Today’s lesson on how to be a good Christian, a good person, comes to you from Jesus by way of Luke. “Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Do not judge.”
You may recall that this is not the first time we’ve heard about turning the other cheek. We heard it in Matthew 5:39, in the Sermon on the Mount after Jesus notes that, “It is said, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ ”
Now, the eye for an eye concept comes up in the law of Hammurabi, the Babylonian king who caused pillars inscribed with his laws to be erected throughout his realm. Although we think of an “eye for an eye” as barbaric, it was considered a liberal law at the time because it limited — and put a particular value on — a wrong. Instead of “hurt me and I’ll wipe out your entire family,” the law tries to limit the reparation to something equivalent. Later, this equivalent becomes money or other property.
But Jesus says Christians are compelled to forget about parity. “Do not resist an evil person,” he says in Matthew. In Luke, he says to “love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.”
Well, that’s not fair, as every 16-year-old in the world has probably said when introduced to this concept. One of the most endearing things about young people is their belief in justice and equity, so much stronger than in most of us older folks whose ideas of fairness have been flattened over and over again by reality.
As my divorce attorney told me after a particularly unpleasant interaction with my ex, “You get justice in heaven. On Earth, we have the law.”
Jesus recognized the law as our human attempt to create justice. And, he seems to suggest that human beings get out of the law business entirely. “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.”
So, does this mean that we sit idly by, staying out of the fray of human interaction to preserve our own Godliness?
I don’t think so. Jesus admonishes against judging against other people, but he’s the first to call a particular act evil. He recognizes that all humans, with the exception of himself, do evil. Yet we also are told that all of us are created in the image of God.
Jesus lived in a culture, as do we, that has a lot of laws. Yet when asked what the most important laws are, he said the first is to love God, and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself, which I’ve yet to see in any penal codes. Moses’ law contains a lot of “thou shalt nots,” but Jesus seems to be more of a “thou shalt” person.
Doesn’t loving your neighbor mean actually going out of your way to do good? This message comes with a warning, “The measure you give will be the measure you get back.” Or, if you’re stingy with forgiveness, God may be stingy with you.
This part of the reading gave me some problems. The first part of the passage is all about going beyond human law, or our standards of justice. I think this second part also calls for us to go beyond human ideas of fairness and justice. Our God is never stingy. If God’s justice was the same as our human justice, none of us would make it past 18.
So what is Jesus really asking us to do. First, I believe that He is asking us to act! His examples of turning the other cheek, and giving more than is asked or demanded of us, are all about responding. Someone may take from us, but if we have the means, we are required to give, as well. We are asked to do more than what we human beings consider fair.
I recently saw a movie about Friedrich Bonhoeffer, the prolific German theologian who was an outspoken anti-Nazi. By nature, a pacifist, Bonhoeffer became active in the Resistance and was hung by the Nazis just before the end of World War II.
Bonhoeffer believed that God’s grace has to be earned. He wrote that “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance . . . Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock . . . It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”
I don’t believe God withholds grace, but I do believe we withhold grace from ourselves when we fail to do what we believe to be God’s will.
Today, as always, we are confronted by people doing evil, evil things. And we are confronted about what we are personally supposed to do about it. Many people choose to react ONLY when this evil impacts them personally. But I don’t believe this is what Jesus means by “turn the other cheek.”
Jesus says we have to do something about it. The Gospel says we must do more — and yet we must preserve a commitment to nonviolence and to not stooping into hate for evildoers, who are still children of God. This is definitely costly grace. Bonhoeffer, Gandhi and Martin Luther King were martyred, but their sacrifices — and those of many, many others — eventually changed the world.
The advances they produced are always at risk of being lost again. Each new generation is called upon to be active against evil. It is not enough to turn the other cheek. The Gospel asks us to do more.
Writing a letter; sending a check; distributing information about rights may not seem like much. But we know that these little things can add up —- and that we can prepare to do more. We are called to think about what “more” is for each of us. What are we willing to risk? At what point do we go from turning the other cheek – and on to protecting others, to answering God’s call to love, to doing more?
Amen.
