Resisting Evil

Bible study:

Leader opens with prayer

Getting to know one another:

Each person from the group can choose to answer one of the following questions.

1. Who is a person you admire for seeming to be able to be calm no matter what the situation? Describe such a time.

2. Tell the group about a time when an act of generosity had unexpected results.

or 3. If you could be any character from the Bible, who would you be? Why did you choose this person?

Opening the word:

Read Matthew 5:38-48 together

What questions do you have about this passage?

*What do you find problematic about a literal reading of Jesus' words in Matthew 5:38-40?

Have you heard these words used to justify a "Christian" passivity towards violence? How has this been damaging for people?*

*The word translated 'resist' in Matthew 5:39 in Greek is 'antistenai': to engage in warfare, to oppose with violence.

Read Ephesians 6:10-14. 'Antistenai' - to stand against - is the same word used in this passage as Jesus uses in Matthew 5:38. How does this reframe your understanding of what Jesus might be saying here?*

NON RESISTANCE

Giving in to evil

Flight Be a doormat

Passive acquiescence

VIOLENT RESISTANCE

Meet evil with evil

Fight

Jesus' third way

*Theologian, Walter Wink, writes this:

"Cowardice is scarcely a term one associates with Jesus. Either he failed to make himself clear, or we have misunderstood him. There is plenty of cause to believe the latter. Jesus is not forbidding self-defense here, only the use of violence. Nor is he legitimating the abandonment of nonviolence in order to defend the neighbor. He is rather showing us a way that can be used by individuals or large movements to intervene on behalf of justice for our neighbors--nonviolently.

The classical interpretation of Matt 5:38-42//Luke 6:29-30 suggests two, and only two, possibilities for action in the face of evil: fight or flight. Either we resist evil, or we do not resist it. Jesus seemingly says that we are not to resist it; so, it would appear, he commands us to be docile, inert, compliant, to abandon all desire for justice, to allow the oppressor to walk all over us. "Turn the other cheek" is taken to enjoin becoming a doormat for Jesus, to be trampled without protest. "Give your undergarment as well" has encouraged people to go limp in the face of injustice and hand over the last thing they own. "Going the second mile" has been turned

into a platitude meaning nothing more than "extend yourself." Rather than encourage the oppressed to counteract their oppressors, these revolutionary statements have been transformed into injunctions to collude in one's own despoiling.

But that interpretation excluded a third alternative: active nonviolent resistance..."

"If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also." Why the right cheek? A blow by the right fist in that right-handed world would land on the left cheek of the opponent. An open-handed slap would also strike the left cheek. To hit the right cheek with a fist would require using the left hand, but in that society the left hand was used only for unclean tasks. Even to gesture with the left hand at Qumran carried the penalty of ten days' penance. The only way one could naturally strike the right cheek with the right hand would be with the back of the hand. We are dealing here with insult, not a fistfight. The intention is clearly not to injure but to humiliate, to put someone in his or her place. One normally did not strike a peer thus, and if one did the fine was exorbitant.

A backhand slap was the usual way of admonishing inferiors. Masters backhanded slaves; husbands, wives; parents, children; men, women; Romans, Jews. We have here a set of unequal relations, in each of which retaliation would be suicidal. The only normal response would be cowering submission.

Part of the confusion surrounding these sayings arises from the failure to ask who Jesus' audience was. In all three of the examples in Matt. 5:39b-41, Jesus' listeners are not those who strike, initiate lawsuits, or impose forced labor, but their victims ("If anyone strikes you...wants to sue you...forces you to go one mile..."). There are among his hearers people who were subjected to these very indignities, forced to stifle outrage at their dehumanizing treatment by the hierarchical system of caste and class, race and gender, age and status, and as a result of imperial occupation.

Why then does he counsel these already humiliated people to turn the other cheek? Because this action robs the oppressor of the power to humiliate. The person who turns the other cheek is saying, in effect, "Try again. Your first blow failed to achieve its intended effect. I deny you the power to humiliate me. I am a human being just like you. Your status does not alter that fact. You cannot demean me."

Such a response would create enormous difficulties for the striker. Purely logistically, how would he hit the other cheek now turned to him? He cannot backhand it with his right hand (one only need try this to see the problem). If he hits with a fist, he makes the other his equal, acknowledging him as a peer. But the point of the back of the hand is to reinforce institutionalized inequality. Even if the superior orders the person flogged for such "cheeky" behavior (this is certainly no way to avoid conflict!), the point has been irrevocably made. He has been given notice that this underling is in fact a human being. In that world of honor and shaming, he has been rendered impotent to instill shame in a subordinate. He has been stripped of his power to dehumanize the other. As Gandhi taught, "The first principle of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating."

*How does what you read here change the interpretation of what Jesus is saying in this passage?

When you think in this way, what are some examples of creative nonviolent resistance you know about?

How does Jesus' life show the 'Third Way' - not passivity, not violent resistance, but creative nonviolent resistance to the powers of evil?*

Turn the other cheek

What it really means:

Give your undergarment also

What it really means:

Go the extra mile

What it really means:

That you may be children of your heavenly Father

For he makes his sun shine on the just and the unjust

Father forgive them

While we were still sinners Christ died for us

Creative

Non

Violent

Resistance

"do not

the one doing evil"