Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 20, 2011

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It seems pretty clear, doesn’t it. Jesus says: Do not resist an evildoer. Turn the other cheek. Give your cloak also. Go the extra mile. Love your enemy. At least since Christianity capitulated to the lure of imperial power in the fourth century CE Christians have done a really lousy job of following those directives of the one they nonetheless claimed as their Lord and Savior, but the directives themselves are pretty clear. Don’t resist. Turn the other cheek. Love those who persecute you. Simple. Direct. Unambiguous.

We have just witnessed a revolution in Egypt. The people of that ancient land rose up and forced from office (or at least created the conditions within which the Egyptian military could force from office) a tyrant whose regime had been oppressing them for thirty years, and his predecessors had been doing for a lot longer than that. When we compare what the people of Egypt did in the past few weeks with these teachings of Jesus we see, don’t we, that they violated his directives at every turn. There is no doubt that Mubarak was an evildoer in the sense that Jesus intended. He oppressed the people. He imprisoned innocent people. He tortured people. He murdered people. He deprived the people of their most basic human rights. And the US supported him in all of that, but that’s a different story. He slapped people around but good. He didn’t sue them to take their coat, but his policies made sure most of them were too poor to buy a new coat when they needed one. He did maintain Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, which was a good thing; but with regard to his own people he was an evildoer pure and simple.

And the people of Egypt, some of them Christians, resisted him. They shut down his country, and theirs, until he left. They resisted him, and they won. We might think that’s a good thing, but then we read Jesus saying don’t resist an evildoer, turn the other cheek, and love your enemies. So we have to conclude that the people of Egypt acted wrongly, don’t we? Many of us cheered them and their victory, but that was un-Christian of us, wasn’t it? We just forgot the teaching of the one we call Lord and Savior, didn’t we?

Well, no we didn’t. What the people of Egypt did was, for the most part with a few exceptions, precisely the kind of thing Jesus is counseling in these lines from the Sermon on the Mount because, you see, those lines don’t really mean what they sound to us like they mean. Some of you have heard or read me say before what I’m about to say now, but this stuff is so important that we can’t say it often enough. Jesus’ words here, do not resist and evil doer, turn the other cheek, give the cloak also, go the extra mile, love your enemies, do not in fact counsel the kind of passivism that they are often misunderstood to counsel. The interpretation of those words that follows comes from the theologian Walter Wink. If you haven’t read his book The Powers That Be I strongly urge you to read it. If you want a condensed version of what he says about these lines from Matthew you can read the section on nonviolence in my book. Or take a copy of this sermon for an even shorter account. This is really important stuff.

There’s more to Wink’s analysis than I can give you in a short sermon, but to show you what Jesus is really talking about here I want to focus on two major parts of Wink’s analysis. The first is his discussion of the word in the Greek original that’s usually translated “resist” in the phrase “do not resist an evildoer.” It turns out that “resist,” without more, isn’t a very good translation. The Greek word that Matthew uses here to convey Jesus’ meaning is a word that elsewhere in Greek literature is used to refer to armies going out in military ranks to resist an enemy. The word really should be translated “resist violently,” or “resist with armed force.” That is the meaning Matthew’s Greek-speaking audience would have taken from his words. They would not have understood Jesus to be saying don’t resist an evildoer at all.

Next I want to address the actual meaning, according to Wink, of turn the other cheek. This one has been used again and again to tell people just to take it when someone hits or otherwise abuses or oppresses them, and it turns out that that is absolutely not what it means. Note that Matthew quite explicitly says “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek.” We tend to skip over that word “right,” and when we do we miss the meaning here entirely. We start by understanding that in the ancient world no one used the left hand for anything. It was considered unclean, and there was no understanding that some people are naturally left handed. (That, by the way, is why some of you left-handed folks even in very recent times may have had teachers who tried to make you write with your right hand. There’s also a direct parallel between that understanding of handedness and the ancient understanding of sexual orientation, but that’s a story for another sermon.) So Matthew’s “if anyone strikes you” assumes that the strike comes from the assailant’s right hand. Now, the only way one person can, with the right hand, hit another on the other’s right cheek is backhanded. You simply can’t do it with a front of the hand slap or overhand. So the phrase “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek” assumes that the blow is with the back of the assailant’s hand. The ancient world in which this scenario is set was very hierarchical. Everything depended on one’s place in society, including how you hit someone else. A slap with the back of the hand is how a superior assaulted an inferior. How a master struck a slave. How a parent hit a child. How a man hit a woman. The line “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek” assumes that we are dealing with a person in a superior or dominant position striking another in an inferior or subordinate position in the social hierarchy.

Now what happens if the person in the subordinate position who has been given a backhanded slap on the right cheek by someone in a superior social position turns the other cheek? The other cheek is the left cheek, and the only way the assailant can strike the victim on the left cheek with the assailant’s right hand is with a forehand motion or with an overhand motion. In the hierarchical order of the time that was how equals fought. So look at what the victim here turning the other cheek does. It puts the superior assailant in a very awkward position. If he continues the assault he has recognized the subordinate person as an equal. So either he recognizes his victim as his equal or he breaks off the assault. The victim wins either way. In this example of how we are to act in the presence of violence turning the other cheek is not at all simply allowing oneself to be hit again. It is nothing less than creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil, in this case the evil of violence against one’s person. We don’t have time to go into them here, but Jesus’ other examples of giving the coat also and going the second mile are also examples of such creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil.

So did those Egyptians who brought down the tyrant Mubarak violate the teachings of Jesus? No. They didn’t. For the most part they exemplified those teachings of Jesus. They were faced with an evildoer, someone who was oppressing them and impoverishing their lives both materially and spiritually. So they resisted, but they did it nonviolently, for the most part at least, and it’s the nonviolent resistance that brought Mubarak down not the few incidents of stone throwing or other violence by the protestors. Nonviolently they brought the country to a halt. Nonviolently they created a situation in which the tyrant simply could not continue. Of course, it was the nonviolence of the Egyptian military that was a major factor, but the military in Egypt is a conscript army, and the soldiers are a part of the people. They too acted nonviolently toward their own people even though they had all the tools and training they needed to unleash massive violence—tools and training they mostly got from us by the way.

So what are we to learn from these dramatic events in Egypt? When I or anyone else preaches nonviolence we often hear “But it doesn’t work.” Really? The tyrant Mubarak is gone, and the crowds who drove him out did it nonviolently. Egypt today is but the latest in a long list in instances in which nonviolence worked to end oppression, and in every case it’s safe to say that violent resistance would not have succeeded because the oppressors have such military might. Nonviolence drove the British out of India. Nonviolence ended apartheid in South Africa. Nonviolence ended Jim Crow in the American South. Nonviolence brought down the Berlin wall and ended Communism in most of Eastern Europe. And all of those things happened in the lifetimes of many of us here in this room. There are myriad stories of nonviolence working on the personal level to stop assaults too. It just isn’t true that nonviolence doesn’t work.

More importantly, we learn that the way of Jesus, which must be the way of the Christian, is neither violence not powerless passivity. It is what Wink calls a third way, a way between violence and passivity. It is the way of creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil. Turning the other cheek turns the tables on a superior assailant, and that’s just an example of what Jesus had in mind. How we use creative, assertive nonviolent resistance to oppose oppression, to oppose injustice, is not always an easy question to answer. But it is the question a Christian must ask. For it is the question that sets on the third way, the way of Jesus. Amen.