Well, today is All Saint’s Day, and so, appropriately, here we have Jesus’ instructions to the saints: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. . . . Do to others as you would have them do to you." [Luke 6:27-31]
Feeling overwhelmed yet? I am. These are extraordinarily powerful words, and like all powerful words, they carry with them a great deal of tension. They contain within them the capacity for great good and for great evil, depending on how they’re used. These words have been used to lift people up and to put them down. They’ve been used to free people and to oppress them. Depending on how they’ve been interpreted, they’ve been used to give people new life and they’ve been used to kill them. That’s why they’re so powerful, and that’s why we can’t just hear them without really exploring what they mean and how they’ve been interpreted
The interpretation that we’re used to hearing when it comes to these words, the most obvious one, is that Jesus’ words about loving your enemy and doing good to those who hate you mean that we should shun payback. In other words, we need to leave revenge, retribution, vengeance, and all those things that incorporate the idea of "an eye for an eye" behind. We need to leave the whole concept of payback to God. It’s not our domain, it’s not for us to carry out. Period. So if somebody says something nasty about you, Jesus’ words forbid us from saying something nasty about them. If you’re standing on the bus and somebody bumps into you or steals your seat, Jesus is telling us that we don’t get to hipcheck them back, or stand in their way as they’re trying to get off the bus, or even mutter mean things under our breath. If you’re driving in traffic and somebody cuts in front of you, Jesus’ instruction to the saints means that we don’t get to cut them off, or tailgate them, or block them from getting back into our lane a second time. Forget it - no dice. We don’t get to behave that way if we’re saints in the kingdom of God. Jesus is telling us to be forgiving, Jesus is telling us to get out of their way, Jesus is even telling us to be gracious enough to invite them to take place ahead of us. Jesus’ instructions to us are clear.
Or are they? You see, there is an assumption being made when people say things like what I’ve said just now. There is a deadly assumption being made when we interpret Jesus’ words to mean that we must automatically forgive, forget, and even allow people to do things that may be hurting us. And the assumption is this - that the people who are doing all the forgiving, forgetting, and allowing are people who have the power to stand up for themselves. When we tell people to turn their backs on revenge and payback, we are assuming that they have a choice in the matter - that they have the power to exact revenge and payback and that now they should choose not to use that power.
But, you see, the truth of the world is that there are people in it who don’t have that kind of power. There are people in the world who don’t have any kind of power at all, and when they are told to love their enemies, and turn the other cheek, and do good to those who hate them, that is a death sentence. I said that there was tension that came with this text, and that it contained the power to do great evil, and here it is. When people are made powerless, when their power has been taken away from them and there’s nothing they can do about it, then these words bring oppression, not freedom. Here’s what I mean:
- These words have been used to keep slaves obedient. "If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also." If your master hits you, well, be a good Christian and take what’s coming.
- These words have been used to encourage pacifism during genocide. "Pray for those who abuse you." This week is Holocaust Education Week, and it is a sad truth of the church that during the Holocaust in Germany, the Christian churches used these words to avoid confronting the evil powers of Nazism, and millions of Jews were shipped off to concentration camps and killed.
- These words have been used to keep victims of abuse from speaking out or confronting their abusers. "Bless those who curse you." Try and say something nice when they yell, don’t provoke them, just smile and don’t talk about the problem.
But let me tell you, flat out, that this is NOT how Jesus meant for these words to be used. God would NEVER want God’s words to be used to justify oppression, or to put people down, or to let them be treated as any less than the children of God that they are. The overwhelming evidence from the Bible shows us again and again that God sides with the oppressed.
- From the slaves in Egypt
- to the widows and orphans during the time of the prophets
- to the lepers and prostitutes in Jesus’ time
- to the persecuted Gentiles during the time of the apostles,
God has always sided with the oppressed against their oppressors. And that is the context, the only context, with which we are to interpret Jesus’ words to us.
So what, then, does Jesus mean when he tells the saints that "if anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt?" Well, we’re in the Gospel of Luke, but if you read the same thing in the Gospel of Matthew, you’ll hear something a little bit different. In Matthew, Jesus says, "if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also." In that little adjective ‘right,’ we find all the difference between allowing one’s self to be hit and claiming the truth of Jesus’ message. You see, during Jesus’ time, it was common for masters to hit their servants and for soldiers to hit their prisoners. But there were certain rules about how that happened. And the acceptable way that someone in a position of power would hit someone underneath their power would be with the back of their right hand on the right cheek of the person facing them. This way of hitting clearly conveyed who was in charge and who wasn’t. But the flip side of that, the side which is relevant for us now, was that it was unacceptable for a superior to hit an inferior with the palm of their hand, or with a fist, on the left side of the person facing them. For whatever reason, that kind of strike was considered shameful for the person doing the hitting. It made them "less of a man," so to speak. It made them less of a person in the eyes of the world.
Which means that when Jesus said, "if anyone hits you on the right cheek, turn the other also," he wasn’t saying, "let them hit you again." He was saying, "don’t let them treat you like an inferior again. Shame them into seeing what they’ve done. Confront them with the truth that they are less of a person because of what they’re doing to you, not more. Expose their abuse of power for being exactly that."
The same reasoning is behind Jesus’s instruction to give someone your shirt when they demand your cloak. You see, the reason for taking another person’s cloak was as collateral for a loan. If someone borrowed money, they had to give their cloak as collateral since they couldn’t live without it. It kept them from freezing to death at night. So it was an abuse to take someone’s cloak and keep it overnight. And the way to highlight that abuse was, in Jesus’ words, "to give them your shirt also." If you give someone your shirt, well... you’re naked. Not only are you most definitely going to die from exposure, but as you walk naked through the town square and in front of the city gates, people are going to start asking, "Why are you naked? Who took your shirt? Who took your cloak? Who abused you in such a way?" And so the person who has taken your coat is, once again, publicly exposed and forced to deal with their guilt and abuse of power.
You see, Jesus never hesitated to expose oppression or abuse. He flat out confronted the Pharisees when they rejected the lepers and prostitutes. He called them hypocrites and a brood of vipers and named their sin for what it was, an abuse of authority of one group over another. Jesus was not subtle or discreet about stopping oppression when he saw it. I mean, for goodness’ sake, he struck Paul blind in the middle of the road to Damascus in order to show him that his murder of Christians was wrong.
Jesus also never advocated forgiveness without ignoring or minimizing what the sinner had done. In Luke, chapter 17, Jesus says, "if another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive." Jesus doesn’t tell us to overlook the sin, or to explain it away, or to make it any less. Jesus tells us to rebuke the offender - and to offer forgiveness only when there is repentance. Not before. It seems contrary to what we know about Jesus that he would say this, but there it is.
But Jesus said all these things, not because he was out to get sinners, not because he was trying to crush the oppressors, but because he loved them, because he was trying to save them. The thing is that abuse and oppression don’t hurt just the abused and the oppressed. They also hurt the people perpetrating the violence and hate. People who abuse their power over others aren’t healthy, or whole, or happy. Their violence is killing them just as it is killing their victims, and Jesus doesn’t want that either. But the only way to stop that from happening is to be open about what is happening, not to deny it or minimize it or ignore it.
But let’s be honest. That’s hard. It is incredibly difficult to expose abuse and oppression. The reason that the churches in Germany were silent about the oppression of the Jews wasn’t because they didn’t feel like speaking up. It was because there were risks to speaking up. They had to be open to the ugliness around them - not an easy thing to be. They had to be prepared that the Nazis would turn on them next. They had to risk church members leaving because of what they said. It is difficult to turn the other cheek, and give away your shirt, and publicly expose these offenses for what they are.
But it can be done, and it is being done all around the world, because God is onside. It can and does happen because God gives us the power of the Holy Spirit, which is, according to our Ephesians reading today, "a spirit of wisdom and revelation." The Holy Spirit enables us to identify and expose oppression and abuse for what it is. It gives us the authority
- to say that the murder of millions in the Sudan is genocide;
- to say that the abuse of the prisoners in Iraq is torture;
- to say that forcing new immigrant workers in Canada to work more than 60 hours a week on less than minimum wage pay is slavery;
- to say that when family members who are rough with their loved ones it’s abuse.
There are risks to talking about abuse, but there are rewards, too.
And the reward is that by being honest about sin and violence, we are paving the way so that God can begin to work in people’s hearts and free them from their sin. Being open and honest about oppression, confronting the oppressor with their sin, is the way that we actually follow what Jesus said, and "do good to those who hate [us]" and "love [our] enemies." The best thing for those who resort to oppression and violence is to come face to face with their own sin so that they can turn to God for healing and forgiveness. The reward of turning the other cheek and exposing sin is that it brings us all one step closer to being whole together in God.
Because the ultimate reality and our ultimate hope is that God, through Jesus Christ, has made change and peace possible. You see, God’s love for us, and Jesus’ instructions to the saints, are meant to free us from the bonds of oppression, both us as oppressors and us as oppressed. They are not meant to keep us in chains and slavery, just as they are not meant to crush those enslaved to committing violence. God’s intention is to gather us all together, both saints and sinners, and to make us whole again in God’s kingdom. That is our great prayer and our great hope, and so we say, together with the psalmist, "Praise the Lord! Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise in the assembly of the faithful." Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment