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Don’t Turn the Other Cheek
I had to wait five hours to fight Billy Gerrard, and I was in agony the whole time. We were 5th graders at Heritage Hill Elementary School in
Springdale, Ohio, back in the day when kids got to school one of two ways: by walking or riding their bicycle. No one’s mother was waiting in an idling vehicle to pick up their child. And since the school sat right in the middle of our suburban neighborhood, no one rode a school bus. That meant when school was over, all of your friends, enemies, and indifferent peers walked out of school at the same time.
So when Billy Gerrard challenged me to fight him during the second period of school in the morning, just past the walkway off of school property, I was confronted with five hours of stomach churning anticipation until our after school battle. It wasn’t that he was so big and tough; the problem was that it was the opposite. Billy was about 8 inches shorter than the rest of his 5th grade peers. And he resented it. He walked through the hallways with his chest puffed out and his arms held out from his body like a bodybuilder. He dared you to bump into him. He was looking for an excuse to take offense. He had a chip on his shoulder and his face habitually wore a sour expression.
I knew I couldn’t win, and it wasn’t because he could beat me up. I couldn’t win because even if I did give him a bloody nose, well, he was 8 inches shorter than the rest of us. But I was also the product of a fundamentalist Christian upbringing. I had already read the Bible cover to cover. And I knew the part where Jesus said if someone hits you, don’t hit them back. Let them have a go at you a second time. I was naive enough to take my religion seriously. I was damned by my peers if I didn’t fight Billy, but I was really damned by Jesus if I did. When the 3:00 bell rang, the Heritage Hillers swarmed out of school. A crowd had already gathered around Billy when I walked off the school sidewalk and we went at it. I didn’t punch him, kick him or bite him. I just put him in a clinch until he got tired or bored or felt that his honor had been served, and we walked away. It was the best of all possible outcomes. I didn’t end up looking either like a bully or a victim, and most importantly, I could go to bed that night sleeping the untroubled sleep of a faithful Jesus-boy.
They went to church to pray one June evening, and it was the last thing they ever did. The doors weren’t locked that night at the Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015, so along with the pastor, a state senator, and seven other parishioners, a young white man named Dylann Roof joined the historically black members of the congregation in their fellowship. He had said online that he hoped to start a race war, but he sat for a while as the Bible study proceeded. If anyone had bothered to look at his website, The Last
Rhodesian, they would have witnessed his Neo-Nazi and White
Supremacist postings and pictures. But that night, he was just another lost soul. He took out his gun and murdered nine people in the sanctuary of a church.
Of course, Roof was convicted of murder. But the families of the victims took the unusual step of offering forgiveness to the young killer. Members of both political parties praised their magnanimousness. President Obama saluted the families for “an expression of faith that is unimaginable but that reflects the goodness of the American people.” Dylann Roof’s act of American terrorism has a long history, stretching back to the Civil War. And the response to that terrorism--by presidents, politicians, and the American people--has often been to endorse nonviolence, to call for victims and their families to turn the other cheek. To love your enemies. To pray for your persecutors. To be passive actors of nonviolence. Dr. King comes to mind. The Mahatma Gandhi is celebrated. But turning the other cheek is far from a passive action.
It was the theologian Walter Wink who suggested that it is an unfortunate misinterpretation of Jesus’ words to imply that turning the other cheek is a submissive, passive, doormat response to physical violence. That’s not at all what Jesus was advocating.
In Jesus’ time, the right hand was used for eating and the left hand was used for--how can we say it delicately?--taking care of other bodily functions. It was unthinkable to use your left hand to hit someone; it would mean being excluded from the religious community. So how do you hit someone with your right hand on their right cheek? You give them a backhanded slap. It’s degrading. It’s what a superior does to an inferior. What a master would do to a slave; what a Roman would do to a Jew; what a bad parent would do to a child. “If someone hits you on your right cheek, turn to them the left also.” Jesus isn’t repeating the old line from Animal House when the frat boy is being swatted by his hazing fraternity brothers: “Thank you, sir, may I have another?” No, turn the other cheek, the left one, because now your abuser has to hit you like an equal--with a fist or an open hand, not the back of the hand. But the master doesn’t want to be equal to the slave. Wink says, “By turning the cheek, then, the "inferior" is saying: "I'm a human being, just like you. I refuse to be humiliated any longer. I am your equal. I am a child of God. I won't take it anymore."
Now, that doesn’t mean that the slave won’t get a beating, that the Roman won’t victimize the Jew, that the parent won’t abuse the child, but the point has been made. The powers-that-be have lost the power to make people submit. When one person does it, it’s problematic for the man holding the power. But when every abused person starts doing it, you have a revolution on your hands. Wink calls it a new, third way, that is neither cowardly submission nor violent reprisal.
The “third way” is also found in the admonition of Jesus that “If someone takes your coat, don’t withhold your shirt either”. If you take off your cloak, take off your underwear, too. Then you’ll be naked. Embarrassing, maybe, but in Jesus’ day it was unthinkable to make another person naked. The oppressor would end up more embarrassed than the man who gave up his underwear. Again, if one person does this, it’s a minor incident. But if everyone does it, being stripped of your clothing becomes a social revolution.
Dr. Wink tells a story from the bad old days of apartheid in South Africa. “The police descended on a squatters' camp they had long wanted to demolish. They gave the few women there five minutes to gather their possessions, and then the bulldozers would level their shacks. The women, apparently sensing the residual puritanical streak in rural Afrikaners, stripped naked before the bulldozers. The police turned and fled. So far as I know, that camp still stands.”
So how can we turn the other cheek as an act of nonviolent resistance as Jesus taught? Is there ever an occasion when we should just allow an attack on our person to go unchecked? Some would say it’s never appropriate, never compassionate, never moral to allow physical abuse to occur without a response of some kind. Why can’t you just turn the other cheek and let it go? There are a number of good answers to that question.
First, just because the life that has been threatened and the life that you are defending is your own doesn’t make it a life that’s any less valuable or deserving of being defended. If we fail to defend ourselves against abuse, we are failing to correct the abuser’s behavior, to state in some important way that this kind of disrespect is wrong.
Additionally, and I feel this is especially important for young women and girls, in allowing oneself to be abused and disrespected, we model victimization for others who watch and learn from us. And finally, in allowing ourselves to be abused, we harm the people in our lives who care for us deeply. Hardly a week goes by in this country without a young person taking their own life as the result of bullying or extreme teasing. What mother, what father, whose siblings and close friends, can watch a person being victimized without suffering deep emotional pain?
An African American boarded a segregated bus and took a seat in the “whites only” section. “Hey you”, yelled the bus driver, “get to the back of the bus.” But the passenger wouldn’t move. A few minutes later, the police arrived and enacted an arrest. That’s a familiar story, isn’t it? But that event took place in 1944, not in 1955. The place was Fort Hood, Texas, not Montgomery, Alabama. And the courageous passenger was Second Lieutenant Jack Roosevelt Robinson, not Miss Rosa Parks. Three years before he broke the color barrier in baseball, Jackie Robinson turned the other cheek. He was arrested in an act of nonviolent resistance and paved the way for Civil Rights leaders who would follow him.
When the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey, chose Robinson to break the color barrier, Jackie’s resume wasn’t all that impressive. But Rickey was looking for something more than a slugger, he knew what kind of man would stand up to the bigots. Rickey famously told
Robinson, “I’m looking for a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back.”
Gandhi once said that a person could truly be righteous only if they were both courageous and nonviolent. He gained that insight, he would later write, from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount--or as it’s known here in Luke, the sermon on a level place.
There’s a famous quote by an Englishman, G. K. Chesterton, a prolific author. Perhaps you have heard it. It goes like this: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” Maybe it’s time for us to try the Sermon on the Level Place. Maybe we can turn the other cheek, not as doormats to whatever abuser who chooses to walk over us, but as practitioners of the “third way”, a better way: choosing to live courageous lives of nonviolent resistance to the Powers-that-Be in our lives.
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