It seems to me that our society today is driven by the 3 Rs. Rights Revenge and Relations. That’s to say, we’re driven by a concern to hold onto our Rights, we want to hold onto what is ours. We’re driven by a need for Revenge, we want to take back what should be ours. And we’re driven by loyalty to our Relations, we all have an inner circle of family and a few friends and our main task is to be loyal to them. Rights. Revenge and Relations.
Jesus wanted to set up an altogether different type of society. He wanted a society where different values rule. And that’s largely because God is not like that. God is not driven by the need to hold onto his rights, he’s not driven by the need to exact revenge, and he’s not driven by the need to be loyal to his closest relations. And when Jesus came to establish the kingdom of God, he set up a society full of people who are like their God.
Two Old Testament Commands
Let’s remind ourselves of the background of this piece of Jesus’ teaching. We’re about a third of the way into the Sermon on the Mount, possibly the most famous of Jesus’ teaching, Matthew chapters 5 to 7.
He’s been looking at the laws of the Old Testament and showing how he came to fulfil them. If we follow him, we’ll find ourselves not just keeping the letter of one or two, but getting into the spirit of those laws; we’ll keep them from our hearts. Up to this point, he’s done this with the ten commandments. He’s looked at the commandment not to commit murder, not to commit adultery, and not to lie, and in each case he’s unpacked the spirit of that commandment for us.
The reading we had this morning does the same thing with two other Old Testament laws, although this time they’re not from the ten commandments. First he talks about the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and then he talks about the command to love our neighbour.
And what Jesus does is get right to the heart of both of them, and they take us the same direction.
Start with an eye for an eye. This command gave sentencing guidelines in matters of physical assault. The principle here was that the punishment needed to be proportional to the injury in some way, and this principle guides English law even today. Having a law like that makes sure that the judge doesn’t lose all sense of proportion and punish something too harshly. You get that today in some Arab countries, where a woman is beaten for driving a car. But it also makes sure that the judge isn’t too lenient, because of what we see happen today: If a criminal is not tried and punished by the courts, people will take the law into their own hands. And so the law says: An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. More than that, the judge would be being vengeful. Less than that, the vendettas would run and run. This was a law to prevent taking revenge when someone wrongs you.
Then the other law is the law to love your neighbour. Now, nearby verses in the Old Testament stress that the Israelites were to show identical care to the foreigners who lived among them as they were to their fellow Israelites. If you ask “who is my neighbour”, the Old Testament’s answer is: “Anyone who might need your help”. But people of Jesus’ day were doing the opposite. They were noticing that the law commanded that we love our neighbour, and so they applied it very narrowly. They would try to work out who their neighbour was, on the grounds that it was perfectly OK to hate everybody else.
So here we have two laws. The principle of an eye for an eye. And the command to love our neighbour. And the spirit of both those laws is to prevent person revenge, and to urge us not just to love our friends but even our enemies too.
Rights. Revenge. Relations. Jesus replaces this with no retaliation. No resistance. No restrictions on who we love.
Instead of rights, Jesus says we don’t resist when someone wants to hurt us. No resistance. As we’ll see in a moment, even if this means allowing them to double the injury. Instead of revenge, Jesus says no retaliation – you don’t get your own back. Instead of relations, Jesus says you love even your enemy, so no restrictions on whom we love.
What Jesus is talking about here is very practical, so the best way to see what this looks like for us is to look at the examples Jesus gives. He’s very contemporary. He gives 5 little cameos of what it looks like to live this out in practice. Let’s look at these little examples and hopefully they’ll bring this home to us.
Example 1: Insult
First example is insult: If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.
To slap someone on the cheek was a direct insult. To slap them on the right cheek was doubly so, because you would have to use the back of your hand. And Jesus basically says: Let them do it again.
So what do you do when someone calls you names? I don’t mean in the playground. I mean when someone dishonours you. Perhaps they spread rumours that you’re not honest, or you don’t work hard, or you aren’t loving. Every instinct in your body says that you should rise to defend your reputation.
Jesus says: Just walk away. Actually, don’t walk away too fast. Let them finish first, for as long as they want to insult you more, and then just walk away.
Example 2: Litigation
Second example is litigation: If anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.
The Old Testament law allowed someone to sue you for your shirt. But they couldn’t take your coat because you needed that to keep warm at night. Jesus says: If someone drags you through the courts asking for your shirt, which they can demand, give them freely what they would be allowed to take.
Few of us today will end up in court over our debts. I hope we won’t. But times do come when a friend or a neighbour says we owe them something, but we don’t think we do. They call in a favour we don’t owe. They ask back for the £20 we borrowed.
Our gut reaction is to defend our corner. To argue that we never borrowed that money. Jesus says we should just give it back. And buy them a box of chocolates to say thank you for lending it to you.
Example 3: Conscription.
The third example is conscription. If anyone forces you go one mile, go with him two miles.
In the Roman empire, a soldier could force someone to carry their luggage up to a mile. That’s from here to the Chequers. Needless to say, for an occupied nation, this was despised, but they had no choice.
Jesus goes beyond saying they are to carry that load. He says offer to carry on as far as the Chaucer instead. Go two miles. Again, instead of looking to get your own back, let the person whose demands are a nuisance double the problem.
If we’re going to look for modern-day equivalents, we need to look for times when we are conscripted to help with something, rather than free to volunteer. Perhaps recent redundancies at work mean that there are fewer people to do everything. So everyone is told that they have to do one extra shift a week, unpaid. You have no choice, really, because future redundancies might come.
Yet even though we have no choice, our next move is surely to do that extra shift, but not to stay on one minute longer than we have to. Jesus says: If a colleague was hoping to go and visit their family this weekend, do their shift too.
Example 4: Begging
The fourth example is begging: Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.
Actually, he just says to give to the one who asks. We can’t tell from this whether he has in mind a close family member, a beggar on the street, or someone in between. That’s the point, though. He doesn’t specify who might ask us for money, and that stops us saying that this only applies in certain cases.
Our natural response is to calculate what it might cost us, and to wonder whether we’d get it back. Jesus is not saying that we should be naïve, and act in a way that doesn’t help the person who asks of us. But he is challenging that natural response we all have, by saying that the only thing that should constrain our generosity is our love for the person who’s just asked us. These words strike hard, whether it’s a family member asking to borrow from us, or wandering through any of our large cities.
Example 5: Prayer
The fifth example is prayer: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
Love your enemies is challenging enough. That means working for the very best for them. Wanting the very best for them. But to pray for them goes even further. Jesus says that we are to think of the person we find hardest to get on with. Do it now… Who in this church do you find it hardest to like? Who do you find hardest to like at work? Who in your family is most awkward? What other groups do you belong to? Neighbours? Bell ringers? Craft group? Mother’s Union? Chess club? Every day this week, pray for yourself, that God would grow your love for them, and pray for them, asking God to give them the very best of all that he has to give.
The next week as the question again: Who in this group do I find it hardest to get on with? …
Actually, praying for them goes hand-in-hand with loving them. It’s hard to pray for someone we don’t love. And the more you pray for someone, the more your love for them will grow.
God’s Example
Now all of this may sound pretty impossible? How do we hope to live like this? It’s so different from the way that the world around us lives.
Jesus isn’t issuing a call to the world. He’s issuing a call to the people of God. This is how we are to live. That is exactly the point. This is different. In verses 46 and 47, Jesus says that the tax collectors and the Gentiles manage to love their own kind. He’s quite consciously calling us to be something that the rest of the world is not, and to live in a way that the rest of the world does not.
If you pay back someone else’s good with bad, that’s devilish behaviour. If you pay back someone else’s good with good, that’s just being human. Everyone manages that. If you pay back someone else’s bad with good, that’s divine. That’s what Jesus is asking us to do.
So how do we hope to live like this? The first answer is to follow Jesus. Be one of his followers. Then we have the help of God’s Spirit in us to live in a way we would never manage otherwise.
But the other answer is to think about how God has treated us, and to think about how Jesus has treated us.
Jesus says we should not retaliate when others would hurt us, but just let them finish doing their damage. Which is exactly what Jesus did when he went to the cross. He let the Jewish leaders and the Roman soldiers do their worst. He did not retaliate. He did not resist. He just let them do it. And he did that for us. Indeed, it was people just like us who did that to him. Jesus did not resist or retaliate when we abused and insulted him and nailed him to the cross.
Jesus says to us: Do to others as I have done to you.
That’s Jesus. How about God? How has God treated us? Well the sun rose this morning on the people of Kemsing. It did that for those with a criminal record. It did that for those who are model citizens. It did that for those who came to church. It did that for those who had a lie-in. It did that for those who hate the church. God did that for all those people. Verse 45: So that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sense rain on the just and on the unjust. God is kind, and in many ways he does not discriminate in his kindness.
In fact we can put this together, can’t we? Paul says, in Romans 5, that the biggest demonstration of God’s love for us is that while were still sinners, Christ died for us. While we least deserved it. While we had treated God appallingly. He did the greatest act of kindness for us. And that involved Jesus allowing others to abuse, insult, accuse and steal from him, without him once attempting to resist.
Conclusion
Three words to sum up our society: Rights. Revenge. Relations.
Jesus did not live that way. He didn’t treat us that way. And he calls us to follow him.