A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — July 24, 2011
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Ephesians 6:10-20;  Matthew 5:38-48

Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.  — Ephesians 6:11

“But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.” — Matthew 5:39a

The author of Ephesians—Paul or more likely some later follower of Paul—says to “put on the whole armor of God” while in Matthew’s gospel Jesus says, “Do not resist the evildoer.”  Two such different teachings!  Commands that seem to stand in sharp contradiction to one another.  My first reaction is that they appear to reflect those two different but deeply instinctual responses that evolution has provided for us human beings when we are threatened—fight or flight.  “Put on the whole armor of God” and get ready to charge into battle.  Or “do not resist an evildoer… turn the other cheek” and get ready to run away.  Fight or flight.

I generally avoid the Ephesians text whenever it shows up in the lectionary.  It’s definitely not one of my favorite passages.  I recall a Bible story comic book from when I was a child that showed a knight in shining armor headed off to war—an image I’ve set aside as an adult.  I’ve seen teachers dress little kids in play armor for Sunday School or Vacation Bible School lessons, making little soldiers out of them.  A particularly horrible Children’s Sermon sticks in my mind, where the person giving it had fashioned cardboard and aluminum foil pieces of armor and put them on the kids and then glorified all those militaristic images at a time our nation was fighting in the first Persian Gulf war.  Too often texts like this are dragged out whenever people want to see our nation as fighting “God’s battle” in the world.

The second text from Matthew is one that is often ignored or ridiculed for being totally impractical and more than a bit “wimpy.”  Doesn’t it simply invite ever more abuse from bullies?  Yet after all Jesus’ advice about turning the other cheek, handing over your cloak, going the extra mile, and actually loving and praying for your enemies—and it’s way more than advice, for Jesus keeps saying, “You have heard… but I say to you…”—after all this seemingly impossible stuff we are to do, Jesus turns to an image from nature to remind us of the amazingly inclusive grace of God that touches on us all whether we deserve it or not.  And we are to do this stuff not because Jesus says so but so we may be “children of [our] Father in heaven, [who] makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”  We children are to take after “our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

 

So are we really called to be passive and unresisting to evildoers?  That doesn’t seem anything like God or Jesus.  Yet I don’t see Jesus armoring up and heading off into battle either—although you can find such images in places like Revelation.  When push came to shove and the authorities came armed to the teeth to take Jesus off to kill him, he told Peter to put his sword away, for those who live by the sword will die by the sword.  But then Peter was facing overwhelming odds.  Maybe we’re supposed to flee sometimes and fight at others.  I’ll admit there are times when each of the responses, flight or fight, has its own attractiveness to me.

Sometimes I just want all the conflicts to go away.  I can’t wait to go off on vacation next month and ride a train across Canada with all those friendly, polite, non-controversial, non-confrontational Canadians.  I wish we could quit fighting in the church over things like ordination of homosexuals, same-sex marriage, abortion, and whether people who aren’t born again end up in hell.  And I grow tired of politics as usual and arguing against people who claim we’re to be a “Christian nation” yet also seem to keep saying that in matters of economics capitalism trumps Christianity—or even that capitalism is, in fact, Christianity in action.  Maybe if I just ignore all the injustices and “turn the other cheek” it will all go away and there will be peace.  Yet I’m well aware of the truth of the maxim that there can be no peace without justice.

So there are other times I grow angry and frustrated with injustice and want to respond with force, to vanquish the opposition, to win no matter what.  One of my guilty pleasures is devouring novels by authors like Lee Child, John Sandford, James Lee Burke, and Tom Clancy, where so often the main character triumphs against all odds by becoming a kind of vigilante and beating the criminals or terrorists at their own game.  Part of me cheers them on.  Yet even in the black-and-white world of thrillers and whodunits, the heroes can come close to becoming what they fight against.  In the real world, this is all too common.  Yesterday’s freedom fighter can become tomorrow’s despot, continuing to wield power to stay on top of the heap.

The problem with these two passages is that each has been misinterpreted and misused to support a particular religious ideology.  The Ephesians text is seen as demanding a militant, crusading kind of faith, ever engaged in fierce battles to root out and combat the powers of evil.  The Matthew text, however, is misused to call for religious disengagement from an evil-ridden, secular world.  Yet an alternative to these two ideologies exists, another response that takes something from both, a third way that might be called “creative non-violence.”

A closer look at the Ephesians text reveals it to be less militaristic and warlike than it first appears.  In the Greek, the initial command to “be strong in the Lord” is actually in the passive voice.  The meaning is not “be strong” but more like “let God make you strong.”  God is the primary actor, not us.  The armor we are to put on comes from God and belongs to God, not to us. To make this even clearer, each piece of armor is a spiritual metaphor—the belt of truth, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and so on.  Then the writer of Ephesians explicitly states that our “struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh”—that is, it’s not a literal war against other people.  And we are not told to attack, but to stand firm against “the spiritual forces of evil.”  Finally, all the pieces of armor but one are defensive.  The single exception is “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”  This spiritual “sword” is not the Bible, not the written word, but rather the Hebrew concept of dabar—God’s dynamic, creative word, the creative activity known from the very beginning when God spoke, “Let there be light.”  The battle against the powers of evil is God’s battle.  Our role, the writer of Ephesians insists, is to stand, to withstand, to stand firm throughout, engaged in the struggle but not running the show.  The only weapon we have is God’s creative, life-giving word.

Let’s see what happens when that creative word issues from the mouth of Jesus—“You have heard… but I say to you…”  The first thing he says is, “Do not resist evildoers,” at least that’s how most translations put it.  This doesn’t sound like “standing firm.”  But the Greek word translated “resist” actually means a very particular kind of resistance.  The word is anthistenai, and in ancient Greek it was a technical term in warfare for when soldiers are sent out to counterattack, meeting force with force.  Hence what Jesus commands here is not to hit back—no tit-for-tat, or as Paul says in Romans 12:17, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil.”  What is called for here is a creative, non-violent engagement with the evildoer, which Jesus makes clear with three examples.  As we consider these three, it is important for us to visualize the action, to look for the role of humor and ridicule in each, and to pay close attention to how the non-violent responses are a kind of verbal jiu-jitsu that subverts the power of those in control, putting them in awkward positions.

In the first example, Jesus says, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”  It helps to act this one out.  How am I to deliver a blow to someone’s right cheek?  The only natural way is to use the back of my right hand.  Remember that in Jesus’ culture, the left hand was used only for unclean tasks.  So this is not a blow meant to injure, made with the fist or an open-handed slap.  It is a blow meant to humiliate, a blow normally delivered by a master to an inferior, a blow that says to them, “You are something less than human.”  Turning the other cheek, the left cheek, is not an invitation to further abuse.  Instead it is an act of defiance, for it renders the master incapable of striking again in the same way.  The nose is now in the way of a backhand, yet the act of defiance essentially requires the master to hit him.  But for the master to use his right fist would establish their equality—the last thing he’d want to do!  Turning the other cheek robs the oppressor of the power to humiliate.  Oh, the master may have the underling flogged, but the point has been made for all to see.  The underling has stood firm, asserting his equality—“I am a human being too, the same as you.”

In the second example, the tables are turned by a bit of burlesque theater.  The average person in Jesus’ time would wear two garments—an outer “coat” and an inner “cloak.”  Peasants would sometimes pledge their outer garment as collateral for a debt.  So Jesus is saying, “If anyone wants to sue you and take your [outer garment], give your [undergarment] as well.”  The result is you’re standing there in court stark naked.  (I’m not going to demonstrate this.)  But this isn’t like that nightmare where you dream you find yourself totally unprepared in 10th-grade math class and somehow you’re naked.  Nakedness was taboo in Jesus’ culture, but the shame fell most heavily not on the one who was naked but on those who beheld the nakedness.  Recall how in Genesis Noah’s son Ham was cursed for seeing his father naked.  So the creditor may have won in court, but has been shamed in the process.  The law has been lampooned as well for its lack of compassion.  The debtor has used creative non-violence to throw the system for a pratfall. 

Something similar happened last month in North Carolina when 59-year-old Richard James Verone walked into a bank, handed the teller a robbery note demanding $1, and then calmly sat down to wait for the police to come.  Unemployed and without insurance, he said he did it hoping that a 3-year stint in prison would get him the medical care he needed.  But his non-violent act exposes the absurdity of a system that proclaims life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be inalienable rights yet insists on denying universal access to healthcare.

Finally, in the third example, Jesus says, “If anyone [that is, if a Roman soldier] forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.”  Roman law allowed a soldier in an occupied country to draft any civilian (usually a peasant) to carry his 6585 pound pack one mile, but no further.  Forcing someone to carry it beyond one mile could result in severe penalties for the soldier.  So the soldier will be clueless when the Jewish civilian keeps walking.  What’s he up to?  Is it kindness?  Or is it a provocation?  Is it an insult to the soldier’s strength?  The soldier has lost control of the situation, and the peasant has asserted his equality and humanity.  The soldier may wonder, Will this civilian file a complaint and get me in trouble?  I picture Jesus’ audience howling in delight as they imagine the soldier trotting after the peasant, crying, “Aww, come on now, give me back my pack!” 

This third way of Jesus—of creative, non-violent engagement—allows us to stand firm against injustice and withstand oppressive power in a way that asserts our full humanity and equality as persons.  It does so without mirroring the evil and thereby entering into a new cycle of oppression.  It shifts the power dynamic, undermining the very structures of power that perpetuate domination and injustice.  And if it does not shame the oppressor into repentance, it at least shines the light of God’s truth on the situation, revealing for all to see—oppressor and onlooker alike—the love of God in action.

At the heart of this creative non-violence lies the fundamental equality of all people within the love of God.  For the Lord God “makes the sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”  God loves freely and without partiality.  And God loves everyone, even God’s enemies, completely and totally.  Hence God’s love is “perfect.”  We are to love like that—as children who take after their divine parent—not perfect as in flawless perfectionism, but perfect as in loving like God does, completely, with our whole being:  heart, soul, mind, and strength.  May it be so.  Amen.