Tangential learning
When I was young I read a lot, which was mostly mom's fault. I also tended to read way beyond my nominal grade-level, which meant that I was often confronted with words, phrases, or concepts I didn't understand. My mother, of course, having been an educator, always answered my requests for explanation by saying, "Look it up," essentially employing STFW before there was a W. On the off chance I'd ask my father, I'd get sarcasm - "Dad, where are the Carpathian Mountains?" "I don't know where your mother keeps anything." - which naturally is how I contracted sarcasm myself. Having left the condition untreated is probably the proximate cause of my cynicism as well.
When I was young looking something up meant using another book, unlike today where you can STFW with a simple drag-and-right-click if you choose the right browser. Digging out the big ol'dictionary, or worse yet having to slag through volumes of the encyclopedia, always seemed like a chore, but if I really wanted to know the answer to my question that badly.... This is where I learned the art of tangential learning, which is inefficient as hell, but certainly makes life interesting. Sometimes it would take me half and hour just to get to the dictionary page containing the word I originally wanted, as I would get distracted by interesting looking keywords at the tops of other pages passed on the way. And I could get lost in encyclopedic cross-references all day long.
So it was today that I started out innocently catching up on email after a weekend away, and spiraled off to a reading of Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion. From there, in the process of trying to decipher wheat was probably a readily understood cultural reference among well-read Brits in the early 20th century, I stumbled on this essay on atonement in Christian theology, and tangentially on socio-political protest, that's probably the most interesting bit of Christian thinking I've read in years.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you
to go one mile, go with him two miles.” (Matthew 5:39-41)
There are no concrete statistics, but I would suspect that these words are amongst the most famous that Jesus ever spoke. And, of course, with that goes the admission that they are surely also amongst the most ignored. The trouble is that they seem unrealistic, naive and irrelevant. How do you give more to a government that only uses what it has to oppress? How do you turn the other cheek to weapons of mass distraction? Can Jesus really mean what he says here - are his followers meant to be passive door-mats, standing by and suffering silently while evil flourishes? Suddenly what appears to be one of Christ’s most ethical sayings seems essentially unethical!
I believe that Jesus means for his words to be taken seriously, but I don’t believe that he is calling for passive inaction. Christ is here teaching to not fight violence done against us with violence against our oppressors - or, as Paul later put it, not to repay evil with evil (Rom. 12:17). When Jesus says, "if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also," we need to see that the most natural way for someone to strike us on the right cheek is with the back of the hand. However, when Jesus spoke these words he was addressing people who would never consider striking an equal in such a humiliating way. In fact, to do so carried a heavy fine. Therefore, following Walter Wink, [footnote: See Engaging the Powers, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press) pp. 176-184] it seems reasonable to conclude that in turning the cheek the oppressed person is refusing to be humiliated. The oppressor can now either strike with the right fist (and acknowledge that he is facing an equal), strike with his left hand and violate his own laws and customs, or desist from his violence altogether.
The same message is being conveyed in Jesus’ other examples. Jewish law permitted a creditor to take someone’s tunic as security when lending to the poor; they would have nothing else to offer as a guarantee of payment (Exodus 22:25-27; Deut. 24:10-13, 7). However, the creditor had to return the tunic each night so that the poor person might not be forced to sleep naked. In the scene that Jesus describes - which seems to take place in a court-room setting - if the poor person was to remove their cloak as well as their tunic they would be exposing themselves in public, thus bringing shame upon the person who caused their nakedness. Moreover, they would be highlighting the inhumanity of the exploitative imbalance of wealth and a society that puts the poor at the mercy of the rich.
Finally, Jesus pictures a scenario where a Roman soldier has forced a Jew to carry his back-pack. According to Roman law, soldiers were allowed to compel someone to carry a burden for them, but this was strictly limited to one mile. This limitation apparently served to protect the oppressed labourer, but Jesus teaches his followers to embarrass those who would impose such laws by demonstrating that they can keep going another mile. The Roman soldier thus runs the risk of being punished by his superiors and might think twice about enforcing such help in the future.
Each of these examples are summed up by Paul when he writes:
"If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head."
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
(Romans 12:20-21)
A number of lessons from the life of Gandhi capture this well. It is well known that Gandhi eschewed violence and looked to Jesus as his inspiration in that. On one occasion he is discussing this with an Anglican clergyman who suggests that Jesus might not have literally meant for us to turn the other cheek. Gandhi disagrees and argues that doing so reminds our oppressors of our humanity and the inhumanity of their actions. This is powerful and disarming. At a number of points in his 'career' Gandhi deliberately went into situations where he knew he was risking his life. His intention was to expose the brutality of British rule and to show the world that India would not give up and that this oppression would not conquer their peaceful resistance. Gandhi was simultaneously demonstrating his own strength and revealing the weakness and cruelty of this foreign oppression.
Similarly, Martin Luther King claimed that his goal was to awaken a sense of shame within his white oppressors and thus to challenge their mistaken sense of superiority. This reminds me of a story I head about a black woman walking along the street with her two children when a white man spat in her face. She stopped and said, "Thank you, and now for the children." The man was, understandably, taken aback and didn't know how to respond. This woman had, in effect, beaten her oppressor and stripped him of his power.
I suggest that it is precisely this kind of 'resistance' that Jesus is talking about. He is, as is made clear by Paul after him, both prohibiting violent retribution and encouraging creative non-violent struggle. As Weaver states, Jesus "was teaching non-violent ways for oppressed people to take the initiative, to affirm their humanity, to expose and [thus] neutralize exploitative circumstances." By living this way Christians demonstrate the Life of the kingdom of God and oppose the tyranny of death and its violent expressions.
When I was young looking something up meant using another book, unlike today where you can STFW with a simple drag-and-right-click if you choose the right browser. Digging out the big ol'dictionary, or worse yet having to slag through volumes of the encyclopedia, always seemed like a chore, but if I really wanted to know the answer to my question that badly.... This is where I learned the art of tangential learning, which is inefficient as hell, but certainly makes life interesting. Sometimes it would take me half and hour just to get to the dictionary page containing the word I originally wanted, as I would get distracted by interesting looking keywords at the tops of other pages passed on the way. And I could get lost in encyclopedic cross-references all day long.
So it was today that I started out innocently catching up on email after a weekend away, and spiraled off to a reading of Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion. From there, in the process of trying to decipher wheat was probably a readily understood cultural reference among well-read Brits in the early 20th century, I stumbled on this essay on atonement in Christian theology, and tangentially on socio-political protest, that's probably the most interesting bit of Christian thinking I've read in years.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you
to go one mile, go with him two miles.” (Matthew 5:39-41)
There are no concrete statistics, but I would suspect that these words are amongst the most famous that Jesus ever spoke. And, of course, with that goes the admission that they are surely also amongst the most ignored. The trouble is that they seem unrealistic, naive and irrelevant. How do you give more to a government that only uses what it has to oppress? How do you turn the other cheek to weapons of mass distraction? Can Jesus really mean what he says here - are his followers meant to be passive door-mats, standing by and suffering silently while evil flourishes? Suddenly what appears to be one of Christ’s most ethical sayings seems essentially unethical!
I believe that Jesus means for his words to be taken seriously, but I don’t believe that he is calling for passive inaction. Christ is here teaching to not fight violence done against us with violence against our oppressors - or, as Paul later put it, not to repay evil with evil (Rom. 12:17). When Jesus says, "if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also," we need to see that the most natural way for someone to strike us on the right cheek is with the back of the hand. However, when Jesus spoke these words he was addressing people who would never consider striking an equal in such a humiliating way. In fact, to do so carried a heavy fine. Therefore, following Walter Wink, [footnote: See Engaging the Powers, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press) pp. 176-184] it seems reasonable to conclude that in turning the cheek the oppressed person is refusing to be humiliated. The oppressor can now either strike with the right fist (and acknowledge that he is facing an equal), strike with his left hand and violate his own laws and customs, or desist from his violence altogether.
The same message is being conveyed in Jesus’ other examples. Jewish law permitted a creditor to take someone’s tunic as security when lending to the poor; they would have nothing else to offer as a guarantee of payment (Exodus 22:25-27; Deut. 24:10-13, 7). However, the creditor had to return the tunic each night so that the poor person might not be forced to sleep naked. In the scene that Jesus describes - which seems to take place in a court-room setting - if the poor person was to remove their cloak as well as their tunic they would be exposing themselves in public, thus bringing shame upon the person who caused their nakedness. Moreover, they would be highlighting the inhumanity of the exploitative imbalance of wealth and a society that puts the poor at the mercy of the rich.
Finally, Jesus pictures a scenario where a Roman soldier has forced a Jew to carry his back-pack. According to Roman law, soldiers were allowed to compel someone to carry a burden for them, but this was strictly limited to one mile. This limitation apparently served to protect the oppressed labourer, but Jesus teaches his followers to embarrass those who would impose such laws by demonstrating that they can keep going another mile. The Roman soldier thus runs the risk of being punished by his superiors and might think twice about enforcing such help in the future.
Each of these examples are summed up by Paul when he writes:
"If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head."
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
(Romans 12:20-21)
A number of lessons from the life of Gandhi capture this well. It is well known that Gandhi eschewed violence and looked to Jesus as his inspiration in that. On one occasion he is discussing this with an Anglican clergyman who suggests that Jesus might not have literally meant for us to turn the other cheek. Gandhi disagrees and argues that doing so reminds our oppressors of our humanity and the inhumanity of their actions. This is powerful and disarming. At a number of points in his 'career' Gandhi deliberately went into situations where he knew he was risking his life. His intention was to expose the brutality of British rule and to show the world that India would not give up and that this oppression would not conquer their peaceful resistance. Gandhi was simultaneously demonstrating his own strength and revealing the weakness and cruelty of this foreign oppression.
Similarly, Martin Luther King claimed that his goal was to awaken a sense of shame within his white oppressors and thus to challenge their mistaken sense of superiority. This reminds me of a story I head about a black woman walking along the street with her two children when a white man spat in her face. She stopped and said, "Thank you, and now for the children." The man was, understandably, taken aback and didn't know how to respond. This woman had, in effect, beaten her oppressor and stripped him of his power.
I suggest that it is precisely this kind of 'resistance' that Jesus is talking about. He is, as is made clear by Paul after him, both prohibiting violent retribution and encouraging creative non-violent struggle. As Weaver states, Jesus "was teaching non-violent ways for oppressed people to take the initiative, to affirm their humanity, to expose and [thus] neutralize exploitative circumstances." By living this way Christians demonstrate the Life of the kingdom of God and oppose the tyranny of death and its violent expressions.