Listen now to this sermon on Jesus and his message of creative non-violent resistance.
Imagine for a moment that you are a small child growing up in a rural village in ancient Israel. One of the rituals of daily life occurs as your father leaves for work. You accompany him to the road holding his hand. His job is to build houses, and you can scarcely think of a job more important than that. Without him, people wouldn’t have homes in which to live. On a typical morning, your father chats with you about the fun you will have that day. Then, when you reach the road, you send him on his way with a plethora of hugs, kisses, and waves goodbye. For both you and your father, this daily ritual is one of the simple joys of life.
On this particular day, however, the glint of happiness normally present in your father’s eyes quickly leaves as he catches sight of a group of Roman soldiers on the road outside your home. The soldiers are passing through town on their journey South. Upon seeing your father, the soldier in charge calls over to him. “You, come carry this pack for us.” You are confused and upset that someone would talk to your dad in this manner, but with a mixture of resignation and shame on his face your father rushes to pick up the heavy pack and lift it onto his shoulders. As your father and the soldiers leave in the opposite direction of the home your father was to be building, the head soldier informs your father that he is lucky that they can only make him go one mile. Otherwise, they would have him carry the pack all the way to Jerusalem. This confusing scene is one that your mother will have to spend the next hour explaining.
We do not know for sure whether Jesus ever had such an experience growing up, but we do from our scripture today that he was familiar with the Roman practice of soldiers forcing whoever they found on the street to carry their packs for up to one mile. At some point, Jesus learned the rules of the game. If you were a Jew living in the backwaters of the Roman Empire, you were subject to the whims of its soldiers. You had no rights and no claims to inherent dignity. You were at the very bottom of society. As a child, you might burn at the insult and humiliation of it all, but how long might that last? How long would it be before you simply become resigned to your fate much like the father in our imagined scenario? Perhaps, a child in such circumstances might pass through a phase of youthful idealism and believe a better world is possible. Perhaps, as a young adult, that idealism might even turn into radicalized dreams of a revolution, but at some point, don’t most hippies realize that the revolution isn’t coming after all and decide that a 9 to 5 job would really be the next best thing?
If you live in a small town in the middle of nowhere, what viable options would there be for changing the status quo? Violent resistance would be a death wish, while passive pleas wouldn’t change anything. It was in the midst of this situation that Jesus wrestled with what to do. Ultimately, he presented what the scholar Walter Wink called “the third way.” Our scripture for today presents Jesus giving his audience three examples that illustrate this alternative response to the circumstances faced. Often our scripture is misinterpreted as a mandate for extreme self-denial and subservience. Don’t just hit one of my cheeks. Hit both of them. Don’t just take my coat. Take my shirt as well. Don’t just make me walk a mile. Make me walk two. Wink, however, brilliantly shows that Jesus wasn’t advocating a self-punishing form of pacifism. When one places Jesus’s words in their proper context, one gets an altogether different understanding.
As I indicated earlier, the common practice of the time was for soldiers to force Roman subjects to carry their packs for up to one mile. When Jesus tells people that they should volunteer to go the second mile, he is giving them a cunning and clever alternative to simple submission. What’s a Roman soldier to do in response to the offer? The soldier is suddenly confronted with an unpredictable situation. He is thrown off balance. The soldier can’t permit the pack to be carried for a second mile because then he would be committing a punishable offense. Yet, if the soldier turns down the offer of subservience, then his will is no longer being asserted over the will of those beneath him. Wink imagines the soldier’s thoughts in response to the Jewish peasant making the offer: Why would he do this? Is he just trying to be kind? Or, is he trying to provoke me? Is he just trying to make me happy? Or, is he trying to insult me? Or, maybe, he is planning to file a complaint and cause trouble for me? All of the sudden the oppressed subject has “seized the initiative” and “taken back the power of choice.” We might imagine the soldier pleading to have his heavy pack returned to him. Jesus was effectively presenting a way to neutralize the abusive power wielded by the Romans.
Similar interpretations can be given of Jesus’ other examples in our scripture reading. At the time, if one wanted to strike a person who was not your equal, you would give a backhanded slap with the right hand to the right cheek. This is how masters would strike their slaves, for instance. By contrast, if you were to strike someone who was your equal, you would punch the person on the left cheek with the right hand. The left hand was not used in either instance because it was reserved for only unclean tasks. The result is that when Jesus tells those who have been hit on the right cheek to also offer the left he is suggesting a response that takes the sting out of the oppressor’s punch. If the oppressor is to strike the left cheek that is being offered, the oppressor’s only option is to throw a punch with his right and thereby acknowledge the other person as his equal.
The third example in our scripture pertains to a person being sued and offering not just a coat but a garment as well. It is thought that the gospel of Luke might offer a more accurate translation. In Luke, Jesus advocates giving one’s undergarment after having already given one’s outer-garment. The person taking the undergarment is then put in the awkward position of forcing the person being sued to break the social taboo against nudity. The nakedness of the victim reveals the naked abuse of power much to the embarrassment of the abuser.
The clever ingenuity of Jesus in this passage makes him appear as a kind of trickster, but it is all with the serious purpose of showing that there is an alternative. We are not limited to a flight or fight response. We don’t have to opt for either weak-willed pacifism or self-destructive violence. There is another option. It’s the option of creative non-violent resistance. This third way, however, isn’t without its challenges. Jesus doesn’t give us step-by-step instructions or formulas for creative non-violent action. If he did, such an action would no longer be creative, and we would simply be automatons. Moreover, creative non-violent action by itself doesn’t always win the day. Some years ago the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy wrote a perceptive essay in which she showed how this was the case in the struggle of those being displaced by the building of dams in India. According to a report by the local Center for Columbia River History, ultimately, some 30 million people would be displaced by the building of dams. As Roy was writing in the midst of one displacement, the tactics of Gandhi were simply no longer working. People went on hunger strikes longer than any that Gandhi ever conducted, but the media and government didn’t seem to care.
I don’t think this means that non-violent resistance is no longer the best and most viable option. I think it does indicate just how entrenched evil in this world is. To me, it also suggests that putting love into action requires constant innovation if we are to have any hope. For me, parenting is the fitting analogy here. Maybe I am the only one who has ever experienced this, but I find that the same parenting tactics that worked one week don’t always work the next week. Just when I think I have finally figured out how to get Danalyn to go to bed early, I suddenly find her running down the hall full-speed as she giggles about her latest escape from bed. I quickly see that I will need yet another strategy. This doesn’t mean I give up. The only option is to keep trying, or else all of us simply have to resign to being miserable night after night and morning after morning.
Likewise, I am convinced that active, assertive love in its many forms is still the best option, but this means recognizing that love is more of an ongoing creative process than a ready-made solution. I doubt Jesus grew up automatically knowing the best way to respond to the abuses of the Roman Empire. When we think of Jesus as a true human and not an all-knowing supernatural sage, then I think it becomes easy for us to imagine how it might have happened. At some point, Jesus likely witnessed the abuses first hand. He certainly would have grown up hearing about them. And, we might imagine that Jesus, like any decent person, would have been deeply troubled by what he saw or heard. The suffering of others would have provoked care and concern. It is out of this that his own creative response would have originated.
I paint this image of Jesus because I think it is important to view his spirit of loving creativity as something within our ordinary reach. Often creativity is viewed as the stuff of tortured geniuses, quirky savants, or reclusive artists, but in actuality, creativity is something that all of us depend upon each day when our care and concern for others calls upon us to act. We are not born knowing all the right ways to tend to a sick spouse or raise a “strong-willed” child. We are not born knowing what to do when our boss at work acts like a jerk or when our best friend thinks that we are the one acting like a jerk. We are constantly figuring things out, and sometimes that means searching for alternatives. Sometimes that means going against the grain of what others think is right or reasonable. Picasso once said, “The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” When Jesus was alive, good sense was “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Turning the other cheek wasn’t good sense. Loving your enemies wasn’t good sense. It was either fight or flight. There was no third way.
We don’t know much about how Jesus was parented, but I like to think Mary and Joseph might have been the ones who helped Jesus see a third way. Maybe Joseph was the one who first offered to carry the soldier’s pack an extra mile, or maybe Mary had an undying patience for her strong-willed child as she found new and creative ways to help him move from childhood to adulthood. In the end, everyday creativity is about making love tangible and real. It’s about finding hope when it seems no other way is possible. It’s about discovering the Kingdom of God is closer than we might at first think. Amen.