Turn The Other Cheek

I have an old bookmark containing the Ten Commandments. I don’t know who gave it to me, but I do remember being so young that I didn’t understand all of them. I thought the commandment not to commit adult-ery (it’s a narrow bookmark, hence the hyphenation) meant something about not acting like an adult, and considering how some adults acted, that made sense to me. At that point in my life I thought the church, like home, was full of rules.

Some people never get beyond thinking that the life of faith is one of rules. Certain parts of the Bible reinforce that. The book of Leviticus is full of rules, although I notice that people like to pick and choose which rules they think are important. Anything that has to do with sex is “gospel truth,” but rules about what to eat or wear or not shaving your head are ignored. Perhaps what we emphasize reveals more about us than it does about the Bible.

Jesus spent most of his ministry turning rules on their head. It wasn’t that he was fond of anarchy or that anything goes; rather, he recognized that devotion to rules had preempted worship of the God who lay behind them. The whole point of the levitical rules was to create a holy people, a people dedicated to God, a people worthy of God. As pointed out by the Apostle Paul, a recovering rule-worshipper himself, there is nothing that we can do to be worthy of God. God loves us freely. We can’t merit that love. Through Jesus Christ, we don’t have to. We are to simply respond to God’s love by loving God back and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

And so Jesus says that it isn’t good enough to limit retaliation to injury. Don’t retaliate at all. Turn the other cheek so that it can be struck, too. Make peace with your accuser. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Pray and do not bomb them. (Oops, he didn’t say that!) Why is it that the very people who are so eager to apply the rules for sex are so reluctant to take the words of Jesus about peacemaking at face value? Is forgiveness really more complex than sexuality?

To me, it sure sounds like Jesus is advocating a pacifist position. That’s not a new idea. The path of nonviolent resistance is a time-honored one, and we recently saw yet another example of it in Egypt. Curiously, the most successful examples are from non-Christian cultures (Egypt, Gandhi in India). Nonviolent Christians have been less successful – the Anabaptists in Europe were nearly destroyed by Lutherans, Calvinists, and Roman Catholics before escaping to become Mennonites and Amish.

I know the arguments against pacifism. Great, systemic evil must be resisted. Someone recently remarked that we don’t speak German or Japanese now because of the outcome of World War II. It’s clear to me that Hitler had to be opposed. And yet – if we believe that Jesus Christ was God incarnate, we have to listen to him. We can’t say he was just a very good man and sometimes he didn’t it get it quite right.

I don’t have an answer. But I do want to raise the questions. Followers of Jesus Christ are obligated to be different and think differently than the prevailing culture. That’s part of what being a Christian is all about. And it’s perhaps the hardest part. After all, the person who did it best was crucified.

[7 Epiphany: Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18; 1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23; Matthew 5:38-48.]