February 23, 2025
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Luke 6: 27-38
You have probably heard the words in today’s Gospel used to justify a pacifist approach to the question of violence. Perhaps worse, you might have heard people use this text to tell us that we must endure violence on earth so that we can get our reward in the afterlife.
But you might not have thought of these texts as resistance texts, texts that show us how to resist the world we live in, a culture which has never been a turn the other cheek kind of place.
In his book Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Walter Wink explains this text in the context of the honor culture of the time of Jesus. There would have been strikes to the cheek in a particular way, with a particular hand, the hand used when hitting an inferior, and the purpose would be to put a person in his or her place. If I offer the other cheek, then my attacker would have to hit me with the other hand, which would be the hand used when one is an equal. It is a way of asserting one’s dignity.
Similarly, if ordered to give a coat, and I strip naked by giving my tunic as well, that would be an act of dishonor, and not only would I bring dishonor on myself, as I stripped naked, but I’d also bring greater dishonor on the one who set these events into motion. In Matthew’s version, we get the sentence about being forced to go a mile and going an additional mile. People who heard Jesus say this would know that he was referring to Roman soldiers, who could force people to walk a mile, carrying a pack. A Roman soldier who ordered someone to go more than a mile would be in trouble, so walking an additional mile while carrying a pack is a way of sending a message to that soldier.
Of course, resisting in this way carries a risk. It’s not as passive as it seems, and it risks enraging the one who seeks to remind us of our place in the social caste. In the time of Jesus, in many cases, the enraged person could have one flogged or put to death for impudence. It’s important to remember that the culture of Jesus was a vastly different culture in many ways than our own. Very few people had the kind of human rights that we say are important, that we can go to court to protect. In the time of Jesus, there was very little in the way of recourse if one was wronged. It was a culture based on social hierarchy, with very little movement between class and caste. It was also a culture ruled by Romans who were not going to tolerate social unrest, Romans who would not hesitate to slaughter dissenters. The Romans liked to remind those whom they conquered of the inferiority of the conquered.
But in some ways, the culture of the empire was not so different than ours: people pitted against each other in a quest for scarce resources, a few people lifted up while masses of others faced a variety of oppression.
The rest of today’s Gospel gives us additional instruction in how to resist a culture that seeks to distract us by turning us on each other. Some of the instructions make sense. We can give to those who beg—that seems like an easy task, one that many of us do already. If our goods are taken or repossessed, we can let them go—that’s not far from other instruction we’ve gotten from Jesus.
We can love our enemies, but what does that mean exactly? Jesus gives us one concrete command: we can pray for those who abuse us, whether the abuse is physical or emotional or monetary or any other form. As we pray for those who oppress us, we keep our hearts soft. We remind ourselves of the humanity of us all. We pray not just for the transformation of the abuser, but we also pray to keep ourselves from being transformed.
At the very least, we can pray. We can pray for those people who are doing the heavy lifting of resistance. We can pray for those who are transforming their societies for good, whether they live in our country or on the other side of the planet. We can pray for the softening of the hearts of the hard ones. We can pray that we have the wisdom to recognize evil when we see it. We can pray that we have the courage to resist evil in whatever forms it comes to us.
These are texts that show us how to resist evil in such a way that evil elements will not turn around and destroy us. Likewise, these are texts that show us how to resist evil in such a way that we don’t become the evil that we are resisting.
Jesus shows us how to live in this world, how to resist evil without being destroyed by evil, and our world certainly has plenty of evil that needs resisting. So how do we do it? Love is the answer, and it has continued to be the answer. We’ve had great religious and moral thinkers through the ages return to this principle of loving our enemies as a tool of transformation.
And it’s not just transformation on a personal level. Let us not forget that nonviolent resistance can change governments and countries. Think of the changes that we’ve seen in our lifetime. I would call our attention to 1989, when the wall between the two Germanys came down. Did you know that this moment in time was sparked by weeks of prayer services and candlelit marches? Did you know that a Lutheran church played a key role?
In October of 1989, a Lutheran pastor in Leipzig, East Germany started holding Monday night prayer meetings. At the same time, there were evening protest marches, with tens of thousands of people coming into the village square, holding candles. One Communist official in Leipzig said, “we were prepared for everything except the prayers and candles.” There were rumors that people would be allowed across the border, so people went to the border crossing. The guards there hadn’t gotten any official notice. They were outnumbered, and they knew that they had a choice: they could start shooting and commit mass murder or they could lift the gates and allow reconciliation. They lifted the gates, and the world was changed.
It could have gone differently, and for every example I give, there are others which have not ended well, like Tiananmen Square. And yet, just because liberation hasn’t come yet, it doesn’t mean that it won’t come.
Walter Wink, writing in 1993, notes, “In 1989 alone, there were thirteen nations that underwent non-violent revolutions. All of them successful except one, China. That year 1.7 billion people were engaged in national non-violent revolutions. That is a third of humanity. If you throw in all of the other non-violent revolutions in all the other nations in this century [the 20th], you get the astonishing figure of 3.34 billion people involved in non-violent revolutions. That is two-thirds of the human race. No one can ever again say that non-violence doesn't work.”
You might be tempted to say that we’re talking about events from 1989, which is getting to be a long time ago. You might look across the globe in despair at how little evidence of nonviolence or nonviolent resistance you see. But rest assured that resisting despair, resisting violence, and praying for our enemies is much wider spread than we might think. This process is like the flower bulbs that many of us planted months ago. Even though the larger world seems frozen and dark, those bulbs have started their work, and soon they will burst forth in glorious colors to brighten the drab world. Likewise, our prayers for peace, our prayers for justice will do their work—and 40 years from now, we won’t recognize the landscape we live in, a landscape we changed through our resistance to the culture that offers violence as the only solution.
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