To counteract how habitually and easily we human beings create enemies, Jesus has a remedy. He throws us a radical challenge — to respond to our enemies (real or perceived) with love rather than hate, with nonviolence rather than retribution.
Jesus’ teaching differs from the principle of talion — an eye-for-an-eye and a tooth-for-a-tooth (Exodus 21.23-24; Leviticus 24.19-20). Talion sets limits on retribution by establishing the right to seek vengeance only in proportion to the offense. A person could seek to put out one eye to avenge an injury to one eye but could not harm both eyes of an enemy. This morality accepts a violent community.
The biblical narratives of Genesis 1-11 use the same binary logic as modern computers that build a system on the differences between two things.
Cain and Abel, Sarah and Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Leah and Rachel. The stories about each of these pairs contrast the opposition: farmer vs. shepherd, barren free woman vs. fruitful slave woman, legitimate heir vs. illegitimate child, shrewd vs. dumb, older vs. younger.
Jesus’ teaching differs from the familiar logic that sees good and evil as either/or opposites. Isn’t Christianity all about saying yes to good and no to evil? No, not really.
Loving one’s enemies asks us to say yes to loving both good people and those who wrong us, who injure us, who act with malice toward us, or whom we perceive as evil. Jesus teaches a win-win ethic rather than a win-lose.
In urging us to nonviolence Jesus also goes beyond the more enlightened morality of the Old Testament that commands, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19.18). This morality sets one’s self as the measure of how to treat others. Jesus challenges us to take God as our compassionate standard.
- What oppositions seem important to you in our culture? Male/female, black/white, white collar/blue collar, rich/poor?
- What differences alienate you? What differences interest and intrigue you?
- How can we respect and cherish differences in people rather than reject them?
Jesus pushes us to a logic of the heart that goes far beyond doing to others as they do to us (vengeance). He urges us to empathy — putting ourselves in others’ shoes and treating them as we would want to be treated ourselves (the golden rule). He envisions for us a community in which God’s compassion sets the standard and we treat even those who hurt us as friends.
Colgate University religion professor Kenneth Morgan described in the New York Times a scene he witnessed in Damascus. A porter bent under a heavy load bumped a man riding a bike with a basket of oranges balanced on the handlebars. The porter dropped the load; the oranges went helter-skelter. The two men exchanged insults. The bicyclist moved toward the porter, clenched fist raised.
A tattered little man, the writer remembers, slipped out of the crowd of onlookers, took the raised fist in his hands, and kissed it. The crowd murmured approval. The two men relaxed. Onlookers began to help pick up the oranges. The tattered man’s kiss eased hostility and encircled the injured man with a helping community.
- What experience do you have of someone negotiating a conflict or someone easing hostilities?
- When have you played the role of the tattered man, or witnessed someone living Jesus’ teaching?
Some people who love their enemies up the odds of winding up dead as Jesus did. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led a nonviolent struggle for civil rights for African Americans until an assassin shot him. His mentor Mahatma Gandhi led a successful nonviolent struggle for Indian self-determination but was shot shortly after independence from Great Britain.
Both of these leaders could see the ancient truth that blood begets blood. Dr. King, Gandhi, and Jesus all worked to build a new inclusive community, not simply to prevail over their opponents.
“We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering,” writes Dr. King. “We will meet your physical force with soul force. In winning victory, we will not only win our freedom. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process.”
- Have you acted nonviolently? Where did it get you?
- How does acting nonviolently differ from accepting the victim role in cases of family violence?
Sunday’s gospel concludes with five parallel sayings. The first saying establishes God as the model for Jesus’ followers. “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” In her book God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Old Testament scholar Phyllis Trible explores the Hebrew word rhm, which we translate compassion or mercy. Rhm has its roots in the Hebrew word for womb, formed with the same three consonants.
This root meaning connects compassion with the feeling that a mother has for a child she has carried in her womb. To say God is merciful is to say God is full of a mother’s unconditional love for the child of her own body. For example, in Isaiah 49.15, the New American Bible translation, God asks through the prophet, “Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness (rhm) for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you.” To imitate God’s compassion, mercy, and tenderness is to love others as if they were of one’s own body, seed, blood.
- How do Jesus’ teachings — do not judge or condemn, instead pardon, give generously — work for you?