Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
January 19, 2003
Matthew 5: 38-42
I’ve shared this with you before, but I had to come back to it again because it speaks directly to our text for today. Violet is chasing Charlie Brown and screaming as she runs, “I’ll get you Charlie Brown! I’ll get you! I’ll knock your block off! I’ll…” Suddenly Charlie Brown stops. He turns and faces his angry pursuer saying, “Wait a minute! Hold everything! We can’t carry on like this! We have no right to act this way. The world is filled with problems – people hurting other people, people not understanding other people. Now, if we as children can’t solve what are relatively minor problems, how can we ever expect to…” POW! Violet drops him with a single punch. As she walks away, leaving a dazed and confused Charlie Brown on the ground, she turns to a friend and says, “I had to hit him quick. He was beginning to make sense!”
I wonder if that is how people felt about Jesus? We had better shut him up. He is beginning to make too much sense. Or, he is demanding too much of us, expecting too much change in our behavior, in how we treat each other. We need to get rid of this guy.
“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.” He can’t be serious. Do you suppose he is serious? If he is, then we had best shut him up quick…before his words begin to make too much sense!
I suspect that New Testament professor, Thomas Long, speaks for many of us when he shares his initial reaction to these challenging words of Jesus: “It boggles the mind, of course, to think about living out this example literally in contemporary society. Imagine a Christian in New York City who gets up one morning and decides to do what Jesus says here: to turn the other cheek, to give to every beggar, and to respond to every lawsuit by settling out of court for double the amount. This person would be broke, homeless, and in the emergency room of Bellevue Hospital before noon!” Just what is Jesus asking us to do? It seems so impractical…even downright dangerous!
First, a word about “an eye for an eye.” We find it in Exodus 21 and again in Leviticus 24. Exodus reads: “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” Leviticus also speaks of “eye for eye, tooth for tooth”, then adds, “The injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered.” On the one hand, sounds like there could have been a lot of people in ancient Israel who had one hand, one foot, no teeth, who were blind. But the fact of the matter is that, as many scholars point out, these words - an eye for an eye -sounded almost as radical in ancient times as Jesus’ words sounded to people of his time and indeed still sound to us today. For what the Old Testament law did, perhaps for the first time, was to place limits on retaliation.
Thomas Long says it like this: “In a society based on raw power, the one with the strongest fists or the most guns wins. Instead of the Golden Rule, the ethic in such a world is ‘Do unto others first before they do unto you,’ or at least, ‘If they do anything bad to you at all, finish them off before they do anything worse.’ In such a ‘survival of the fittest’ environment, the law of Moses was a mitigating, moderating force. ‘No,’ it said, ‘don’t retaliate against other people with every ounce of destruction you can muster. Let the response be measured by the offense: yes, an eye for an eye, and only an eye; a tooth for a tooth, but only a tooth. Thus the Old Testament law set human society on a trajectory of moderation and restraint.”
But, as we talked last week, then Jesus comes along and challenges us to take the law further, to take it even deeper. “You have heard it said, ‘an eye for an eye’ but I say to you, if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Again, just what is he asking of us?
One of Aesop’s fables tells of a wasp that settled on a snake’s head and tormented it by continually stinging. The snake, maddened with pain and not knowing how else to be revenged on its tormentor, finally put its head under the wheel of a wagon, so that both the snake and the wasp perished together. I think the fable makes Jesus’ point. Do we continue to buy into the cruelty and violence around us until we are all destroyed – an eye for an eye until all are blind – or do we finally say enough and choose a different path, away from the mutually destructive violence that surrounds us?
It was so many years ago now, I don’t remember the exact date. A meeting was held in a church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a snowy night in the middle of winter. There was standing room only. People listened as a young black preacher spoke these rather startling words:
“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 community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half-dead and we shall still love you.” With these words, Martin Luther King, Jr., whose own house would be bombed and his children threatened, defined the major thrust of what would become the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s – non-violence in the face of frightening violence; love in the face of hate.
Isn’t that what Jesus was talking about? Wasn’t he saying something like this: “If you are going to follow me, if you are going to be citizens of the Kingdom of God, then you need to move past the idea of justice as simply fair play – an eye for an eye; you do something to me, I do an equal amount back to you – you need to move past that and ask instead, ‘If someone does something evil to me, how do I respond with good in return? How do I respond with something other than more evil? How do I keep the evil in him or her from taking over me, refusing to allow violence to be in control?’” Now let’s be clear: Jesus is not talking about victimhood here – “You hit me, oh please, hit me again.” Jesus never said, “Stay in an abusive relationship, just take it!” There is no victimhood here. This is about being a citizen of the Kingdom, a human being created in God’s image, a person who is ultimately a blessing, even to those who would do violence.
Radical stuff? You’re darn right it is!
I can’t tell you how many I times I have heard people proclaim that many of Jesus’ teachings, such as the one we are considering today, are impractical, irrelevant to “real” life; that his words just don’t apply to this world. And there is actually a lot of truth to that. In the words of a colleague: “Jesus had a vision called the ‘Kingdom of God,’ and in many ways it was a different world from what you and I live in. But that's just the point: he lived toward the future, toward the kind of world this should be, toward what God really intends for us. And if you say, ‘his teachings are irrelevant,’ it all depends on which world you most believe in.”
This is tough stuff. At times, I’m not sure I want to buy in to it. If someone threatens my children, no way am I going to turn the other cheek! And yet, even as I say that, I think of the scene from the film, Gandhi, when his followers line up to confront the British and Indian forces. One by one they come forward, one by one they are severely beaten. Yet still they come forward, one at a time, silently, endlessly, receiving the violence, but refusing to succumb to the culture of violence, until finally that culture succumbs to them. They dare to dream of a new world. And they literally put their lives on the line to bring it about.
And so it was that blacks in Birmingham were harassed, beaten, and threatened during the now famous bus boycott. But they did not give in, they did not give up, and they did not respond with violence. “Jump in, grandma, you don’t need to walk.” “I’m not walkin’ for myself; I’m walkin’ for my children and my grandchildren.” On the day the Supreme Court declared Alabama’s bus laws unconstitutional, the Ku Klux Klan said they would ride and burn down fifty homes in Montgomery, including King’s. At nightfall 40 carloads of robed and hooded men appeared on the streets of the black neighborhood. They found people on their porches with their lights on, people refusing to give in to violence and fear. Some even waved! The Klansmen, expecting to find black families quaking in fear behind drawn shades, were so baffled and uncertain by all this that finally all they could do was get into their cars and drive away. Amazing what can happen when people dream of a new world and dare to live as citizens of that world. Makes one wonder just what is the real world – the world of retaliation and violence we all live in and are so familiar with? Or is it the world announced by Jesus, the world where we dare to move in the direction of inclusiveness, acceptance, love and peace; a world where the cycle of violence is broken once and for all.
“You have heard it said…but I say to you.” It’s not a word we use much in this church, but you know what we need? We need conversion. We need to be converted; we need a change of heart and mind; we need Jesus’ view of reality; we need Jesus’ view of a new world, which is just as real as this world. And it’s a decision he calls us to make – not in some great bye and bye, but today…here…now. Will we join him in his bright new world…with all of its risk, with all of its hope?
But there is a part of me, even after I have lived with this sermon, that remains so timid, so afraid, so intimidated by a world of violence. Like Violet with Charlie Brown, I just want to shut him up. I don’t want to deal with this, with this new life he offers. It’s way too scary.
But the other part of me truly does long for a new way, Jesus’ way, and yearns to stay with him on His pilgrimage, wherever it may lead. An eye for an eye has led to too much blindness. There has got to be another way. Then I look up, and Jesus is standing there saying simply, “Follow me.”