It was hot, brutally hot in the tropical sun. The farmer was bent over, had been bent over, it seemed, for centuries, though it had only been since that morning, when he looked up and it seemed like a vision, as if it had just . . . appeared out of nowhere, he could’ve sworn it wasn’t there a minute ago, then he looked down to his work, and back up and there it was, as if born out of the tropical mists. He had the irrational urge to pinch himself to see if he were still awake, but he didn't . . . what he did do was look back down at the earth, at the fruits of his morning’s labor, and then quickly back up to see if the phantom had disappeared, but it hadn't--it had just gotten closer. Close enough that he could now see it clearly: a bald, middle-aged man, wearing the traditional dhoti and shawl, with sandals on his dusty feet. He was surrounded by similarly-clad men, and suddenly, the peasant-farmer knew who it was: it was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, otherwise known as Mahatma Gandhi.
He also knew what the great man was doing:
he was marching to the sea, in protest of the British overlords’ control of the
most important compound of human civilization, apart from air and water, that
is. He was protesting the British
Colonial government's control of salt.
Despots know that to really control a peoples, to really keep a tight
choke hold around their collective neck, it is important to control the basic
elements of life. The British were experienced
colonialists, adept at the subjugation and maintenance of their colonies, and a
major tool was the absolute control of salt. The British Raj awarded the
ability to manufacture salt—of course to a favored British company—taxed salt
production, which was of course passed on to the consumer, and forbade anybody
else, whether company or individual, from making it.
Not only did the farmer know where
Gandhi was going, but he knew just what he was going to do when he got
there. He knew this, because Gandhi had
publicized the event ... A large-scale protest did nobody any good unless
people—both oppressed and oppressors—knew about it. So Ghandi had announced that when he got to
the sea at the small town of Dandi, he was going to do one only one thing: he
was going to make salt.
And such was the power of his
personality, and so heavy the yoke of British rule, that the march grew,
accreting marchers so that by the time they reached the sea, more than 50,000
were gathered to watch Gandhi break the law. The farmer was one of those: he'd
left his field and followed him along the way, because he understood that this
road, this road, in the end, meant freedom.
Jesus would have understood this as
well—after all, Gandhi learned about nonviolent resistance from him, and today’s
passage is ground-central of his teaching on the subject. And if this is news to you, it's because for
centuries the church has taught 'passive' behavior in the face of power and
worldly (or church) authority. We have been seduced by teaching that we
should bear abuse or being used by those in power, what Paul would call the
“powers that be,” and this passage has been used to support it. Women should 'go the second mile' and endure a
broken, abusive marriage. An man who’s
been hit by another shouldn’t fight back, he should just 'turn the other
cheek,’ as should a child that is being bullied or a wife who is being
abused. We are not, this interpretation
suggests, to resist at all, we’re to be passive, to receive the abuse and, tacitly
submit to more.
In its original context, however, this
teaching did not advocate Christians becoming doormats for our enemies. It did not advocate that we give in to evil
in some kind of misguided attempt to show that we are morally superior, or that
evil will somehow be defeated by our getting tromped upon. As Gandhi pointed out, Jesus was never
passive, he always resisted evil, he
just didn’t do it with violence.
Biblical scholar Walter Wink points out
that there are two standard responses to being confronted with violent abuse:
fight or flight. In fight, a person
resists violence with violence . . . if you’re struck, you strike back. If you’re attacked, you retaliate in
kind. In flight, you get away as fast as
you can, you put yourself out of the situation.
The problem is, neither way really solves anything. If you hit your attacker back, the violence
escalates, and somebody might get hurt badly, or even killed. If you flee, you haven’t really solved
anything, it’s liable to happen again, because the dynamic hasn’t changed—your
attacker has come to the—correct—conclusion that his way works, and that he can
get what he wants that way. Neither way,
in other words, teaches your enemy anything, neither way invites him to change.
Jesus’ way, Wink explains, is a third way, that is neither submissive or
violent, and he illustrates them in the teaching in our passage. First, the cheek thing: “If anyone strikes
you on your right cheek, turn the other also.”
Though it seems like a milque-toasty thing to do, it actually subverts
the status quo. To see how this is so,
consider that Jesus very specifically says “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek”, and this specificity is
the key to its meaning. The first thing
we have to know is that in the first century, nobody in their right minds would
hit someone with their left hands, it was considered dishonorable, shameful:
the left hand was considered inferior.
If a person were trying to beat down an opponent, to show who was boss,
or even if it was in the heat of the moment, a first-century person would never
hit someone with the left hand.
To see how this plays out, I need a
volunteer from the audience, er, the congregation. (gets a
volunteer) Now. Remembering that I have to hit him with my
right hand, and Jesus specifies that I’m doing it on his right cheek, how do I have to hit him? (demonstrates) I have to backhand him, and backhanding
is the way masters hit slaves, they slap them as if they were inferior, as if
they were not equal. By hitting him with
my right hand on his right cheek, I have asserted my dominance over him, that
he is my inferior. Now: turn the other
cheek. Note that it’s the left cheek,
and notice further that to hit him there, I have to either (a) hit him with my
left hand, which is shameful, which a civilized, free man would never do or (b)
hit him with my closed fist, which only an equal
would do. Either way, by turning the
other cheek, he has asserted his equality, and caused me, the attacker, to risk
extreme embarrassment—turning the other cheek is hardly a passive way to
resist my attack, it forces me to acknowledge his equality, and has the
potential of embarrassing me to boot.
And oppressors hate being
embarrassed.
Now.
Let’s look at the second stricture: if anyone wants to sue you and take
your coat, give your cloak as well. It sounds
like he’s saying “If anybody breaks into your house and steals the silverware,
give him the television too, or if anyone holds you up and demands your watch,
give him your wallet as well, but in the context of first century Palestine,
that wasn’t it at all, and to understand why, it helps to know a couple of
things. First, the Greek word translated
here as “coat” describes an outer covering—thus the translation—but the one
translated “coat” describes the inner clothing.
Second, the economics of the day were similar to the company store of
Tennessee Ernie Ford fame, where the coal company both paid the workers and
owned the store from which they must buy food and clothing. In this case, in the uncertain middle-eastern
climate, small farm-holders had to borrow from wealthier land owners during bad
years, but in good years never made quite enough to pay them back, so they got
further and further into debt, and they literally were sued by the wealthy
land-owners for the coat on their backs, just before they took their land, that
is. And so Jesus tells them that if you
are sued this way, give him all your
clothes, so that you’re naked, which is extremely embarrassing for the one doing
the suing. And in fact, in Hebrew tradition,
it was shameful to see somebody’s nakedness—remember Noah’s sons walking in
backwards to cover their dad’s nakedness?
So this tactic both shames the oppressor and exposes the injustice to
the public.
Ok, there’s one more … go the extra
mile. Note that Jesus again is very
specific: “if anyone forces you to go one
mile, go also the second mile,” and
it’s because this addresses a specific regulation of the Roman army. One of the things occupying armies do—and
they were under occupation, remember, by the Romans—is to live off the land, to
take food, strip crops, etc from the folks being occupied. One of the secrets to the longevity of the
Roman empire is that they made this burden as light as possible, to keep things
below revolutionary boiling point, and there was a regulation that a centurion
could only make a peasant carry his stuff one mile, so Jesus counsels that the
peasant carry it two. Now picture this:
at the end of the prescribed mile, the centurion goes to take his pack from the
farmer, but he continues on, and the soldier, afraid of being punished, keeps
trying to take it back, and on down the road they go, the centurion begging to
get his stuff back and the farmer refusing . . . it’s a ridiculous picture,
isn’t it? And the onlookers would jeer, and the centurion would sweat, and once
again injustice would be unmasked and ridiculed, two of the major aims of
non-violent resistance.
When Mahatma Gandhi got to the coast, he
broke the salt laws in front of flash-bulbs and whirring newsreel cameras, and the
entire world learned about the unjust laws of the British Raj . . . after the
action in Dandi, Gandhi continued on down the coast making salt as he went, and
after his inevitable arrest, the action was carried on by successors, who
extended it to other locations, and cameras followed them, and the British government was mightily embarrassed, and
though the action brought no immediate relief,
it triggered a wider Civil Disobedience
Movement that contributed significantly to the eventual negotiated end of
British rule.
Gandhi considered civil disobedience a
tool in a larger way of being that he called satyágraha, which is a cognate of two Sanskrit words: satya, or truth, and agraha, for force or strength . . .
truth strength, as it’s sometimes called, or soul force, as you might have seen it rendered. There is strength in telling the truth, in
unmasking the oppression, in embarrassing the oppressor, and that is what our
three examples from Jesus do, isn’t it?
They all expose the injustice, they unmask the inequality that is
inherent in each situation. Forcing an
attacker to either give up the attack or hit his victim as an equal exposes the inequality to the world.
Forcing an oppressor to strip you naked exposes him to ridicule and underlines
and exposes the injustice in his position.
Finally, the idiocy of the Roman occupation is unmasked by the spectacle
of a centurion following a farmer and begging for the return of his kit.
But if those these acts of satyágraha, of truth force, reveal the
injustice to the world, they reveal it to someone else as well: to the oppressors, to the one perpetrating the
evil. And that explains why Jesus
couples this teaching with a command to love our enemies . . . it’s not some
mushy, love-boat love, not some saccharine valentine’s-day sentiment, Jesus’ is
talking about an active doing, a service to the one being loved. And what better service, what more important
thing can we do to those enmeshed in evil, than to gently point it out, to give
them an opportunity to see it from a different perspective, and an opportunity
to change their ways? More importantly,
it gives them an opportunity to become part of the inbreaking and already
here—in the person of Jesus Christ—Kingdom of God. As Walter Wink put it, loving our enemies means
enabling them to see their sin and giving the opportunity to turn from it, thus
becoming a part of God’s kingdom on Earth.
Gandhi formulated his doctrine of satyágraha almost two thousand years
after Jesus laid down the principles in this oft-misunderstood teaching . . .
and can you imagine a church in this country that lived by this third way? That resisted unjust laws and renounces the
use of violence in the doing? Can you
imagine what would happen if instead of throwing up our hands and saying “what
are you gonna do?” we practiced Jesus’ third way in everything we do? Amen.
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