Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18 ; 1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23 ; Matthew 5:38-48
February 20, 2011
Sincere people of all faiths engage their scriptures, their sacred stories, their tradition, and their concept of transcendence in order to best discern how to live their lives. And, I would boldly contend, pretty much every faith tradition contains elements that place very difficult demands on adherents who take their religion seriously. Yet people seek to live out their faith, no matter how difficult at times, because they believe such a life is what’s best for them, for humanity, and for creation. And when we look at the major world religions, it isn’t hard to see that, whether Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist, when someone is living from the best of their teachings, amazing things happen.
Now, I don’t know all faith traditions intimately, but here’s my suspicion: it’s not just that every religion has difficult teachings, but I suspect the really hard parts of our faiths are often what, when lived out, are the most transformative…for individuals, humanity, and creation. Compassion for all living creatures, adherence to demanding religious practices, nonviolence in every way…these are at the heart of the various religions, and they are extremely challenging to live out, yet they have proven time and time again to bring life, goodness, peace, and beauty to the world.
Today we have one of our hard ones. In fact we’ve seen over the past few weeks that the entire Sermon on the Mount in Matthew contains many hard teachings. Most of us have chosen Christianity as our path – for many, varied reasons – and so we look to our scriptures for guidance on how to live, even when we know some of what is in there is extremely difficult and challenging. Today we get that classic Christian teaching that is surely one of the hardest: Love your enemies. Of course, the roots of this startling teaching go all the way back to the God of Israel – the God we encounter in the Hebrew Bible.
One of the most fundamental lines in Scripture is part of today’s reading from Leviticus. “Yahweh said to Moses, ‘Speak to the whole Israelite community and tell them: Be holy, for I, Yahweh, your God am holy.” And this sentiment is reiterated in Matthew – be perfect, as your Creator God is perfect.” Both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures teach the same basic lesson: followers of God are expected to imitate God.
Scholars pretty well agree that the best way to translate the original Hebrew for holy is “other.” Part of what it means to say God is holy is that God is our alternative, our “other”, to the powers that be in our world – powers that act not from Grace and Righteousness, but from selfishness and greed. And just as God stands in contrast to how much of the world operates, so we too are to stand in contrast to the world at times.
The writer of Leviticus gives examples of the otherness Yahweh expects of us. “You shall not bear hatred for your brother or sister in your heart ….take no revenge and cherish no grudge against any of your people. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus continues the list: “Offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other as well... Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go for two miles. Love your enemies.”
“Love your enemies:” arguably Jesus’ toughest saying. It’s simple but far from simplistic. “Love your enemies.” Whatever did he mean by that? On its face it seems to be a contradiction in terms. Aren’t our enemies those people that we hate? Obviously, this is not an easy command to get our heads around. Figuring out what this commandment means is fraught with danger and opportunities for misinterpretations that lead to horrific consequences. Turn the other check, for example, has been used as a justification for expecting women to endure domestic violence. Yet there is much at stake: transformation is at stake. If we can learn what this means, we can seek to live it and thus bring transformation to the world.
Let’s start by noticing what Jesus did not say. He did not say, “Do not have any enemies.” If we are going to stand for anything, let alone the Christian faith, we are going to have opponents, those who disagree with us. Of course not everyone we disagree with is our enemy. For instance, many of my holidays are filled with disagreements with people, and I don’t call them enemies, I call them family.
To have an enemy is to escalate opposition. While loving our opponents is still reachable, loving our enemies is harder. There is more at stake. In fact, sometimes it seems everything is at stake, including personal and global security. Usually our enemies are not merely people we oppose, not even those we merely hate, but those hate because we fear them. And fear twists things. It is hard to look at what we fear, and hard to love what we can’t face. Still Jesus says to do it.
And to explain how to do it, Jesus draws on his own Jewish faith. Rabbi Jesus is doing a midrash on the torah text from the law code in Leviticus, a passage he returns to again and again, which he says contains the summation of the law in the golden rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But in this midrash he also takes the verse prior, which directs God’s people to refrain from revenge, and does the algebra to bring the two verses together into one concept: “No revenge” plus “love your neighbor,” means love your enemy. It is classical rabbinical teaching.
But, the world often uses different moral math. Harvard psychologist, David Gilbert has looked at mechanisms of revenge, retaliation and retribution. And, as he points out, these are all words that start with the prefix “re-” which means to do it again. In other words, the second punch is legally and morally different than the first punch. “He hit me first,” provides an acceptable rationale for retaliation. So the first equation in the moral math of revenge and retaliation is that “two wrongs make a right.”
The second equation is that retaliation must be proportional to be moral. Not only do we factor in, “She hit me first,” but “she hit me harder,” when we try to calculate whether or not retaliatory action is moral. We don’t need fancy law codes to figure this out, every small child instinctively knows this. But what if our instincts are dangerously flawed, which is what Gilbert’s neuro-psychological experiments indicate. What his data overwhelmingly concludes is that our sensory perceptions are skewed so that we cannot trust ourselves to be able to count the offenses against us correctly.
Through experiments, he showed that we generally only perceive the aggressive actions of others, not our own. So we see their punches, but the one’s we throw barely register. And we can only observe our own thoughts, not those of others, so our reasons for punching register loud and clear, but theirs do not. Similarly, we only register our own pain, not that of others. In experiments where volunteers were asked to tap each other with the exact force with which they were tapped, they could not do it, try their level best. They would always escalate the force because their perceptions were skewed. Dr. Gilbert concludes, “Research teaches us that our reasons and pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pain of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our (retaliatory) actions are a justifiable response.”
Examples of how this plays our are not hard to come by; from the backseat of any car headed on a family vacation, to just about any global conflict, come cries of, “He hit me first, she hit me harder.” Consider this: it’s hard to think of any partisan in the Middle East who has claimed to do anything but play defense according to their version of reality while, of course, training and stockpiling munitions for the day when revenge becomes inevitable.
The bottom line is that human beings, left to their own devices, are not wired to do the moral math that makes retaliation a successful strategy for justice. But we are not left to our own devices. Our scriptures call us to live out of that part of ourselves created in God’s image so we can transcend the moral math that only leads to never-ending cycles of violence and hate. For transformation to occur – if we are to break these entrenched cycles between enemies – we are to practice a faith that leads us to a different kind of moral equation based on who God is, not what the world often teaches. We are called to be holy – perfect. It’s hard, but that’s what brings transformation in our faith tradition.
Jesus words have always struck the realists among us as naive if taken at face value. Paul says it appears as foolishness to others. “If someone hits you on the cheek, let them hit you on the other cheek as well.” What about national defense? “Give to everyone who begs from you: and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again...If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you?” Not only a bad pun, but a recipe for economic collapse. “Do not judge and you will not be judged...” Now he’s doing away with the justice system. No, we realists shake our heads, he must be speaking metaphorically. Or we say, he is speaking spiritually, about heaven, this is the way the pie in the sky will be sliced and served, this is not a strategy for here and now.
But suppose Jesus meant it? Suppose Jesus didn’t need to wait for a Harvard psychologist to tell him that tit for tat retaliation doesn’t work. Suppose he really means that we are to love our enemies. And I believe he meant it. I also believe Jesus’ spirituality was always tethered to this world, and so is something to which we can connect in real and practical ways.
Throughout my journey as a Christian, attempting to live what Jesus taught, I have found myself arguing with these verses. After all, I am a realist. I have found myself wrestling with these verses like Jacob wrestling with some muscular, yet spiritual angel, hoping that I might force a blessing out of them. And I think I have, but like Jacob, it is not without a cost.
What I have decided is that I am not spiritually and morally advanced enough yet to fully grasp these verses. The consequences I can envision of following this teaching can seem to me at times as potentially as destructive as the consequences of not following them. But, I can begin to grasp them. I’m not a master, but a novice in the art and discipline of peacemaking. I’m not perfect. I’m not holy like God is holy. But I have chosen to trust that our Christians scriptures will, if lived out, bring about the world Jesus sought and the world for which we yearn. And I can get on board with the idea that as I seek to follow the path I have chosen, I am being perfected…the Holy Spirit is working in me to bring out, more and more, the image of God.
I can take the first baby steps towards love of enemy. I can, for example, set a bottom line. I may not be able to love the terrorists, but I can say that I will oppose torturing those who have been accused of terrorism. I may not know fully what Jesus meant by love your enemies, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean short-shackle, sexually humiliate, subject them to sensory deprivation, simulate drowning them or threaten their families.
There have been people throughout history who have been morally advanced – who have, in my opinion, fashioned a holy life – in all faith traditions. People like Gandhi, MLK Jr., Albert Einstein, the Dali Lama, Mother Teresa – the names come easily to our heads. These people did not shy away from the most difficult teachings of their faith tradition, and we can all see what a difference it made for the world. It’s easy to get discouraged by comparing our lives to theirs, not to mention comparing our lives to Jesus. But instead, by looking at their lives, we can recognize the value of teachings like “love your enemies,” and be motivated to pursue a holy life, no matter how odd or foolish it appears to others, or even seems to us at times.
We are not perfect – and I don’t think Matthew meant that we are to be perfect in the sense that we never make mistakes, never have a bad thought, or do the wrong thing. We can strive to be holy – to live by different values than those of retaliation, revenge, and retribution. We have chosen the Christian path, and that path sometimes demands a lot from us. But we are made in God’s image – in the image of the God who we see embodied in the person of Jesus – Jesus who forgave his enemies for torturing him to death; Jesus who knew that retaliation is an endless cycle, a spiral downward into hell, and so on the cross, he said “no” once and for all. The possibility for us to do the same lives in each of us simply because of who God is and because we are made in God’s image. We are made to be holy – to be perfect as our creator God is perfect. Amen.
