FINDINGS II

  

Epiphany VII - A - February 20, 2011

Matthew 5: 38-48  

 

 

 

 

 

  

Harry T. Cook

Matthew 5: 38-48   

Jesus said, "You know that it used to be said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say do not resist. If someone hits you on your right cheek, turn the other to him, and if any one threatens to sue you to get your shirt, just give it to him along with your coat; and if someone forces you to go one mile, go the second voluntarily. You also have heard that you should love your neighbor but hate your enemy. Wrong.  I'm telling you to love your enemies, for if you love people who love you, so what? Try to be mature instead of infantile. Don't be a Gentile. Be a Jew." (Translated and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook.)

 

 

RUBRIC

 

This passage would appear to be the heart of the Jesus ethic by which human nature is most sorely tried and mostly found wanting. The ancient "eye for an eye" injunction seems on the face of it barbaric. But what appears to have been its original intent was to control the wreaking of vengeance, or as W.S. Gilbert would much later put it, "Let the punishment fit the crime." It is difficult from a civilized twenty-first-century perspective to accept that "an eye for an eye" once represented progress. But it did. Under that dispensation you would not be justified in killing your neighbor's wife and children and burning his house down if in some act of aggression he blinds one of your eyes. You are entitled only to blind one of his.

 

 

WORKSHOP

 

It's called "evolution" when ideas as well as life forms adapt and by adaptation survive or promote survival. Human ethics have evolved from a cave-man kind of behavior pattern to the passive resistance of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. in which retaliation of any kind is proscribed. What was once geschrieben is now neither adequate nor accepted. What is now accepted in the arena of human conduct is "turning the other cheek" to the smiter.

 

In the Mediterranean culture, striking another person's cheek with the back of the hand was a well-known and established major insult. Basic human instinct and the maintenance of honor and dignity would seem to demand striking back. According to the Jesus ethic, the victim passively asserts that dignity and honor by presenting the other cheek, daring the attacker to strike again. The idea is to make the aggressor think twice about what he has done and not to start a war.

 

The demand for one's coat should be answered not by resistance but by peeling off one's shirt as well. This is not passivity but passive resistance. If it is true that the Jesus of the synoptic gospels was thought to have come out of peasantry, he would have known the thin line that separates poverty from destitution. The coat-as-well-as-shirt move would go hand-in-hand with the "if-then" proposition later stated in Matthew at 16:25ff to the effect that loss of life is gain.

 

In a practice copied from the Persians, a Roman soldier or government official might order a Palestinian to carry his gear for one Roman mile (5,040 feet or about 80 yards less than an English mile). The Jesus ethic says the one thus ordered should do a second mile voluntarily. Why? For two possible reasons: 1) to maintain one's dignity and 2) to make a supposed enemy sufficiently curious about what would have seemed an odd piece of conduct to consider the human worth of the person so conducting himself.

 

"Give to anyone who asks," is the mandate. The assumption is that the one asking is in greater need than the one asked. This utterly countercultural instruction assumes a radically egalitarian state of affairs in which "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is the governing concept. See Acts 4:32-35.

 

The end of the passage calls on those who would heed the words attributed to Jesus to be "teleioi" as the deity is "teleios." "Perfect" is not a helpful translation. "Mature" or "rounded in character" in the sense of being "finished'" (as in finishing school) works better.  

 

To attain such a mature or finished state will require-on top of turned cheeks, ceded coats and shirts, walked second miles, and giving liberally-the loving of one's enemy, that is, the same one who struck or sued or required the first mile of burden bearing. The "finished" or "mature" one will recognize a human being like himself or herself in every other human being and will treat him accordingly. Or as the Episcopal Church's baptismal liturgy has it, striving "for justice and peace among all people" and respecting "the dignity of every human being. /1

 

 

HOMILETIC COMMENTARY

 

The Jesus of whom the writer(s) known as Matthew wrote evidently believed that human beings had it within them to live by Hillel the Elder's summary of Torah: "What you hate do not do to another." In fact, at 7:21 Matthew has Jesus paraphrase that proposition in positive terms: "In everything do to others as you would have them do to you." That ethic was thought central to the idea that "the kingdom of God is within you."  It is not a quid pro quo kind of thing like "I'll love you if you'll love me." It is an unconditional "I love you because you are you."

 

On the face of it the mandate seems to ask the well-nigh impossible of human beings who are, after all, human. But it seems clear that Jesus' ethical corpus offers a different version of "being human." Being human or "only human" does not necessarily mean being less than the ideal as a matter of course. It can mean being truly human. Of that we are presumably capable.

 

That idea flies in the face of theology all the way from Paul to Augustine to Karl Barth and beyond. Paul scoffed at the idea that human wisdom could be of any avail. But that is not what Matthew's Jesus seemed to be saying. He is credited with the idea that the kingdom or rule of heaven is within the person or within the covenanted community, meaning that "salvation" has little or nothing to do with some other time or condition, but rather with the here and now.

 

The ethical wisdom inherent in the verses of this Matthean passage is, if not "the" key at least "a" key to human survival on the planet, to the vision of not only enduring but prevailing.

 

 

1. Book of Common Prayer 1979, p. 305.

 

 

CORRECTION: In FINDINGS II for February 7, 2011, an allusion to a line in a Shakespeare play should have been to Act III, Scene II, line 240 of Hamlet.



� Copyright 2011, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.


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