June 15 2020
1 Kings 21:1-16; Matt 5:38-42
Monday of the Eleventh Week of Ordinary Time
Weekday prayer service at St. Catherine of Siena church
Today’s Gospel passage is taken from the Sermon on the Mount. The commandment “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” sounds rather bloodthirsty today, but at a time when there was no criminal justice system, the only way to punish someone who injured you was retaliation: do it yourself. The commandment, which is also found in the code of Hammurabi (a Mesopotamian law code from 1754 BCE), is intended to make sure the retaliation fits the crime: if someone punches your brother in the face and knocks out a tooth, you may punch him back and knock out his tooth, but you may not poke out his eye. Jesus’ rewriting of this commandment is not about stopping short of injustice, but about a change in attitude that is necessary in order to usher in the kingdom of God. It requires an attitude of compassion and self-sacrifice. It requires putting God’s agenda before your own agenda.
“Turn the other cheek.” It sounds sweet, doesn’t it? Until you think about real life, which is what today’s first reading is about. Naboth is the victim of gross injustice. The story in today’s first reading is a small vignette of a process that was common in Israel and the middle east in the eighth century BCE. Small subsistence farms were giving way to large plantations of olive trees and grape vines to support a lucrative international trade in oil and wine. People like Naboth were cheated out of their farms or the farms taken by force; the small farmers became day laborers on the big plantations.
Intolerable injustice happens, as our country has been dealing with intensely over the past several weeks. “A tooth for a tooth” is practical guidance for dealing with personal injury. Jesus’ commandment needs more interpretation, if we are to understand how to apply it in practical situations, like the killing of George Floyd by police officers. Fortunately, the twentieth century produced some remarkable prophets who have helped to unpack Jesus’ words for us. Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King showed us in their lives and work how the change in attitude Jesus demanded works out in practice.
Gandhi once said that he began to understand Christianity when he read the Sermon on the Mount. Certainly he has helped me to understand what it means to turn the other cheek. For Gandhi, the core teaching of Christianity was “non-retaliation, or non-resistance to evil,” or “boundless love and no idea of retaliation whatsoever.”[1] Gandhi said that when you practice love and non-retaliation, you have “to be ready to receive two blows when only one was given, and to go two miles when you were asked to go one.”[2] This willingness to suffer and refusal to hate or fight enabled the followers of Gandhi to win their independence from Britain. We all know that Martin Luther King studied Gandhi, and he later argued that the Gandhian philosophy was “the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom” (Papers 4:478).[3] This method is still being practiced in our streets today and by pacifist groups like the Kings Bay Plowshares, which protests nuclear armaments.
Turn the other cheek is not an easy message. Jesus asks a lot, but of course he always does. It means not only that protesters must avoid violence. It means that I have to avoid any feelings of hostility to the policeman who knelt on George Floyd’s neck or to the troops who occupied the streets of Washington DC, or to the politicians who falsely accuse peaceful protesters of violence. It means that if I think a certain politician is really bad for the country, I must try to vote him out of office, but I may not insult him or be glad if he catches covid-19. Because hostility just breeds more hostility, and our country and our world need compassion more than ever right now.
[1] “Mahatma Gandhi: What Jesus Means to Me,” a talk given by Mohandas Gandhi on December 25, 1931, https://publicseminar.org/2018/12/mahatma-gandhi-what-jesus-means-to-me/, accessed June 6, 2020.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Quoted at https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/gandhi-mohandas-k, accessed June 6, 2020.