God's Commandment

The text that was read this morning from the New Testament is probably the most dangerous text in the whole of scripture. No matter your political leanings, progressive, conservative or anywhere in the middle, this text challenges your belief system to its very core. This text is so dangerous that it has been interpreted, reinterpreted and misinterpreted since Matthew wrote these words almost 2000 years ago. This text has been used to prevent people from revolting against the powers and principalities and this text has inspired social revolutions. This text has been used to keep the oppressed in a place of submission and this text has inspired the oppressed to resist de-humanization by sustaining their dignity. This text has been used to control people and this text has inspired people to take control through their own actions.


This text is so dangerous that when King James commissioned his translators to write the Bible in the vernacular of his day, he targeted this text as “seditious, dangerous, and trayterous” because he perceived it as scripture giving permission for the oppressed to disobey a tyrannical king and so he instructed his translators to water it down. “Therefore” some note, “the public had to be made to believe that there are two alternatives, and only two: flight or fight. And Jesus is made to command us, according to these king’s men, to resist not. Jesus appears to authorize monarchical absolutism. Submission is the will of God. And most modern translations have meekly followed in that path.” (1)

How many of us have had the phrase, “turn the other cheek” used against us when we’ve tried to defend ourselves against someone who is bullying us either physically or verbally. I don’t know about you, but that chafes me just as much as the sing songy “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” And the time honored phrase “If you ignore it, it will go away.” Bullying does not go away, words do matter and through digging deeper into this dangerous text, I’ve learned that submission to abuse was not what Jesus meant when he preached, “do not resist an evil doer, turn the other cheek, give your cloak as well and go also the second mile.”

Several years ago I went to a conference on non-violent resistance where theologian Walter Wink was the keynote speaker and the text that he focused on was the scripture we read this morning. Rather than just talking about his interpretation of the text, he recruited several of the youth in the audience to demonstrate this for us. In the first scene a slave owner is yelling at her slave that he isn’t following her instruction. Instead of cowering before her with head bent down, he looked her in the eye and calmly listened to her. As she became more agitated, she lifts up her right hand to slap his right cheek with the back of her hand (I assure you this was all blocked, all pretend, she didn’t really hit him). When her hand made contact with his right cheek, he lifted his head up and turned to expose his left cheek, thus she could not backslap him again. Walter Wink reminded us that in Jesus’ time, “The back hand was not a blow to injure, but to insult, humiliate, degrade. It was not administered to an equal, but to an inferior. Masters backhanded slaves; husbands, wives; parents, children; Romans, Jews. The whole point of the blow was to force someone who was out of line back into place.” (2) So when the young man turned his cheek she could do one of two things. She could back backhand him with her left hand, which ancient people didn’t do because the anything done with the left hand was considered unclean or she could hit right cheek with an open palm or a fist but in that time only equals fought with fists and open palms “and the last thing the master wishes to do is to establish this underlings equality.” (3) Walter Wink states, “By turning the cheek…the ‘inferior’ is saying: ‘I’m a human being, just like you. I refuse to be humiliated any longer. I am your equal. I am a child of God. I won’t take it anymore.” (4) In a world that is all about honor and shaming, the master has lost the power to shame the slave. She has been stripped of her power to dehumanize him. As Ghandi taught, “The first principle of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.” (5)

In the second scene a girl played a creditor taking a poor man to court over an unpaid loan. The judge ordered that the poor man give his jacket to the girl as collateral for his loan. The young man took off his jacket and handed it to her, then he took off his shirt, then he took off his t-shirt and then stood bare chested before her as she turned ten different shades of red. The Galilean landowners were crippled by the tremendous debt and high taxation that they owed to their Roman Occupiers. They kept their land by taking out loan upon loan with exorbitant interest rates of 25 to 250 percent. This economic leverage was used to pry Galilean peasants loose from their ancestral land. By the time of Jesus much of the Galilean land was owned by absentee Roman landlords, managed by stewards and worked by tenant farmers, day laborers and slaves. Even though the peasants lost their land, they were still in debt and taken to court to pay it off. According to Biblical law a creditor could take as collateral a poor person’s robe. It is to this injustice that Jesus speaks. While it is humiliating for a peasant to hand over his robe to his creditor, it is even more humiliating for the creditor to be seen with someone who is naked. Wink states, “Nakedness was taboo in Judaism, and shame fell less on the naked party than on the person viewing or causing the nakedness. By stripping, the debtor has brought shame on the creditor…the poor man has transcended this attempted to humiliate him. He has risen above shame. At the same time he has registered a stunning protest against the system that has created his debt.” (6)  The powerful depend on their dignity and through non-violent resistance the powerless are able to take it away from them.

In the third and final scene a young man pretends to be a Roman Soldier forcing another young man playing a peasant to carry his heavy backpack for a mile. They walk side by side and come to a mile post and the soldier asks the peasant for his pack. The peasant refuses and tells the soldier “don’t worry, I’m going to walk it another mile.” The soldier began pleading for the peasant to give back his pack. Off to the side we see more soldiers snickering at this scene. Wink reminds us that carrying a pack a second mile is an infraction of military code for which a soldier could be punished. By carrying the pack a second mile, the peasant is getting the soldier in trouble. This will make the soldier think twice before he tries to force this peasant to carry his pack again. Once again the peasant has taken his power back through the use of non-violent resistance.

Some say that non-violence doesn't work, but over the past several years, there have been many countries which experienced non-violent revolutions: India, Ghana, Guatemala, South Africa, the Philippines and just last week Egypt. (7) We’ve even experienced the non-violent revolution of the civil rights movement where African Americans and their allies resisted the evil of segregation with non-violence. The evil of racism was laid bare as pictures of people being attacked at lunch counters were published in the newspaper. As the television showed footage of young people being chased by police dogs and hosed down at civil rights protests and as the radio aired throngs of people shouting all sorts of hatred against African American children walking to their newly de-segregated schools.

We are called as Christians to work towards the consummation of God’s kingdom here on earth where all of creation live in right relationship with each other. This comes about not by passively allowing evil to happen but by proactively resisting persecution through redemptive love. To never, never, never render evil for evil. That if the opportunity comes for us to defeat our adversaries in kind, that we do not bring ourselves down to their level. This was the meaning of love that Jesus was talking about when gave the command to love our enemies. Loving our enemy does not mean becoming a doormat. What it does mean is having a desire for the goodwill of all human kind. This goodwill seeks to defeat systems that are evil, but it does not seek to defeat other people. Rendering evil for evil only intensifies the cycle of evil. In resisting evil through the power of nonviolence the arc of history continues toward a just world as God would have it. That is the Kingdom of God. May it be so. Amen.

(1) Wink, Walter. The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium. (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 100.


(2)  Ibid., 101

(3)  Ibid., 102

(4)  Ibid., 102

(5)  Ibid., 102

(6)  Ibid., 104-105

(7)  http://www.progressiveinvolvement.com/progressive_involvement/2011/02/lectionary-blogging-matthew-5-38-48.html#tp