Preacher David Hoke tells a great story about a weary truck driver who pulled his rig into an all night truck stop late one summer evening in Broken Bow, NE. He was tired and hungry. The waitress had just served him when three tough looking, leath-er-jacketed bikers of the Hell's Angels type decided to give him a hard time. Not only did they verbally abuse him, one grabbed the hamburger off his plate, another took a handful of his French fries, and the third picked up his coffee and began to drink it. The trucker didn’t respond as you might expect. Without saying a word, he rose, picked up his check, walked to the cash register at the front of the room and gave the check and his money to the waitress, who watched him through the door as the big truck drove away into the night. When she went back to the bikers’ table, one of them said to her, “Well, he's not much of a man, is he?” She replied, “I don't know about that, but he sure isn't much of a truck driver. He just ran over three motorcycles on his way out.”
Many of us are probably thinking, “Good for him!” That’s the natural human re-sponse to retaliate when we’ve been wronged. As the old saying goes, “Don’t get mad, get even!” The problem is, that most of us don’t want to stop there. We really prefer, “Don’t just get even, come out on top!” Part of the problem with vengeance is that it just plain feels so good.
Getting even has been a primary goal of human beings since the beginning of time. “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” is a really satisfying code. The only problem is that if everyone indulges this impulse, sooner or later, as the saying goes, the entire world will be blind and toothless. Because emotions take control, the hurt done to me always looks bigger than the hurt done to you. It’s a trick of perspective – you can’t avoid it. Justice for one side never looks like justice to the other side. And so the spiral begins.
And contributing to that spiral of anger is diametrically opposed to everything Je-sus had been teaching his disciples and to us, contrary to what he had modeled for them and us, contrary to the kind of behavior that is required of the citizens of God’s kingdom. God’s people do not act like this.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.... No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. [Ro 12:17-21]
Yes, people have a right to justice. As citizens of this world we are called to seek for justice, and fight for justice. But not when it’s our own rights that are at stake. When it’s personal, Jesus calls us as citizens of God’s kingdom to opt out of the world’s system.
So does this passage justify pacifism? Many interpreters throughout history have thought so. Before Constantine, Christian leaders rejected participation in the Roman army. They cited not only this passage, but the arrest of Jesus, when Jesus rebukes the disciple who cuts the ear off one of the guard, saying “Then Jesus said to him, “all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” [Mt 26:52] Matthew himself may have seen political meaning in this text; the Zealots, who practiced armed resistance against the Roman occupation, made life much harder for everyone.
But other passages in the Gospels push us in a different direction. New Testament scholar Dr. Dale Allison points out that “Each situation ... in 38-42 is one in which the disciple alone is insulted or injured. But what does one do if others are being insulted or injured? . . . in the parable in Mt 18:23-35 a king . . . releases a servant from debt. But when that servant mistreats another, the king intervenes with punishment.” He further notes that passive submission when others are being hurt is not an act of love, which is, as we know, the fulfillment of the commandment.
First of all, let us look more closely at the context. Jesus has just said that he has not come “to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.” [Mt 5:17] And he begins the lesson by quoting from the Old Testament, “You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’” [Ex 21:24; Lev 24:20; Dt 19:21] That is the principle of exact justice. The punishment must fit the crime precisely. Exodus is explicit: “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise;” Leviticus adds “fracture for fracture.”
And these laws are, in fact, great improvements over other law systems current in the ancient Near East. Elsewhere, the punishment varied according to the status of both the victim and the accused. Mosaic law invented the idea of equal treatment under the law.
But now we’re getting a new look at the concept of justice. Both of these passages deal with civil justice. A person charged with a crime would be brought to the civil authorities, tried, and punishment would be ordered. There are, of course, two reasons for this process: to reduce crime and to assure fair punishment. Personal retaliation wasn’t allowed; in fact, this law explicitly checks the human desire to take matters into our own hands. But of course it didn’t remain a limitation; people then and now still quote it in order to justify vigilantism. And that impulse is what Jesus is talking about.
At this point in his sermon, Jesus is moving away from our sins, the 10 commandments that we spend so much time trying to weasel out of. Now we’re looking at how we deal with other peoples’ sins, especially the ones which impact us. And instead of urging us to respond to those sins with justice, he urges us to act with grace. Not just mercy; mercy responds to another’s pain, not their unfairness. Not just forgiveness, either. You can forgive someone without going out of your way to help them. Grace includes mercy and forgiveness, but it goes beyond them. What is grace? It is undeserved favor. It’s a present not for an occasion, not when it’s expected, but just be-cause, out of the blue, out of love. And it’s not only doing more than we deserve, it’s getting even more than we could imagine asking for.
Responding to sinners with grace imitates God’s own treatment of us. As Paul pointed out in his letter to the Romans, God didn’t wait for us to be sorry for what we had done, or to clean up our act: “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” [Rom 5:8] It’s the only way to get out of the destructive spiral that seeking revenge sets in motion.
Jesus sets out another approach, a completely different attitude: “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” [v.39] Understand that Jesus is not forbidding self defense. Revenge is not a matter of self-defense. It’s not about preventing future wrongs, either; it’s about getting even for past wrongs. And the issue at hand here is only a slap on the cheek, shorthand for the common insults and aggravations of daily living. And so Jesus suggests that the way to make peace - remember, peacemakers are God’s children - is to act according to Kingdom norms instead of according to the world’s.
I know that some of you may be thinking, “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t know the people I have to deal with. In the real world, if you don’t strike back people will just take advantage of you.”
That may be true. But consider the cost of living with your guard up, ready to de-fend yourself against all wrongs, real or imagined. What eventually happens is that you develop a cynical attitude, a negative filter that automatically views other people with suspicion. And that’s a soil in which nothing good can grow. There’s a better way.
And that other way is neither naive nor unrealistic. Jesus never asks anyone to flinch from the reality of evil in the world. The alternative that Jesus advocates isn’t to float dreamily through the world, believing good of everyone, never ready for disap-pointment, always taken by surprise when people fail to live up to your expectations. Jesus calls us to meet injustice squarely, head on, and turn it into an occasion for grace.
There are three key ingredients to being able to carry this out in practice.
The first, as I just hinted at, is to be realistic about the human condition. Those who expect perfection are doomed to disappointment, since, as Scripture reminds us, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” [Rom 3:23] Gracious people understand that human beings are prone to sin and selfishness and all sorts of evil, and they make allowances for that fact. They expect people to be imperfect, to be selfish or inconsiderate or forgetful or sometimes even dishonest or cruel. That doesn’t mean they approve of it. They just have the wisdom to dial down their sensitivity monitor. And if you want to know how to do that, just take a good look in the mirror.
Because the second key to practicing grace is having a deep understanding of your own imperfections. Later on in this same gospel Jesus says,
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” Or how can you say to your neighbor, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. [Mt 7:3 5]
When you start looking at your own faults honestly and comparing them to everyone else’s, frankly, there usually isn’t as much difference as we would like to think.
There are a lot of people out there who’ve made some really bad choices – even sinful choices - in their lives, and do you know what? I have too. Of course I’ve repented and changed my ways, but I can’t forget or disown the person I used to be. The predisposition to sin is just as strong in all of us. They may be different sins, and grace or circumstance may have kept you from acting on them, but we are none of us pure enough to point the finger at anyone. Remember what Jesus said about the woman caught in adultery? “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” [Jn 8:7b]
The third key to practicing grace is trusting God. Getting even is God’s job, because he is the only one who can see all the issues in the right perspective. That is why Paul wrote, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” [Rom 12:18-19]
Remember that during the sermon on the 6th commandment (the one against murder) we mentioned that only God can carry out precision bombing? Well, here we are again with the same lesson.
OK, now we have our three keys: Be realistic, be humble, and trust God. We’re now ready to walk through the door into God’s kingdom, and of course the door is Jesus. Entering that narrow gate isn’t easy; he never said it would be. But we pray every week, “Thy kingdom come.” If we really mean it, we have to start living by kingdom standards, instead of the world’s.
