that line down the middle of their hearts, no matter what decisions they have made before, no matter how distorted the image of God may have become in them, or how twisted or constrained the options left to them might be.
“So we must pray to the creator to help his creatures–not that they be like us, not that they treat us more favorably, not that they choose what we wish they would choose, but that in whatever way God wants, here and now, they might opt for the good in their hearts and not the evil. We pray that they might become what God created them to be, not what we think that they should be. We do this because we share with them in our hearts the capacity to do great evil or great good. Without such a belief in my solidarity with all my fellow creatures, even those who persecute me and what I believe is good, I would not have hope that God might work his miracles in my own heart, and help me to choose the right. That is why I must pray for even Premier Li Peng, who imposed martial law, and for all who ordered the military actions during the first week of June.
“Jesus was perhaps establishing an impossible standard for human behavior and emotions in the sermon on the Mount, when he said love your enemies. But as he said elsewhere, with God nothing is impossible. God gives us the grace to be able to pray sincerely for our enemies’ good. For we must do this if we are to become as God wants us.”
That sermon changed the way I looked at many things, and is one of the great watershed moments in my life, the moment, I believe, where I started on the journey of cultivating an adult Christian faith shorn of sectarianism. Particularly because of the circumstances in which it was given, it brought together for me many of the disparate elements of my religious belief and helped me internalize them.
My friend and Solzhenitsyn both understood the principle behind Jesus’ statements here. We are all God’s creatures and all bear God’s image, no matter how we may have distorted and twisted it. And so are all who are our enemies. We are all in this together. And that is so regardless of what we think of each other, regardless of how right or wrong we may be in our judgments of each other.
God loves us, each and every one. So we must learn to love each other. Not pretend to love each other. Not practice passive aggression on each other as we despise the other. Not silently disengage and passively submit, detached, from the abuses others subject us to. But love. And love as God loves, which means sometimes being a pain in the neck and almost always means challenging the beloved.
I pray that we may learn so to lovingly, actively engage those around us.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
