Early in 1902 members of a French archeological team were
exploring the ancient royal city of Susa in Iran. There they came across a
large carved stone, seven feet long and six feet in circumference. On it were
engraved forty-four columns of ancient Babylonian cuneiform script. What they
had discovered was the collection of laws of Hammurabi, the sixth king of the
first Babylonian Empire, dating from around 1750 BC. The introduction to the text (actually
written thirty years later) states that Hammurabi was predestined by the gods “to
cause justice to radiate over the land, to surrender sinners and evildoers to
destruction, and to take care that the strong should not oppress the weak”.
Now on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris, Hammurabi’s
Code consists of 282 laws covering almost every imaginable aspect of life: marriage
and family relations; negligence; fraud; commercial contracts; duties of public
officials; property and inheritance; crimes and punishments; protection for
women, children, and slaves; debt relief for victims of food and drought; taverns;
the building of houses and ships… Embedded within it is the earliest written
expression of what is known as the Law of Talion: “If a man put out the eye of another
man, his eye shall be put out” (196). “If he break another man’s bone, his bone
shall be broken” (197). “If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth
shall be knocked out” (200).
It all sounds rather fierce and primitive to us now, but the
Law of Talion (from which we derive our word “retaliation”) was instituted to
prevent the escalation of violence. (Would that the Hatfields and the McCoys
had known about it a hundred and fifty years ago!) A version of that same law
is found centuries later in the book of Leviticus (24:19,20) in the Old
Testament Law: “Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in
return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury
inflicted is the injury to be suffered.” And that is where Jesus’ commentary on
the Law begins in this week’s passage.
The path of non-resistance
The Law of Talion was intended to promote justice. However, Jesus
takes it a step farther—indeed, a quantum leap. “This is what you have always
been taught,” he tells his disciples, “but I say to you, do not resist an
evildoer.” Now I can’t imagine Jesus’ disciples just sitting back and taking
all this in. Remember that among them was Simon the Zealot, a radical
revolutionary dedicated to the violent overthrow of the Roman occupation. There
were also James and John, whom Jesus later nicknamed the sons of thunder,
presumably because of their violent tempers.
Perhaps they did try to interject, but that did not stop
Jesus from driving his point further home with three forceful examples.
·
The first had to do with being struck on the
cheek. What Jesus was talking about was not just being slapped. In order to be
hit on the right cheek, the assailant has to use the back of his hand. In the
world of Jesus’ day, this did not just cause injury; it was an insult reserved
for the lowest of the low.
·
In the book of Exodus (22:26) there is a law
that states, “If you take your neighbor’s cloak in pawn, you shall restore it
before the sun goes down.” But Jesus says, if someone takes your tunic, give
them your cloak as well, even if it leaves you in the shame of going about
naked.
·
In the occupied Roman territories soldiers could
conscript local inhabitants to carry their heavy packs for a mile. (Exactly the
same verb is used of Simon of Cyrene when he was forced to carry Jesus’ cross.)
But Jesus says, “Don’t just go the one mile—go two!”
Jean Vanier, founder of the worldwide l’Arche communities
for people with disabilities, speaks about the need to absorb negativity and violence—and
he himself is a living example of what that involves. One of his biographers
tells this story:
Once in the road in Trosly he was accosted by a large,
muscular man from the village. He was hurling abuse at l’Arche, at people with
disabilities and at Jean, all of whom he seemed to hate. The man hit Jean on
the ear but not quite hard enough to knock him to the ground. Jean found
himself standing firm and heard himself saying, ‘You can hit me again if you
want.’ Flabbergasted, the man took him by the hand and invited him to his
house.[1]
It all sounds like an impossible ethic. Yet even as the Nazi
power was exerting its deathly grip on Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer could
write,
The only way to overcome evil is to let it run itself to a
standstill because it does not find the resistance it is looking for.
Resistance merely creates further evil and adds fuel to the flames. But when
evil meets no opposition and encounters no obstacle but only patient endurance,
its sting is drawn, and at last it meets an opponent which is more than its
match.[2]
The evil of Nazism was such that in the end Bonhoeffer saw
no alternative to becoming involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Two years
later the physician who witnessed his hanging at Flossenburg prison camp testified,
“In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a
man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”[3]
The transforming power of love
If the path of non-resistance is a difficult pill for us to
swallow, Jesus turns up the pressure by several degrees in his next remarks. It
is not enough that we should not resist our enemies, he tells us. We should
love them. Here we need to remember that in the Bible love does not mean
thinking nice thoughts or having warm feelings towards another person. No, love
in the biblical sense means taking practical action, doing loving things. The
priest and the Levite may well have had kind thoughts about the wounded
traveler in the ditch, but it was the Samaritan who loved him.
In his recent book David
and Goliath, New Yorker
journalist Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of police officer Joanne Jaffe. In
2003 she took over responsibility for the New York City neighborhood of
Brownsville. Home to more than 100,000 people, Gladwell describes it as “block
upon block of bleak, featureless brick-and-concrete developments … plagued
by groups of teenagers who roamed the streets, mugging passersby”. One of the
first tasks Jaffe undertook was to compile a list of all the teenagers who had
been arrested over the previous year—106 in all, who by her estimate could have
been responsible for as many as 5000 crimes.
She then put together a task force of police officers and
had them contact every name on the list. They told the teens, “We want to do
everything we can to get you back in school, to help you get a high school
diploma, to bring services to your family, find out what’s needed in the
household. We will provide job opportunities, educational opportunities,
medical—everything we can. We want to work with you.”
The breakthrough only came after months into the program,
when a group of officers chipped in to provide Thanksgiving dinner to the
family of one of the worst offenders. “This is a kid we’re gonna lose,” they
said, “but there are seven other kids in that family. We had to do something
for them.” This inspired Jaffe to request the police commissioner to provide
125 Thanksgiving dinners to all the families of the teens in the program. A
month later this led to Christmas toy giveaways, to playing basketball with
them, taking them out for meals, driving them to medical appointments. The
approach seems counterintuitive, but the number of robberies and arrests
declined over each of the succeeding five years, down to twenty percent of
their original level.[4]
Joanne Jaffe took an amazing risk, and it was altogether
possible that her gambit could have failed. Crime and violence might have
increased in Brownsville. Yet the point is that we need to be willing to take
the risk, to love even those who have done us wrong, who may even hate us and
everything we stand for, all the while remembering that for Jesus it led to the
cross.
The challenge of perfection
I do not claim that this is an easy teaching either to
understand or to accept. It may have been words like this that caused some of
Jesus’ followers to say, “This is tough teaching. Who can accept it?” There
were some (and I suspect no small number) who decided to stop following him.
However, that did not deter Jesus, who in our passage this morning ratchets
things up even further with the seemingly impossible demand, “Be perfect,
therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
What does Jesus mean by this? I think the answer is to be
found in the word that is rendered “perfect” in almost every English translation
of the Bible. In Greek it is teleios.
Most of the time it is translated “mature”, and it means whole, fully
developed, or complete. We find it in passages such as these:
·
You know that the testing of your faith produces
endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be teleios and complete, lacking in
nothing. (James 1:3,4)
·
Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching
everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone teleios in Christ. (Colossians 1:28)
·
Epaphras … is always wrestling in his prayers on
your behalf, so that you may stand teleios
and fully assured in everything that God wills. (Colossians 4:12)
But the clincher for me in understanding this word is found
in Paul’s testimony to the Philippians, where he writes,
Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but
this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what
lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of
God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us then who are teleios be of the same mind; and if you think differently about
anything, this too God will reveal to you. (Philippians 3:13-15)
To be teleios is
not to have arrived. Nor is it to have reached the pinnacle of moral and
spiritual perfection. In fact it has nothing to do with me or my achievements. Quite
the opposite: it is to recognize my incompleteness, and that my true completion
is to be found in God—that to be fully human, fully the person that God has
created me to be, means to live in a relationship with him, and to depend on
his love and mercy, grace and power. For this reason, of all the translations
of this verse, I like Eugene Peterson’s version in The Message best: “Grow up… Live out your God-created identity.
Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”
As we leave this first chapter of the Sermon on the Mount, we
are reminded that what Jesus is talking about is not living for God, but living in him and with him.
It is an invitation not to heroism but to faith—to walk through life in company
with him.
[1]
Kathryn Spink, The Miracle, the Message, the Story: Jean Vanier and l’Arche, 90,91
[2]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 127
[3]
Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, 532
[4]
Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath, 209-217
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