On Not Becoming Monsters--February 25, 2025

On Not Becoming Monsters--February 25, 2025

[Jesus said:] "If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt." (Luke 6:29)

If we tell ourselves we've already heard this speech about turning the other cheek before, we are almost guaranteed to misread it as Jesus' instructions for everyone to be a doormat, setting ourselves up for abuse from other people and allowing ourselves to be dehumanized by dictators or belittled by bullies.  That's how a great many folks have been taught to understand Jesus' teachings, and we have thereby avoided hearing what he actually is saying. I want to ask us to take a second look and listen more closely, because I am convinced that Jesus has found a way to be simultaneously non-violent and also not a doormat.  And to do both--to resist evil while also refusing to give into evil as a strategy--is a challenge that will absolutely take us out of our comfort zones, because we are much more used to either burying our heads in the sand and letting rottenness run roughshod over everything or succumbing to hatred ourselves in the fight against hatred.  Jesus charts a different course.

I want to suggest--and this is hardly my original insight, but drawn from many who have spent time with the teachings of Jesus and of the New Testament--that Jesus is calling for his followers to respond to those we see as "enemies" in ways that do not blithely copy the enemy's playbook.  Theologian Walter Wink once put it like this:  "Evil can be opposed without being mirrored, oppressors can be resisted without being emulated, and enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed."  In other words, we don't run from confrontation with the bullies and blowhards of the world, but we don't respond the way they expect--with the kind of hatred, violence, or destructiveness that just gives them more ammunition.  We respond in ways that are meant to turn the tables on our adversaries by refusing to demonize them, but rather treating them as people capable of seeing the rottenness of their ways and of being changed. It is what Gandhi called "satyagraha"--or soul-force, or "the power of truth"--and it works, as some like to put it, the same way jiu-jitsu throws an opponent off guard.

Let me offer an example from here the Sermon on the Plain.  In the first example Jesus offers, he says that if someone strikes you on the cheek, you are to offer the other also.  The idea here, which is even clearer in Matthew's parallel version of the same teaching, is that you turn to your assailant and refuse to do either of the two things they expect of you: fight or flight.  You turn to face the opponent, unafraid but also unarmed, and say essentially, "I refuse to do to you what you have done to me. I will not allow you to degrade or dehumanize me, either by just bowing my head like I deserve your mistreatment, or by degrading you back."  In Matthew's telling, Jesus specifies that you are struck on the "right cheek," and numerous biblical scholars will point out that in an ancient near-Eastern culture, which like many still today was right-hand dominant (and left hands were literally used only for unclean purposes like bathroom functions, rather than eating or interpersonal gestures) if you were striking someone on the right cheek with your right hand, you would be backhanding them.  In other words, this would be a slap--a literal slap in the face--which is not a gesture of sparring equals, but an attempt to dominate or belittle the other person.  If that's anywhere close to being in the right ballpark, then this whole passage has the feel of saying, "If someone else tries to put you down by publicly trying to shame you with a backhanded slap, look them in the eye and turn the other side to them, as if to say back, 'I refuse to be seen as less-than. You will have to treat me as an equal if you are intent on hitting me'."  And of course, that's the last thing bullies really want.  They are looking for low-hanging fruit--people who will easily cower to them or be goaded into an imbalanced fight so that the bully can look "tough" or "strong" or like a "winner." Jesus' approach denies them that opportunity--it says, "I will not let you and your intimidation tactics define me, and neither will I let you make me sink to your level and play by your rules." It defeats the opponent by refusing to engage on their terms, and it also leaves the door open to transformation of the opponent, which is really the greater victory.

In a similar vein, the second example Jesus gives has also has a subversive twist to it that would have been obvious to first-century listeners but which we easily miss twenty centuries later.  The Hebrew Scriptures had a legal principle that you weren't supposed to take someone's coat or outer garment permanently as collateral in a pledge or a loan.  In other words, if someone were in need of a loan and all they had for collateral were the actual clothes they kept warm with, you weren't supposed to actually deprive them of their clothing overnight (when it got cool and they would need it for warmth--again, remember this is a Mediterranean climate and everybody does physical labor as part of their daily work).  It was considered being a bad neighbor to deprive someone of their coat like this, even as collateral for a loan (and again, you'd have to be pretty hard up if the only collateral you had was your coat, so this would be a situation for some pretty vulnerable people).  Now, imagine that someone with more wealth starts making loans in the hope of making themselves a tidy profit, and they don't care about the rules against keeping clothing as pledge--if someone did that and insisted that they were keeping your coat until the loan was paid off (likely with exorbitant interest, which was also against the Torah), what kind of recourse did you have?  Well, technically, you did owe the money on the loan, and technically the lender was going to insist on collateral.  And of course the occupying Roman Empire in the time of Jesus doesn't care about the Torah's rules against keeping a coat overnight--they don't recognize the authority of non-Roman rules or laws.  So who would be your advocate?  Jesus proposes a response that is meant to shame the lender into the right kind of practice.  If they insist on taking your coat overnight (in defiance of the Torah's good rules against such a thing), then give them your shirt, too, as a way of publicly forcing them to own up to their actions.  If they have to publicly acknowledge that they are making you go around half-naked, the hope is that they'll be publicly ashamed and have a conscience wake-up call.  The social pressure of having everyone else in the community see that they have been unjust will force their greedy practice out into the open and expose it, so that either they'll have to contend with the whole community no longer wanting to have anything to do with them, or they'll change their minds and give you back your coat to keep warm with in the mean-time.  In other words, this whole approach calls attention to the wrong being done, but it doesn't resort to injustice as a way to get things resolved.  Jesus calls us to find creative approaches that force those who have been aggressors or tried to dominate us to see their own actions, in the hopes of changing them--if not from an authentic change of heart, then at least from the social pressure of knowing that others will see their behavior, too.  It's a revolutionary approach because it stands up for the person who is being taken advantage of but also refuses to do harm to the person trying to cause harm to you.  It recognizes both the infinite worth of you, the person being threatened, and also the fact that the person threatening is nevertheless made in the image of God and capable of repentance, change, and growth.  That is a courageous stand to take, and it is also very much an uncomfortable place to stay.

We are so easily pressured either into giving in to the folks who want to dominate and take advantage of other people or hating them and refusing to see those people as still beloved of God, even at their worst.  And Jesus' teaching here won't let us do either--he doesn't let us just give up in the face of rottenness, greed, or intimidation tactics, but he also doesn't let us hate those people, either.  So when we stand up in the face of that rottenness, it is not just a stand "against" someone that we don't like but rather a stand "for" those who are being harmed, and even "for" the recognition that even those we don't like are still made in the image of God.

If we actually spend the time trying to unpack what is going on for Jesus in these teachings, we'll find that we can't so easily just ignore him or dismiss him as if he's telling us to let everyone walk all over us.  He is not.  He is instead insisting that our kind of resistance to bullies, blowhards, and browbeaters will have to reject their tactics. Jesus insists, in other words, that we not become monsters ourselves in the attempt to combat monstrosities.

To do that well, and in a sustained effort, is not just difficult, but profoundly uncomfortable.  But there are moments from our history--from the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the marches in Birmingham during the Civil Rights era, to Gandi's march to the sea, to the worldwide divestment pressures that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa--that remind us it is possible to say a loud No to adversaries without succumbing to hatred. It is possible to insist upon your own inherent dignity as a person made in God's image without degrading that same dignity in the person who is hostile to you.

If that feels like a hard needle to thread, the good news for us is that Jesus never intended for us to do that alone.  We do that work together, as community, and with Jesus in our midst leading the way.

Let's go.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage, the clarity, and the compassion to respond to the rottenness in the world around us without being swallowed up by that rottenness ourselves.