Amazingly Practical
Perhaps you have a story to tell of resisting violence with grace or mercy or love or kindness. Those who have experienced such do have a story to tell. One of the most active nonviolent resisters today is a young man in Western Australia named Jarrod McKenna, and he wrote the following story in response to a question I asked him: “How did you get to where you are today in your commitment to nonviolent resistance?” If this story doesn’t show the power of creative nonviolent resistance, I don’t know what does.26
MUGGED by Jesus
By Jarrod McKenna
I was eighteen. It was my first year in University, studying Fine Arts. I was coming back on the train and I had been reading Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time. I got off at Warwick train station. I was walking over the overpass bridge away from the train station and in my typical ADD dreamland state, I thought of Dr. King’s talk of the nonviolent resistance of the early Christians. I had hardly noticed the big guy in a dark tracksuit with his sleeves rolled up walking toward me.
Still a couple of meters off, he loudly grunted something at me. I missed what he said. A little shocked to have Jarrod’s dream world interrupted, I quickly tried to piece together what he had said … I definitely heard the word “money.” Thinking he asked for a few bucks to catch the train, I got my wallet out.
Bad move.
Lunging at me with his fist clenched and other hand reaching for something in his pocket, he yelled, “Give me your money!” (He actually said a sentence along these lines only with words you can’t say in front of your mum in the mix.) At that point a number of things went through my head (including some other words you can’t say in front of your mum).
A number of things flashed through my head that years later Walter Wink would put into words for me with such clarity:
The Split option. [Flight] The only thing about running was that I was wearing my backpack with all my art equipment in it. If I ran, this would make my getaway at best a fast waddle. Not to mention … he’s huge! (Not hard compared to my towering 5.7 ft stature).
The Hit option. [Fight] Only (as I mentioned earlier) … he’s huge! Maybe I could get one cheap shot and if he wants to have kids, he’ll have to adopt. More likely, I take a shot at him, then he’s unaffected, like a machine in a Terminator movie, then transforms me into a red puddle formerly known as Jarrod.
I joke about it now, but there was nothing funny at the time. If you’ve ever been mugged or held up or threatened violently, you know the shock can be numbing. What next flashed through my head short-circuited my panic and crazy split-second plans of “split” or “hit.” The words of Jesus that Martin Luther King Jr. had been experimenting with: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you….”
The flash of those words in my imagination felt like warm oil over my head with a tangible sense of this is how God has related to me. For the first time in the situation I felt grounded. I had already gotten out my wallet, so I reached in and gave him what I had, which was only ten dollars; you’d think he’d have known better than to choose an art student as his victim.
I’m still not sure why, but I didn’t simply hand over the money, I stuck out my hand and said, “I’m Jarrod.”
Wide-eyed and with mouth open, he grabbed my hand and grunted, “James!”
Surprised and confused I said, “No, Jarrod.”
To which he with a surprise to match mine said, “No. I’m James.”
“Oh,” I said.
There was an awkward pause. This was by far the weirdest passing of the peace I’d been involved with.
I noticed his arm. The bruising ran all along it, interrupted only by the scarring that rivaled a pincushion. James’s arm was offered to me like an icon in an Orthodox worship service to contemplate the depth of his pain and all the desperate attempts to escape it. He couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than me. The next thing that hit me was the stench. Like stale urine mixed with cigarettes. As we stood on the bridge suspended above the freeway, James launched into his life story at a pace to rival the cars passing below.
His words seemed to overtake each other, then cut each other off. He said he was sorry to be doing this to me, that he was in a bad way. He’d been doing really well, he was on the naltrexene program and getting off the stuff, but then his mum kicked him out of home again and now he was back on the streets.
I asked him to come back to my house and eat and have a shower, get a change of clothes. I’d try to find him a new place to stay.
Another awkward pause.
Then, through the middle of us both on the bridge darted a young woman in another black tracksuit, with a bag under her arm, yelling, “Go! Go! We gotta go!” At the time I didn’t know if she’d been hassled by security guards at the train station or if she had stolen the bag, but it was clear that she knew James and she wanted to get out of there, fast.
“Wait, James, before you go …” I shuffled in my backpack past my art gear and textbooks to reach in and grab the little New Testament I always carried with me. “It’s got my name and number in it if you ever change your mind about a place to stay.”
For the first time since I was staring at this big guy’s fist, it got ugly again. James got right up in my face and started yelling:
“What do I want a Bible for—I’m going to hell!”
His face contorted with an anger that had an intensity that explained his arm. Without even thinking, I found myself saying, “James, we’re all going to hell. That’s why Jesus came.” Now, I know that statement rates low on the theological “wow” scale (and maybe embarrassingly high on the theological cringe factor), but it’s what I said. What happened next, I think, was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. This big guy who, only moments earlier was ready to beat me up (if not worse), just started crying. I’m not talking one tear sad movie crying. He burst out crying. Like a little kid does. Suddenly this pain that was so visible in his anger, on his scarred arms and in his situation, seemed to burst like a floodgate at the news of God’s love for him.
As this big guy stood there crying, I honestly didn’t know what to do. In the same way that my response had put him off balance, James’s tears now totally threw me. I just stood there while his head hung, his shoulders heaved and he wept.
James didn’t say anything more to me. He snorted to try to stop the snot and tears, and then he grabbed the Bible and started running.
After a few paces he turned, looked me in the eye, waved the Bible at me and nodded. Then he kept running.
I stood a long moment on the bridge, stunned. Then I picked up my bag, a bit dazed and continued along the overpass. As I neared the end of the bridge I saw [his female accomplice] jump into an already crowded beaten up maroon VK Holden Commodore sedan. As she got in she yelled over the music to the others, “I got a bag.”
James run up and as he got in the car he yelled over the music, “I … I got a Bible!?!” They piled in and drove off, and I walked right past my bus stop.
I just kept walking.
James taught me that there is nothing that shows the world what God is like more clearly than when we love our enemies. Despite the reality that throughout the New Testament the cross is not only how God saves us, it is how we witness to that salvation. I’m aware that “enemy love” still scandalizes many a fundamentalist and liberal alike. Who wants a Savior who loves the enemies we want to kill? Who wants to witness to the God whose love falls like rain on the just and the unjust alike? Who wants a God who longs to heal those who have hurt us so they hurt no more? Who wants a Christ who comes to us in the pain we want to run from?
Notes
1. For an informed and jaunty sketch of this history, see W. I. Miller, Eye for an Eye (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
2. J. F. Davis, Lex Talionis in Early Judaism and the Exhortation of Jesus in Matthew 5.38–42 (JSNTMS 281; London/New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, 200
5).
3. W. H. C. Propp, Exodus 19–40 (AB 2A; New York: Doubleday, 2006), 228.
4. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 132.
5. Luz, Matthew 1–7, 273 nn. 26–29.
6. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 133.
7. France, Matthew, 220.
8. Hence, Guelich’s translation, “You shall not oppose an evil person in court,” while contextually sensitive, misses the concreteness of Jesus’ own illustrations. See his Sermon on the Mount, 219–20. To keep this “in court” theme, he presses 5:38–39 into the mold of Deut 19:16–21 (unsuccessfully). One is hard-pressed to get each of the concrete instances of nonresistance into a courtroom setting, and it might be argued that only one of them plausibly belongs in that context—“if anyone wants to sue you …”—and Jesus contends to act before that even happens. The Q parallel in Luke 6:29–30 is even less courtroomish, and the order varies slightly.
9. See Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:544.
10. An instance connected to Jesus is Matt 27:32; Mark 15:21.
11. Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 105.
12. Ibid., 110.
13. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 134–35.
14. Ibid., 136.
15. Calvin’s form of the two-realms thinking (Christ vs. Caesar) is not as severe as Luther’s; see Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:193–95; Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 131–32; Turner, Matthew, 174.
16. P. Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 270 n. 21.
17. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 93.
18. Quarles, Sermon on the Mount, 146.
19. Lapide, Sermon on the Mount, 127.
20. Stassen and Gushee, Kingdom Ethics, 170–73.
21. For an excellent sourcebook, see R. J. Sider, ed., The Early Church on Killing (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012).
22. See the comments and bibliography at 5:9. Also Luz, Matthew 1–7, 277–78, who mentions the Waldensians, St. Francis, the followers of Wycliffe, Erasmus, the Anabaptists, Quakers, Tolstoy, Albert Schweitzer, and the now-growing Christian pacifists. He observes that “they are in agreement with the overwhelming witness of the ancient church.”
23. Talbert, Reading the Sermon on the Mount, 92.
24. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 144.
25. Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 107.
26. Jarrod sent this to me 2/23/2011. I have slightly reduced it with Jarrod’s permission.
Chapter 10
Matthew 5:43–48
LISTEN to the Story
43“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Listening to the text in the Story: Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:34–40; Luke 10:27; Galatians 5:14; Romans 12:19; 13:9; James 2:8.
One can dip into any number of moments in the Story of Jesus and observe that Leviticus 19:18, the second half of what I call the “Jesus Creed,” played a formative role for Jesus. Thus, when Jesus was asked which of the (613) commandments was the greatest, his response was the combination of the Shema (Deut 6:4–9) with love of neighbor (Lev 19:18). But the questioner wanted more, so he pressed Jesus with a question: “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus responded by illustrating that love for God must be attended by love for the (wounded/dying) neighbor (Luke 10:25–37).
But the law was not limited to the 613. Alongside them, at readied attention, stood innumerable halakhic rulings, like the list of forty items that constituted “work” so that one would know how to keep the Sabbath, one of the 613. This discussion in Matthew 15:1–20 about hand purity reflects an additional ruling that needed to be observed in order to be considered observant. Jesus calls these halakhic rulings “heavy … burdens” (23:4), and Peter observes that the weight of the Torah had become burdensome (Acts 15:10).
In that context Jesus stepped in to provide nothing short of a radical hermeneutical guide for proper observance of the Torah: love God and love others. This hermeneutic of Jesus, which Matthew will tell us later is the double hook from which hang all the Torah and the Prophets (22:34–40), is not a criticism of the Torah itself but of what the Torah had become: fertile ground for multiplying commandments. Jesus’ reduction of the 613 (plus rulings) to two—love God, love neighbor—gave his disciples a divine guide for life.
That radical hermeneutic is given a new life by Jesus in our passage (5:43–48) to put forward one of the most radical of Jesus’ moral directives: “love your enemies.” The Story of Israel tended in differing directions when it came to Gentiles (gôyim).1 Sometimes they were distanced from the holy community and labeled as “others” (Gen 10; 17:20; 1 Sam 8:5, 20), idolaters (Deut 12:30; 1 Kgs 11:1–4; Isa 44), and unclean/inferior (temple restriction; cf. Josephus, Jewish War 1.152, 354), and they were to be avoided (cf. Deut 7; Ezra 9). But alongside “othering,” some urged Jews to see that the Gentiles were neighbors to be treated with civility (cf. Philo, Life of Moses 1:23–24; Josephus, Antiquities 2:412–16), and they were a future part of God’s all-embracing kingdom (Sir 36:11–17; Sibylline Oracles 5:493–500). Sometimes the distancing got fierce and they became “enemies.” Thus, the Kittim, a code word for the Romans, of the Dead Sea Scrolls were part of the historical context for Jesus. I give but one example, from the opening column in the famous “War Scroll” between the Essenes of Qumran and the Kittim (1QM 1:9–11):
On the day when the Kittim fall there shall be a battle and horrible carnage before the God of Israel, for it is a day appointed by Him from ancient times as a battle of annihilation for the Sons of Darkness. On that day the congregation of the gods and the Congregation of men shall engage one another, resulting in great carnage. The Sons of Light and the forces of Darkness shall fight together to show the strength of God with the roar of a great multitude and the shout of gods and men; a day of disaster.
Jews knew who they were; they were God’s elect people. Because they were the elect, they knew where other people stood, and the Gentiles were those “others”; whether they were sinners, neighbors, or enemies in the face of Rome, they were still others. Those who thought of Gentiles as enemies were about to be turned inside out in the kingdom game Jesus played. He was about to reveal an Ethic from (so far) Beyond that it would boggle some of his audience.
EXPLAIN the Story
This passage is the summary antithesis that brings into crystallization the essential feature of the ethic of Jesus: the centrality of love. Matthew 5:17–20 established the categories: Jesus’ ethic flows out of the Torah and the Prophets without setting either aside; yet his ethic also deepens and sharpens both Torah and Prophets. His deepening and sharpening were in the direction of loving God and loving others; hence, the surpassing righteousness of 5:20 is a kaleidoscope revealing in separate views the Jesus Creed of loving God and loving others, being “perfect” in 5:48, and the Golden Rule of 7:12.
The present passage cites an explicit Old Testament text (Lev 19:18) and then adds something implied by some (not all) of Jesus’ contemporaries: “and hate your enemy.” Following this “thesis,” Jesus forms an antithesis: first, he gives his prescribed behavior (5:44—love your enemies, pray for your persecutors); second, he grounds the love-your-enemy command in the universal love of God for all humans (5:45). Third, Jesus interrogates his followers by pushing back against an ethnic-family-only kind of love. That sort of biased love makes them no different than the tax collectors and Gentiles (5:46–47). Finally, he offers a summary statement: “Be perfect.” But this summary makes sense only by perceiving the logic of 5:44–45: as God cares for all, so they are to love all; as God is perfect, so t
hey are to be perfect (5:48).
The Misunderstood Love-of-Neighbor Command
There is no evidence from the Jewish world that anyone quoted—verbatim quotation—Leviticus 19:18 from the time of Moses to the time of Jesus. But Jesus intentionally and provocatively clasped their (neglected) Torah (“love your neighbor”)2 to their disposition toward others (“hate your enemy”). This is deconstruction. Leviticus 19:18 was elevated to cardinal, principal status by Jesus, and the verse became fundamental to the ethic of Paul and James as well as to John and to a lesser degree Peter.3
Where Jesus got “and hate your enemy” is unclear, and perhaps David Garland is right in minimizing it a bit by contending it means “place the neighbor first and the enemy second.”4 Perhaps, but it is more important to observe that hating your enemy was not typical of Judaism at the time of Jesus.5 “Hate your enemy” is not found in the Old Testament, though there are glimpses of such an idea. Thus, one thinks of Psalm 139:21–22:
Do I not hate those who hate you, LORD,
and abhor those who are in rebellion against you?
I have nothing but hatred for them;
I count them my enemies.
Here is fertile ground for those so inclined to connect “love your [Israelite] neighbor” with “hate your enemy.” If this is the text, or others like it, Jesus is once again summarizing Scriptures rather than quoting a particular one. Instead of quoting a text, many think Jesus here is contesting a group of fiercely zealous Jews of his day, the Qumran-dwelling Essenes. More than one text discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls contains injunctions to hate the enemies, and that means the Romans. This set of lines tells the whole story:
Sermon on the Mount Page 21