Transformational
Matthew 5:38-48
Emmanuel Baptist Church
February 23, 2020; Rev. Kathy Donley
I read a sermon this week called The Most Important Passage in the Bible.[1] It was about these verses from Matthew and the preacher was seriously arguing that they are the most important verses in the whole Bible. Consider how many other important things are in the Bible – Resurrection is just one that comes to mind. I am not ready to say this is the most important passage in the Bible, but I agree that it ranks right up there near the top.
We remember that Jesus is speaking to the peasants, the working class people of Palestine. Last Sunday, I talked about how powerless they seemed in the face of the Roman occupation, and yet Jesus told them to keep on being God’s covenant people in spite of that. What he does in this passage is to help them find a power that they might not have realized they had, to exert some influence that could alter or even transform the situation.
Matthew writes, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek . . .” In Jesus’ time, your left hand was used for personal hygiene and since, there wasn't always a lot of water to wash with, it wasn't used for anything else. Using your left hand in public was a huge no-no. Now, in order for someone to strike you on the right cheek with their right hand, they would have to use with the back of their hand. This is the type of blow that a superior deals to an inferior -- in that culture, a master to a slave, a husband to a wife. It is a way of putting the subordinate back in their place. It was intend to humiliate a person.
The person who back-hands you expects you to submit to them, to accept your place in the pecking order. But if, instead of submitting, you turn your face so that they must strike your left cheek, you have just signaled something very different. You have asserted your equality as a human being. Now they have a choice – to hit you with a closed fist or an open palm on your left cheek. That is the kind of blow dealt to a worthy opponent and it may just make them stop and think.
Jesus is speaking to people who whose lives are burdened with systematic oppression. They may think their only choices are to submit or to retaliate. He offers a third way, which is resistance without violence. He offers them strategies, ways to take initiative which might transform the situation.
In the second example, he says that if someone sues you for your coat; give him your cloak as well. In his day, people wore just two pieces of clothing – underclothes and outer clothes. The coat was a person’s outer garment. It was often also their blanket at night. Sometimes it was the only thing a poor person had to put down as collateral on a loan.
Jesus’ audience is made up of poor people. They know that if they’re dragged into court for indebtedness, that the law is on the side of the wealthy. And Jesus says in that situation, when they take away your outer garment, give them your undergarment too. Jesus says “strip naked in the courtroom.” Nakedness was taboo in Israel, but the shame was upon those who caused or viewed the nakedness, not on the naked person.
Some of you will remember the film called “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” which we showed here a few years ago. It told the story of the end of the civil war in Liberia which happened because women who wanted peace went to the leaders who were not bringing it about. The women went to the place where they were gathered and surrounded them. Then they threatened to take off their clothes if the men did not immediately negotiate a peace agreement. That, along with other non-violent measures, brought peace to Libera because in that culture, seeing the naked person is shameful.
Jesus’ final example is about the Roman soldier. The Roman soldier could legally force anyone to carry his 70-pound pack for one mile, but just for one mile. Jesus is saying “when you come to that mile marker, you keep going.” That turns the tables on the soldier. He is no longer in charge because you are willingly carrying the pack, but you are violating military law. What if his centurion finds out? Now the situation is changed and there is the possibility of an unexpected outcome.
Jesus is not saying that the mistreated people should should put up with the abuse. Turning the other cheek is not about being a doormat, but about holding up a mirror to offensive behavior. It is a way of treating enemies with respect -- because it assumes that if they knew what they were doing was wrong they would try to change it. Loving our enemies is hard work; it means campaigning and struggling with them so that they give up their hate and become reconciled.
Jesus’ examples were from his time and culture. Initiatives that have the power to transform will also be dependent on the their context. Non-violent resistors have to be creative, adaptors, but the principles can work in any culture.
They can work in one-on-one encounters. In Cleveland one night, 21-year-old Shaquille got off the bus at 3 in the morning, coming home from his night shift, when he was faced by an attacker with a drawn gun. The attacker demanded that Shaquille give him everything he had. Shaquille gave him his wallet and his phone and began praying aloud for him. The man struck him with the gun. Shaquille continued to pray for him. The attacker paced back and forth and started talking about why he was doing this. It was his first robbery. He had no job and needed money. The robber stopped and said, “Man, keep your stuff. I’m sorry for this. You were the wrong type of person to do this to.” [2]
Transforming initiatives can also be part of larger scale social change movements. Like the Liberian peace process I mentioned, or Montgomery Bus boycott or lunch counter sit-ins. Even in a beauty pageant. During the swimsuit portion of the 2017 Miss Peru Pageant, each contestant was expected to recite her physical measurements. Instead, each one of them stepped up to the microphone, stated her name and the town she represented and delivered a statistical fact about violence experienced by women in the past few years.[3] Peru has the second highest rate of violence against women in Latin America. It was an interesting juxtaposition, holding up an internal mirror at an event which many would say objectifies women and forcing those who were there for entertainment to consider how the objectification of women is wrapped up in violence.
Some of us might appreciate these examples, and still be skeptical that non-violent resistance, no matter how creative, will actually prevail over real evil. Well, of course, it doesn’t always work, but, then again, neither does armed conflict.
There is now compelling research to confirm that nonviolence has more power to shape world politics than armed violent resistance. Erica Chenoweth is a political scientist at Harvard. She looked at hundreds of campaigns over the last century and found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent ones. They led to political change 53% of the time as compared to 26% for violent protests. [4]
She also found that it requires about 3.5% of the population to be actively engaged in the nonviolent campaign in order to be effective. “There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event,” she said.[5]
That seems incredible to me. And hopeful. It reinforces that preacher’s notion that this might just be the most important passage in the Bible. Jesus of Nazareth was so far ahead of his time.
Reading through the Sermon on the Mount this month, I have been struck by how well it builds upon itself. In the first part, the beatitudes, I picked up the notion of honor. Jesus credited his listeners as “honorable” even though they were pretty far down on the honor-shame hierarchy of their day. Then he encouraged them to express themselves in lives of faithfulness, to be salt and light, in a time and place where they felt completely powerless. And then here, he equips them with strategies to regain honor and assert a power they didn’t know they had.
Going back the beatitudes, verse 4 says “Honorable are those who mourn.” The English usually finishes, “for they shall be comforted.” But the Greek expression, parakaleo, doesn’t refer to the kind of comfort offered with hugs and hand-holding. Instead, it is the kind of comfort that calls the mourner out of immobility into action. The same expression, parakaleo can refer to calling a witness in court.[6] A better understanding of that verse might be “Honorable are those who mourn for they shall bear witness with their truth.”
I think of Holocaust survivors who carry deep trauma and are bearing witness. One is Sylvia Ruth Gutmann. Her family were already refugees, fleeing Nazi Germany when she was born. She was separated from her parents in a camp in Vichy, France. They were taken to Auschwitz. Sylvia and her sister survived in hiding. They came to the USA when she was seven. When she tried to tell her classmates her story, she was silenced by the teacher who called her a liar. At age 55, on the verge of suicide, she finally received therapy for the trauma she carried for so long. Now at age 80, she tells her story widely. What she repeats to every audience is this: “This is personal for me. What is happening at the border today is shocking and eerily similar to what happened in Nazi Germany. I am every immigrant child.” She says “We cannot be indifferent. We cannot look away. We must stop this horror. We must band together and demand that children never be separated from loved ones, not for one more day.”[7]
Honorable are those who mourn, for they shall bear witness.
Today Japanese Americans are protesting the detention of immigrants at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. It is located in an industrial area, where other construction is prohibited because it sits within a toxic sludge field and Superfund site. The facility holds up to 1,500 immigrants and is notorious for its inhumane conditions.
Twenty minutes away, is a place that was called the Puyallup Assembly Center. It was the place to which more than 7,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly transferred by army troops almost 80 years ago. Today’s protestors include survivors and their descendants.
Paul Tomita was three years old when his family spent 14 months in captivity in US internment camps. He says, “You don’t see people with blonde hair and blue eyes in these [modern detention] camps. No, you see brown people, you see Black people. You see people of color, just like you saw when we were in camps,” Tomita said. “Just like what happened to us, you see laws and policies being put into place to discount people and their humanity. They don’t want us to work together and see these parallels, but we do.”
Homer Yasui was a teenager in California when his family was forced into the largest internment camp. At age 95, he is in Tacoma today and he says, “[I speak out] because 78 years ago, my people were being loudly and viciously denounced as being ‘disloyal’ by the press, the U.S. government, politicians, and the American people in general. Almost nobody stood up for us,” Homer said. “Quiet Americans were the enablers that allowed the atrocity of the so-called evacuation to happen. I learned something from that. So now I am going to stand up for immigrants and people of Islamic faith who have been viciously and wrongfully attacked as being criminals, rapists, and terrorists. If I can do it, so can others.”[8]
Honorable are those who mourn, for they shall bear witness. Honorable are those who heed their witness and take transformational actions because of it.
Dr. King preached at the National Cathedral in Washington on March 31, 1968. In what would be his final sermon, he said, “It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. . . I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "We ain’t goin’ study war no more." [9]
May it be so. Even now, Lord, may it be so. Amen.
[1] https://theologyandpeace.com/2017/02/19/the-most-important-passage-in-the-bible/
[2] As told by Victoria Curtiss in her sermon “Jesus’ Third Way” https://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2017/021917_8am.html?print=true
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-41827062
[4] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world
[5] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world
[6] Richard Swanson, Provoking the Gospel of Matthew: A Storytellers’ Commentary, Year A (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2007) , p.96.