Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.

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1 George A. Mason 7 th Sunday after Epiphany Wilshire Baptist Church 19 February 2017 Dallas, Texas Disabusing Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18; Matthew 5:38-48 Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. I think we all know that Jesus said this. I think we all know we ought to do what Jesus said. I think we all don t think enough about this thing that Jesus said. So maybe it sounds nice, right? Be nice. That s it. Christianity is about being nice, we think. It s about not fighting back or causing trouble. It s about being peacemakers and living quiet, respectable lives among our neighbors. But does anyone see any problem with that? We ve got to break this issue down before we do more harm than good. I was outraged a few weeks ago when reading a story in the British newspaper The Guardian about a new Russian law passed two weeks ago that decriminalizes domestic violence. From now on in Russia, beatings of spouses and children that result in bruising or bleeding but not broken bones are punishable by 15 days in prison or a fine, if they do not happen more than once a year! Previously they carried a maximum jail sentence of two years. In a country where experts say that a woman dies every 40 minutes at the hands of an abusive spouse, the message is now clear that the government will not protect women and children from being beaten and battered. Amazing. The rationale for the law is it wasn t right that abusers in families should be treated more harshly than strangers who do the same kind of harm. Really? So the people who are supposed to love us the most but abuse our trust and do us harm should be treated as leniently as strangers? If we follow the logic of Leviticus, they should be treated more severely. You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin. The biblical witness sees the family as a place of safety from the cruelty of the outside world. But now even the church is supporting this law and undermining the safety of those who are being abused. The leader of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchy commission on family matters defended the new law, saying that the government should not be poking its nose into family disputes. Then this nonsense: An article in the science section of [a] popular [Russian] tabloid cheerfully told readers about an advantage of wife-beating. It said: Recent scientific

2 studies show the wives of angry men have a reason to be proud of their bruises. Biologists say that beaten-up women have a valuable advantage: they more often give birth to boys! 1 What century is this? This is downright evil. And the problem isn t happening only in Russia. It happens right here in our country, in our city, and in our homes. I realize that this is hard to hear about in church, but we must break the silence here, because we can t depend upon the world to defend the weak. You have already heard about our support of the Genesis Women s Shelter here in Dallas, which gives battered women and their children a place of refuge from violence in the home. Surely the church of Jesus Christ will stand up for the protection of vulnerable women and children. Right? But the sad truth is that too often it has been the church that counsels abused women to stay with their husbands because Jesus wants them to turn the other cheek. Let me start by saying to anyone and everyone in this room, on the radio or live stream: No, no, no. Don t go using Jesus words to justify abuse. God is not on the side of abusers. God loves the abuser, too, but God will not abide their abuse, and neither should we. If you are in a relationship with a spouse or a boyfriend or a parent who physically or sexually abuses you, run. Run now. Run to the church. Run to my house. But get out of there. You will not stop an abuser by excusing him, by loving him better while you are being beaten or molested, or by praying for him. He has broken his marital vows and violated his family by his actions, and those actions free you from your covenant to stay with him. You can love and pray for him from a distance. (By the way, I say him because the perpetrator is usually a man, but I know of women who are abusers, too, and they are no better.) If your abuser has told you to keep the secret, don t. It will be the death of you to bury that inside yourself, and you will never help yourself by keeping the secret

3 A man who molests his own children or beats his wife will not stop, because the abused simply takes it. Every time such abuse happens, it damages the soul of the abused and threatens to kill it altogether. If you are beaten or raped or molested, don t remain silent, and don t allow yourself to endure it ever again. And if you are a wife who knows it s happening with a child, you are not protecting your family by denying it; you are complicit in the abuse and guilty of allowing to happen. The deep damage done against a woman or child often leads to terrible consequences of drug or alcohol addiction to dull the pain. And because the sense of self is so damaged, the capacity to have healthy intimate relationships is often ruined forever. Worse still, those who are abused often and unbelievably grow up to be abusers themselves. And the generational harm is a social nightmare for all of us. This Thursday night we are hosting the actress Mackenzie Phillips. You may remember her from the movie American Graffiti or the TV show One Day at a Time. She is the daughter of John Phillips of the pop band The Mamas and the Papas. She will be talking about her new book, Hopeful Healing. She is a survivor of incest and parental neglect that led her into addiction. She is now trying to help others get well. And getting well is possible only when you face up to the truth. Now let s get back to what Jesus said and disabuse ourselves of any naïve reading of his profound words. Nothing I say from this point forward changes what I have said up till now. Jesus begins his nonviolent admonition to his disciples by citing Leviticus: You have heard it was said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This injunction was first intended to limit retaliation in a time when the cycle of violence was devastating to society. If someone got into a fight and poked out the eye of a neighbor, the clan might come and kill the person who did that to their kin. And that would lead only to more killing. Saying you could retaliate only proportionally and in kind was moral progress. But even then, as Tevye said in Fiddler on the Roof (and both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., often repeated), An eye for an eye ends up leaving the whole world blind and toothless. Jesus said it first. He wants his followers to stop the madness. He wants 3

4 us to break the cycle of violence altogether. And to do that we must undermine violence by strong actions of nonviolent resistance and redeeming love. When Jesus says not to resist the evildoer, he doesn t mean that we are to encourage evildoing by doing nothing. The resistance he prohibits is fighting back on the same terms. We don t defeat evil with evil or violence with more violence. When someone in Jesus day struck a person on the right cheek, it was not so much an act of force as humiliation. Righthandedness was regarded as normal, so if someone used the right hand to strike, the victim would be hit on the left cheek. But if the person struck the right cheek, he was delivering a backhand. It was an insult, a slap at personhood. It wasn t a brutal act of beating. It was intended to show that you were nothing to the aggressor who could control the victim. If anyone fought back, the aggressor was showing that he had the victim right where he desired. By turning the other cheek, the victim was being defiant in a nonviolent way, proving both his self-respect and strength of soul. Turning the other cheek is not about becoming a punching bag; it s about refusing to play into the dehumanizing power game of an offender. It confounds, shames and confuses the aggressor. It disabuses the abuser, don t you know?! Our usual counsel in dealing with a bully is to punch him in the nose so that he ll back down. Bullies don t respond to weakness, we say. But that never works in the long run. We undermine the power-game play by exposing them as the cowards they are. It takes more strength to maintain dignity by fighting violence with nonviolence. Jesus takes the idea two more steps. If someone asks for your coat, give the shirt off your back, too. By stripping naked in front of him, you show everyone the cruelty of the demand. And if a soldier compels you to go one mile which was his right to do go one mile as an act of obedience and a second mile as an act of freedom. Jesus doesn t even stop there. He cranks it all up another notch by saying that we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. This was revolutionary in Jesus day. It had no precedent 4

5 in Jewish teaching, and it has few defenders even in our day. It requires people with sufficient inner spiritual strength to act this way. Whenever you set out to do what Jesus says, you can be assured that he is with you to empower you to do it. When the church acts as salt and light in the world, we show the world an alternative way of living. We show that our worth is grounded in our being children of God, not in what other human beings grant us. And that stance can t help but redeem the world. Phil Klay is a former Marine who served in a medical support role in Iraq. He wrote a stunningly relevant essay titled What We re Fighting For in last week s New York Times Sunday Review. In it he tells about a Marine who had been shot by an enemy sniper. The medics did everything they could to save him, but to no avail. Then the enemy sniper turned up in the same medical unit. He had been badly wounded. He was given pint after pint of American blood. He was given painkillers and comfort as he was transported him by helicopter to a hospital. From the men in the platoon who brought the sniper down by their gunfire but would not kill him when defenseless, even though he had killed their friend, to the doctors and nurses who saved his life, all demonstrated moral courage. They were loving their enemy, whether they felt like it or not. Klay makes the claim that every time we carry out these kinds of actions toward our enemies, we undermine the spirit of hatred and enmity that keeps people fighting. If you want to know the opposite effect, all you have to do is recall the terrible humiliation of enemies at Abu Graib prison in Iraq by dishonorable American soldiers. Their behavior helped give rise to ISIS, and we know what evil its adherents have wrought. But every time we do as Jesus taught us to do, it is also, in the words of Phil Klay, an act of war. It s an act of war on war itself. It s an act that subverts war with love. 2 Love alone is what heals and redeems the world. All you need is love, the song says. But if you won t believe the Beatles, believe Jesus