Hilton Head Island, SC – August 6 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 5:1-12; Matthew 5:38-42
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” – Matthew 5:39 (RSV)
World Changing Sayings of Jesus: Do Not Resist One Who Is Evil
Some editions of the New Testament are known as “red-letter editions.” It means that everything Jesus said is printed in red ink. That way the reader knows at a glance what are claimed to be the actual words of Jesus, and everything else in the Gospels is written about Jesus. The black print describes the actions or activities of Jesus, while the red print tells the words of Jesus from which the actions presumably evolved.
Today begins a series of six sermons called Life-Changing Sayings of Jesus. Certainly there were far more than a mere six such sayings. But these particular statements, along with many others, can change your world and mine. I hope they have, and I hope they will continue to do so.
Incidentally, in the middle of this series I am going to insert an unrelated sermon called Thought on a Total Solar Eclipse. On August 21 we are going to have a solar eclipse in a long, narrow band across the whole country from Seattle to Charleston. It is such a rare occurrence that I want to address some of the profound issues that a total solar eclipse naturally evokes.
Now, to return to the sayings of Jesus. When I decided to preach this series, I took out my red-letter Bible to gauge roughly what percentage of each Gospel has the words of Jesus and how much of each Gospel contains words about Jesus. For example, there is an alternative Gospel, called the Gospel of Thomas, which was not accepted as part of the New Testament canon. Thomas has only sayings of Jesus; there are no stories described at all.
What I discovered in my brief research is that the earlier two Gospels have far fewer sayings of Jesus and far more stories, while the two later Gospels have more sayings and fewer stories. Does that mean that people better remembered what Jesus said as time went on? Most professional New Testament scholars theorize that Mark was written about 60 AD, Matthew in 70 AD, Luke in 80 AD, and John in 100 AD. Nobody knows for sure, but that is the hypothesis.
Mark, the earliest Gospel, has the lowest percentage of sayings of Jesus. I guesstimated that 20% of his Gospel is sayings of Jesus, while the remaining 80% is stories about Jesus. For Matthew my guesstimate was 30% sayings and 70% stories, for Luke 40% sayings and 60% stories, and for John 45% sayings and 55% stories. But remember, these are “guesstimates,” not accurate numbers.
I never thought about this issue until I decided to preach a series of sermons on the life-changing sayings of Jesus. Jesus surely said many things that are not included in any of the four canonical Gospels, and some of the things the Gospels said he said he maybe didn’t say. I hope that statement doesn’t shake your faith, and instead helps to inform and strengthen your contemplation of what, in fact, you actually believe.
Furthermore, when I call the narratives about Jesus “stories,” I certainly do not mean that anything in the Gospels was “made up” or “created from whole cloth,” like fairy tales or detective stories or Harry Potter novels. The Gospels are narratives about Jesus intended to nurture the faith of people of faith. They are not histories or biographies of Jesus. They are, to use a fancy Greek word, hagiographies of Jesus, holy writings by people of faith for people of faith.
Before coming to the first of the life-changing sayings of Jesus, we need to look at the context out of which that saying in taken. In fact, four of the six sayings I have selected come from what the Church has always called “The Sermon on the Mount.”
The Sermon on the Mount is found in Matthew, chapters 5 through 7. Everything in it except the first two introductory verses are quotations of Jesus. It is an unbroken collection of things Jesus presumably said. Matthew decided to put them all together as the first major statement of Jesus about anything. It turns out to be many unrelated statements about many things. Luke has many of the exact same statements in his Gospel, but he doesn’t put them all together in one section of his Gospel.
The Sermon on the Mount begins with the Beatitudes. The root for that word means “blessed” or “happy.” “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs in the kingdom of God.” “Happy are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” What do those sayings mean? Matthew presents them at the beginning of his Gospel so that readers might see them explained in various ways throughout the Gospel. By themselves, the sayings may seem unclear or mysterious, but in the context of the entire life and all the other teachings of Jesus, their meaning comes into focus.
The dictionary defines a miscellany as “1. A mixture of various things. 2. Separated writings collected in one volume. 3. A collection of writings on various subjects.” The four Gospels are miscellanies about a man called Jesus of Nazareth. In each of the miscellanies there are sayings and there are stories. In these six sermons, we shall be looking at six sayings.
The first saying is Matthew 5:39, “Do not resist one who is evil.” Here are the five verses which provide the entire context for our text. “”You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. For if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also, and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go a mile, go with him two miles. Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse from him who would borrow from you” (Mt. 5:38-42).
In case you were wondering, this is not a proclamation sermon, declaring such things as: God is great! God is good! God is love! This is a teaching sermon, a didactic sermon, a study sermon. And so also will be the next five sermons in this series. What Jesus shall be telling us in these sayings can be life-changing, but it is life-changing in how we live and how we behave, not in what we believe. Both kinds of sermons are important, but the six sayings in this series can change our lives by helping us better to figure out how we ought to live on a daily basis.
“Do not resist one who is evil:” Did Jesus actually say that? And if he did say it, aren’t there times when we are required by God to resist someone who is evil? Weren’t citizens of the allied nations during World War II required by God to resist Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo? Shouldn’t we resist Hafez al-Assad and Kim Jong Un?
It it imperative to understand that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was not talking about international strife and evil. He was talking about interpersonal strife and evil.
Having said that, I wonder if he really said or meant to say “one who is evil”? Is anybody evil? Many people do evil things, they act in evil ways, but are they evil? This is a question upon which there shall never be unanimity. Speaking only for myself, and not for Jesus or God or the Bible, I don’t believe anyone is essentially evil, meaning genetically and consciously and totally evil. People do evil things; probably all of us have committed evil from time to time. When we hear racist speech and do not speak out against it we engage in social evil; we allow social “niceness” to override what God would require of us, namely, to call the offender on his offense. Our silence is not a great evil, but it is evil all the same, because goodness did not speak up against evil.
Young’s Analytical Concordance of the Bible is a 1200+ page book which gives all the meanings in Hebrew and Greek for most of the important words in the Bible. I must be honest and tell you that nearly everything in it is unfamiliar to me, because I actually know and understand very little Hebrew or Greek.
Anyway, I was curious what Matthew would have written in his original Greek version of Mt. 5:39 for the word “evil.” According to Young, it was ho poneros, which literally means “the evil.” That would seem to imply that Jesus was saying, “Do not resist the evil that is done to you” rather than “Do not resist one who is evil.”
This particular saying was prompted by Jesus when he referred to a verse found in three different places and in three different contexts in the Torah. It is a phrase with which everyone is familiar: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” On the face of it, this sounds almost savage. If someone blinds you in one eye, you can blind him in one of his eyes, and if he knocks out one of your teeth, you can knock out one of his teeth.
In legal terms, this is called the lex talionis, the law of retaliation. God is telling the Hebrews that there must never be unlimited retaliation if someone hurts you. You can only strike back by doing what was done to you, and no more. To give an example, if somebody cuts somebody else with a knife, the other person might kill that person with a gun. Such an action would violate the lex talionis. It’s OK to cut, but not to shoot. Really? Not so for Jesus!
Jesus deliberately goes beyond the law of limited retaliation. He tells us not to retaliate at all. “I tell you, do not resist one who is evil” (or perhaps more accurately, one who does evil). Then he cites the examples of turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, and so on. What a different world it would be if we all always did that!
The other night on one of the television movie channels they happened to be showing Spike Lee’s classic movie about life in a lower-income, mainly black neighborhood of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn on the hottest day of the year. The movie is called Do the Right Thing. It was nominated for two academy Awards and won many other awards.
The movie begins with a second-generation American-Italian opening his pizzeria in the morning. When he started in business twenty years before, the neighborhood was mainly Italian, but now it has become nearly all black. However, Sal is determined to stay, because in his own way he believes he is performing a worthwhile service to the community. Many of the residents dislike Sal, and especially his son. One thing leads to another on this terrible day, and that night many of the young men who were patrons attack the pizzeria, burning it to the ground.
I saw a snippet of this movie years ago, and soon turned it off. The language is atrocious. But that may be the way many people speak in poverty-stricken neighborhoods everywhere. This time I decided to stick with the plot, because I was too-belatedly taken by the title, Do the Right Thing. Spike Lee is a controversial movie director, but I am convinced his heart is in the right place, and this movie is excellent. It is a series of vignettes in the daily lives of several of the people living near the pizza restaurant. The movie is now so old that one of the actors is identified in the credits as “Sam Jackson,” not the “Samuel L. Jackson” of later Hollywood fame. The theme of the film is this: How does each character react under great emotional stress when a riot takes place? And how many of them do the right thing?
One of the characters is almost a Christ-figure, played by Ossie Davis. He tries to bring out the best in everyone, but he is more successful with some than with others. To his credit, Spike Lee plays a young man in his twenties who works for the pizzeria owner, and has a love-hate relationship with him. Spike doesn’t make himself look noble in his own film, for he is the first one to throw a garbage can through Sal’s window, with all the destruction that follows.
After the last scene, there are two quotes, one from Martin Luther King, Jr., and the other from Malcolm X. The King quote urges non-violence as the best way to improve life personally and also the life of the world. The Malcolm quote essentially says that violence is not good, but sometimes it may be necessary in order to secure justice. MLK also said this: “If we do ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ we will be a blind and toothless nation.” The way of Martin Luther King is the way of Jesus of Nazareth. Violence too often begets only more violence. We should resist whatever evil is done to us by acts of love, not by acts of retaliation.
On the bulletin cover is a famous quote by the eighteenth century English political philosopher, Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” But Burke was not talking about personal matters when he said that. He was talking about political matters. His statement has relevance to the United States of America in 2017, but it has little relevance to our personal lives regarding the triumph of evil.
In relationship to other people, as Jesus said, we must overcome evil with good. At the end of the Beatitudes, this string of sayings about the blessings and happiness which come to certain kinds of people in certain kinds of situations, Jesus made this strange statement: “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven” (Mt. 5:11-12). What Matthew did not say Jesus said, but what Jesus surely must have meant, is this: You will be blessed and you will rejoice if you do not repay evil for evil, and if you refrain from hurting those who hurt you.”
Many people do many evil things; of that there can be no doubt. But only relentless kindness and forgiveness can defeat relentless human cussedness. People who do bad things may not change their ways if bad things are not done to them in retaliation, but they will never change their ways if retaliation is the only response to the evil they do. The Sermon on the Mount is a long collection of sayings of Jesus is what might be called “practical theology.”
THE world won’t be changed by Matthew 5:39, but YOUR world and MINE can be. And if our world, yours and mine, can be changed, maybe the world eventually can also be changed. It will happen only if it is tried. And if it is perceived to be an ideal which will never work, it will never even be tried.
Do not resist one who is evil. Do not return evil when it is done to you. Overcome evil with good. It will change your world.