VII Epiphany – February 20, 2011 – Year A (RCL)
Our bishop makes it a point to pray daily for her clergy colleagues and for the congregations they serve.
She also is careful to keep “the diocesan household” –by which she means everybody in the Diocese—informed, when there’s something she thinks all of us should be praying about or someone all of us should be praying for.
And every once in a while she shoots her clergy a suggestion or two about how we might approach a particularly ticklish set of Sunday scriptures from the pulpit, as she did in a helpful email message to us this week.
In this instance Cate reminded us of Lutheran theologian Walter Wink’s surprising explanation of Jesus’ “stubborn” insistence that we turn the other cheek, give up our cloaks as well as our coats, and go the second mile.
(You may already be familiar with Dr. Wink’s explanation, if you’ve heard Bishop Cate preach much, because she has often referred to it to illustrate how beneficial engaging in serious Bible study can be.)
When trying to figure out some of Jesus’ more challenging words, it does help to remember to whom for the most part he was addressing those words.
For the most part Jesus was addressing his words to people who considered themselves “one down”—maybe even more than “one down”.
As I think I have mentioned before, Jesus didn’t bother much with what we might call “the powers that be” until the very end of his earthly life, when the implications of the ministry he was offering collided with those powers head on.
The people with whom Jesus concerned himself most were people who were victims of the political system that was in place, and most of his teachings—not unlike the teachings of a Gandhi or the teachings of a Martin Luther King, Jr.—centered around how to beat the system.
Walter Wink’s less benevolent term for “the powers that be”, past or present, “the domination system”, says it all.
It suggests by its very nature that it can’t be fought successfully on its own terms.
(As far as “the domination system” was concerned, when Jesus went head on with it at the very end, Jesus lost—or at least it seemed that way.)
The “domination system” for the people who crowded around Jesus meant the Romans, specifically, the Roman army, and to a lesser extent their collaborators, the religious leaders—the priests, the scribes, and the Pharisees.
And it seemed that there were only two ways you could hope to beat the system—the old “tried and true”: fight or flight.
You could either take up arms against it like an outlaw and die or you could “make peace with it” in some way and live, even if “living” meant settling for a lesser role in society: like that of a collaborator or a fugitive or a slave.
But, as Dr. Wink convincingly points out in his path-finding study, Engaging the Powers, if the people who crowded around Jesus listened carefully enough to his words, what they learned about was a different way, a third way, a time-honored alternative to either fight or flight: non-violent resistance, in spite of the fact that Jesus is quoted as saying in this morning’s passage from Matthew’s Gospel: “But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.”
We have to respect Dr. Wink’s contention that the word “resist” here is a mistranslation of the original Greek and that the closest to what Jesus actually said is “Do not retaliate against an evildoer.”
Otherwise Jesus’ masterful instruction in non-violent guerilla warfare which follows makes no sense because all three suggestions he makes are guaranteed to antagonize the “evildoer” in each case—in other words, resist all you want; just do no violence.
So how does turning the other cheek, if someone strikes you on the right side of the face, have the desired effect of antagonizing the perpetrator?
It helps if you imagine yourself being back-handed by a superior, the way a master, however unadvisedly, might reprimand a slave, only to force your antagonist to deliver the second blow using the palm of the hand, thus acknowledging you to be an equal!
You might escape further injury, or you might not, Dr. Wink hastens to add; it would likely depend upon your station in life; but either way you would have made your point.
The second case proves to be a bit more complicated.
Why would anyone take you to court over a coat?
It could happen, again according to Dr. Wink, if it was all you had to offer as collateral for a loan (and, believe it or not, the equivalent of foreclosure on their property had left much of Jesus’ audience impoverished).
If your creditor successfully sued you for your coat, then insisting that he might as well take your last item of clothing, your cloak (maybe even taking it off in the courtroom), would be more humiliating for him than it would be for you.
Finally, the only person who could force you to go a mile was a Roman foot-soldier, who could require you to carry the equivalent of his backpack for him for up to a mile, but no further, or he would be in violation of Roman law and subject to punishment.
Not that such examples of non-violent defiance will necessarily “avoid trouble”, as Dr. Wink hastens to add, “ …But the point has been made. …And when large numbers begin behaving [like this] (and Jesus was addressing a crowd), you have a social revolution on your hands.”
Funny that Dr. Wink should mention that, given the fact that in the last few weeks large numbers have indeed begun behaving like this in principality after principality across the Middle East and even in, of all places, Madison, Wisconsin, and Indianapolis, Indiana.
In the Middle East people are demanding the freedom that access to the internet, for one thing, seems to have awakened them to; in this country state capital buildings are being overrun by disgruntled government employees, including public school teachers, protesting budget cuts and measures to limit collective bargaining that many legislators feel constrained to pass because as one governor was heard to say: “We’re broke.”
Actually this kind of stuff could be happening all over the world, and we may just be beginning to hear about it.
Whatever has been triggered and whatever has triggered it, it’s definitely in the air, and it’s not going to go away soon; in spite of the turmoil people are listening to each other in ways that they never have before.
And that’s good because the more conscious people all over the world can become of our common humanity the more reason there is for us to have hope, even if, politically, we also know, deep down, how important it is to maintain what is a delicate balance at all costs.
After all, what we’re dealing with here are collections of human beings that somehow have to live together, that somehow have to get along, that somehow have to help each other survive as riders on this planet.
We don’t need the Bishop to tell us that this is something we need to be praying about as hard as we can.
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” is what the writer of Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus say, as if our being given what sounds like an impossible assignment is any help.
What might Jesus have meant, if in fact he said this?
Theologian Marcus Borg, writing in his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, maintains that Luke’s version of this saying: “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” may be closer to the mark.
And Walter Wink points out that the original Greek in the passage from Matthew, rather than “perfect”, is better translated as “complete” or “all-encompassing“ or “all-embracing”: “Be all-embracing, therefore, as your heavenly Father is all-embracing.”
It also helps to know that by the time Jesus got hold of the saying at the end of this morning’s lesson from the Hebrew scriptures, the one that reads “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”, “neighbor” was no longer limited to someone in your immediate family or someone in your community or someone of your own nationality; “neighbor” meant your enemy; “neighbor” meant anyone you happened to meet; “neighbor” meant everyone.
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