Be All That You Can Be
Posted on Feb 19, 2017 by David Whetter
Jesus can’t be serious, can he? Turn the other cheek? If someone wants your coat, give it to him or her? If you are forced to carry someone’s backpack for a mile, don’t stop there, carry it an extra mile for them? Love your enemies and pray for them? This is ridiculous, after all, when it comes to God’s law, God did say, “Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth;” (Leviticus 24:19-20). As a friend of mine likes to say, this was just “crazy talk.”
You know the one command here that might have gotten Jesus’ listeners the most riled up might have been the one about carry one’s pack an extra mile. In those days, a Roman soldier who was marching with his heavy pack could pull a Jewish bystander out of a crowd and command them to walk with him and carry his pack, but by law, he could only force the person to carry the pack for a mile, then he had to relieve the person of his pack and find another, or carry it himself. The Jews hated this. It was demeaning and humiliating. We can only imagine the hatred and the desire for revenge that built up in those communities. So why would Jesus encourage such horrific things and tolerate such violence and humiliation?
The answer is he didn’t, but he also knew that hatred, revenge, and violence would never bring the peace that God desires. When Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' 39But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also;” (Matthew 5:38-39), it is one of the very few times he actually overturned a law from the Hebrew Scriptures.
So why did he do this? What was the point? Well, to understand this, we need to take a look at ancient history. About 2000 years before Jesus, there was a Babylonian king by the name of Hammurabi. The king was a violent man and the culture was extremely violent. Revenge feuds went on for decades and so Hammurabi put in to law the Code of Hammurabi, which said “if someone gouges out your eye, you are — or your kinsman is — entitled to track the perpetrator down and gouge out his eye in revenge.” Sound familiar. The point of the law was to limit one’s violent response and to serve a way to insure justice, not revenge. You could do no more to your perpetrator than they did to you. But the problem is as the decades and millennia went on, such laws turned into was to seek revenge and humanity quickly began to confuse revenge with justice and they are not the same. Revenge is an act of violence that attempts to get even with someone, or more likely hurt him or her worse. Justice is the act of setting things right.
Jesus full well knew that revenge was not a means to bring about peace, so he brought into the world a new understanding and he offered a shocking new teaching. Do not respond to an evildoer in kind, but instead respond with kindness. Imagine that foot soldier who got his kicks out of humiliating those Jewish leaders, when instead of responding to his actions with grumbling and anger, responded with kindness.
Now this way of living isn’t easy and Jesus didn’t pretend that it would be, but it does work. Every time I read this text I am reminded on an incident I was involved in several years ago. I was pulling into a gas station and it was very crowded. All the pumps were full and I was waiting my turn. Just as I was about to pull in to an open spot, a guy pulled in from the other direction and parked there without even waiting his turn. I laid on my horn and cussed him out from my car. Jill kept saying, “just calm down there will be an open spot in a minute.” When I finally pulled into the on the other side, I got out of my car and glared at him, I wanted to really give him a piece of my mind, but before I could say a word, the man looked at me and with all sincerity said, “Hey man I am really sorry, I am in a hurry and didn’t realize what I did until after I was here and then he said, and God loves you, man.” How can you be mad at someone who reminds you that God loves you?
Now I know what you’re thinking, that isn’t the same as being physically hurt, or having someone steal your possessions, but I would disagree with you and I think Jesus would, too. It is the same thing. That man diffused my anger before anything happened and his kindness caused me to see the pettiness of my anger. Imagine if we could always respond to the world with such kindness, but the truth is we can’t do it, can we? And, to make matters worse, Jesus ends this text by saying, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). But we cant be perfect, we are human, so what does Jesus expect the impossible from us?
No, he doesn’t. So, let’s take a look at what he does expect of us. The Greek word here that we translate as “perfect” is “telos” and it’s meaning was less about a moral perfection than it is about being intentional with what you are trying to do. So, if one is shooting an arrow, the “telos”, or perfection of the arrow is to hit its target. It might not hit its target, but its telos was the target. As one scholar notes, Understating “perfect” in this way then means what Jesus was saying was “Be the person and community God created you to be, just as God is the One God is supposed to be” (David Lose, In the Meantime, 2/13/17).
Yes, turning the other cheek is hard. Yes, instead of responding in kind but rather responding with kindness is really hard, but as David Lose also notes in his article, what Jesus knows about us that we don’t is this, “God sees more in you than you do. God has plans and a purpose for you. God intends to use you to achieve something spectacular.” What is that something, it’s you, and me, helping to create a different kind of world. God desires us to help create a world where violence doesn’t create more violence. It is the kind of world where hatred doesn’t breed more hatred. It is the kind of world where we actually care why there are people who are hungry and we will seek to change the world so that hunger might cease. It is the kind of world in which we understand that God has revealed God’s self to others in different ways and that our God is so big that God doesn’t need us to create religious wars to protect God. It is the kind of world where we embrace the diversity in each other that god has created us to be and relish it and not try to change others to be just like us. Impossible you say, well it is if we depend only on ourselves. But we don’t have to depend on ourselves, we are called to be dependent on God and that is what Jesus is challenging us to do here today, depend on God, like our lives depend on it, because they do. It’s our job to live like we really believe Jesus actually is bringing in God’s kingdom, and to realize that we get to practice living like Jesus’ disciples and citizens of this new kingdom in the meantime. Yes we will fail at times, but let’s seek to be the people and community God created us to be. Amen.