Continuing our reflections of last week on His instruction to His disciples on how to really belong in God’s kingdom, Jesus goes next into non-retaliation and universal love as concretizing their manner of being differently holy, like their heavenly Father (Matthew 5:38-48).
Only an ‘eye for an eye?’
The law of retaliation (lex talionis, law in kind), “an eye for an eye,” was instituted in the ancient world as a safeguard against excessive revenge and to control violence, going for proportionate injury as acceptable self-defense. This measured retribution is not enough for Jesus: it is still too much for Him. He wants it superseded by the principle of nonviolent resistance. Turning the other cheek, or giving your cloak, as well, or going an extra mile does not mean becoming a doormat to violent people. It is a creative strategy to take power away from violence.
When someone backhands you to shame you, or when you are stripped naked and your tunic repossessed by a creditor, or when armed troops force you to carry something for them, do not allow them to reduce you to servility. Remove the control from their hands, and make a burlesque of their violent method and show of legality. Show in a new and courageous way that you refuse to participate in violence by responding in kind; demonstrate the other way and possibility of nonviolence. This rejection of the way of the world is further illustrated by the command of Jesus, not to stay at the unjust stratified economic structure where the borrower remains in debt and the beggar has to keep begging, but to give outright to a beggar or a borrower. His disciple does not solely protect his own wealth, but rather acknowledges mutual need and responsibility as foundation of community living, and acts accordingly.
Be perfect like your Father!
The ultimate norm and standard for a disciple is to be, together with Jesus, like the heavenly Father. And that is not done if one is predictably, and unremarkably, like everybody else in loving only those who love you and hating those who hate you. One has to go beyond the presupposed irreconcilable divide between friends and enemies, and purposely move beyond the traditional standard of giving it back to others as you get it from them. To love all even your enemies and to wish them well is to imitate your heavenly Father who is the Father of all, saints and sinners alike, and who makes His sun rise on the evil and the good alike.
Revenge, even what is commonly considered as fair retaliation in kind, finds no endorsement from Jesus. The radical stand He demands of His followers is not only not to meet violence with violence, but to love even your enemies. In being good even to those who do you ill authenticates where you really belong. We belong to God’s holy people; we are part of His kingdom, for we are all His children. That is why we care also for the others who may be in fact persecuting us and ridiculing us, and doing the very opposite of what we believe in.
Alálaong bagá, loving all even your enemies is the peak of Jesus’ reinterpretation of the law, the final antithesis in the Sermon on the Mount. The law of love must be practiced magnanimously and universally, not selectively or merely out of ethical humanism or ultimately for one’s self-interests. Just as God lets His love like the sun to shine on all, so must the disciples of Jesus let their love like a light shine on a hill or on a lampstand for all. Vowed to divine perfection, true Christians must sublimate their human capacities for revenge and violence, favoritism and prejudice, and imitate the Father’s holiness of loving, giving and forgiving. The rampant, brutalizing violence going on in our supposedly Christian country, in both extra-judicial and vigilante killings and in plain uncontrolled outrages, is a livid contradiction to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
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