No Retaliation

a Sermon for Epiphany 7A
Text: Matthew 5:38-48

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you give us the tools of great change and the opportunity to make the choice. Help us to see your ways for us as the right choice. Amen.

Retaliation and escalation
Jesus begins the gospel with a familiar phrase: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'” Now, I know that you know where this comes from and what it is about; I am just reminding you. To do that, we’ll have to go back thousands of years, long before Jesus and even the Torah (from where this phrase comes). Long before all of this, there was a different law of the land. A law, unwritten, but understood universally:

If you do something to me, I do something to you.

It is as simple as that. OK, not just as simple as that, because we didn’t just retaliate, we had to do more: we had to teach them a lesson. They had to know that they shouldn’t have done it, and won’t do it again. So if they hit you, you maimed them.

If you do something to me, I do something bigger to you.

Sometimes that lesson wasn’t actually for them, but for other people. So if someone stole your goat from you, you would kill them. You had to show what happens when someone messes with you. If they insulted your wife, you killed them, and their wife. If they went after your kids, you killed them, their wife, and their kids: you wiped the whole family from the face of the earth. That was just what you did.

Besides, they were clearly evil people, anyway.

You can see how this thinking has persisted throughout history. Look at mafia movies:

“Eh! He disrespected me, so I shot him in the head!”

And every week (I guarantee it) there is at least one movie at the theater that encourages over-retaliation. At least one movie that glorifies vengeance. The first one that came to my mind was from a few years ago: Taken with Liam Neeson; a movie in which a man’s daughter is kidnapped, and he proceeds to kill all the people involved in the kidnapping. And we want him to! We watch him get his bloody vengeance and we don’t want to see him show any mercy! He has a movie out this week, Unknown, which appears to have a similar vengeance plot.

Enshrining Evil
There seems to be something in us: something that wants to seek vengeance, to retaliate violently. Something that is in us at a truly base level. Which is why it was so remarkable that GOD would instruct the people with this teaching: “An eye for an eye,” because he tells them not to over-retaliate, to not teach people lessons. If someone steals your goat, you steal it back—you don’t burn his house down or anything else.

But, Jesus recognizes the problem: it actually enshrines violence. It makes retaliation OK, and He isn’t OK with that. Because we love vengeance, so we seek out the most “appropriate” retaliations. If someone messes with us a certain way, we desire to mess with them back—to hurt them in the very way they hurt us.

In the immediately preceding passage, Jesus makes a similar claim about oaths. He says that when you swear an oath, when you pinkie-swear with someone, you are saying that you will be honest and not steal or you will do what you say you will do. At the same time, you also communicate that the rest of the time, you don’t have to be honest. You communicate that it is OK to lie and cheat and steal all the rest of the time. So don’t swear any oath. GOD sees you—even inside your head—and knows when you lie or cheat or steal, so be a person who never lies and cheats and steals and you will never need an oath.

Oaths enshrine evil just as “an eye for an eye” enshrines violence.

Jesus’s way: The Love Revolution
Jesus offers us a different way. But for some reason, we don’t understand it. It has to do with our reptilian brains—the oldest part of our brain—that is hardwired with two options in response to adversity: fight or flight. Either we retaliate, or we run away. This is also the way of the world. The part we’ve inherited from thousands of years ago that yearns for violence. The part that says that the most preferable option is to fight back. That good people fight and cowards run away.

So when we hear Jesus say “But I say to you Do not resist an evildoer,” we hear that as cowardly—as encouraging us to run away. We have to make it fit in that ancient paradigm: it is either one or the other: we have two square pegs and two square holes. And the peg Jesus hands us is round.

To make sense of this, Jesus gives us these three, very visual examples of this third way; and we might mistake them because they are so different from the world:

In the first he says, If somebody hits you on the cheek, offer him the other. Look at this: this is what turning your cheek looks like. You are giving them another shot. That is not running away and that is not retaliating.

Then he says, If somebody sues you for your coat, give them your cloak as well. Imagine the courtroom scene. You are the defendant and the charges are being read and you stand up, and start taking your clothes off. You just take them all off, including your shoes, and you ball them up and walk them to the other desk and you hand them over. Then you walk back and sit down. That is not running away and that is not retaliating.

The third one is awesome—but we screw it up so badly. We misunderstand it. Jesus says, If someone forces you to walk a mile, walk a second one. We hear that phrase, go the extra mile as if it were the ultimate do-gooderism. Good job! You did a little extra! That Protestant Work Ethic thing really suits you! But here is what Jesus is really saying. A Roman soldier would come across a Jewish peasant force him to carry something like 120 pounds of gear. And if the peasant valued his life, he would do it. Now, the image hits home at the important juncture at the end of that mile. Imagine the soldier, chuckling with his buddies about this guy carrying his stuff. He turns to the peasant and says:

“We’re here. I’ll take my stuff back.”

And the peasant responds:

“Actually, I want to keep walking. I’m good.”

This isn’t weak-kneed flubberings and it isn’t work a little harder, either. It is a different kind of option.

Jesus wants us to get that this is a love revolution.

We’ve been reading The Secret Message of Jesus each Sunday, and last week we covered the idea that violent revolution is not revolutionary. That overthrowing a violent regime with a violent revolution is just perpetuating a cycle of violence: it is replacing violence with violence. And more, it enshrines a cycle of violence. Our own revolution enshrined a culture of violence for us. It told us that it is acceptable and there are times to fight fire with fire.

That is the way of the world. Not the way of Jesus.

Jesus encourages us to fight fire with water. To violence, love is the water.

It Begins Here
This whole arc, Matthew 5, the first third of the Sermon on the Mount builds from the Beatitudes to this moment. We learn that we are to be and live a certain way, not act a certain way. We are to love. When Jesus says to love your enemies, I think he really intends to say that when we have a love revolution, there are no enemies. Everyone gets loved.

In the last year, we’ve seen bitterness and anger at St. Paul’s.
That is the way of the world, not the way of Jesus.
Anonymous letters, backbiting, potshots from the peanut gallery, back room conversations about people and their families.
That is the way of the world, not the way of Jesus.
People have even used our youth as weapons.
That is the way of the world, not the way of Jesus.

This ends today.

When St. Paul’s is on track, it is the epicenter of the love revolution. We might track evil in, like mud on our shoes. Just tap your shoe, and knock it off. This is a new place, not of this world. Something new.

Here and now—we love. We are a new creation built on love.