Fight or Flight

Scripture: Seventh Sunday after Epiphany, A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. AMEN.

Turn the other cheek.

Right.  Now you tell me… how well do you suppose that usually goes?  Turn the other cheek.  Heh.  Yeah—let me know how that works out for you.

Now, if a man slaps you in the face, there’s what you call a natural biological response: fight or flight.  Hackles go up, nostrils flare, eyes flip wide, and that old adrenaline starts coursing through you like it’s do-or-die time. You don’t think about it, you can’t choose it, it just happens.  In a split second your body calls all hands to battle stations, and you make that snap judgment regarding whether all this delicious adrenaline is going to be spent running like crazy in the opposite direction, or fueling your fist straight into the other guy’s face. Kick a wild dog, what’s he going to do?  Fight or flight.  Pick your poison.

Now, a man who turns the other cheek—that just don’t seem quite natural, does it?  And it sure as heck ain’t what I’d call manly.  A man’s got to stick up for himself. They push you, you push back.  Maybe, if he’s got enough friends backing him up, you do more than push.  You take him down hard enough that all the others think twice before jumping in along with him. That’s how Dad did it, that’s how America does it, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.

Edward Gibbons, world-famous historian, entitled his multivolume masterwork Fall of the Roman Empire.  And you know who he blamed?  Christians.  That’s right.  Gibbons blamed the destruction of the mighty Roman Empire, which for 1200 years bestrode the world as a colossus, annihilating every impediment to its militaristic conquest of the globe, on the Roman people’s mass conversion to Christianity. Because the Christians were soft.  They turned the other cheek.  Hello, Dark Ages.

Now, if you want a rule to live by, how about something more sensible, more masculine?  Like, say, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”  There, now, that’s a maxim!  The ancient Hebrews lived by “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” So did the Sumerians in the Great Code of Hammurabi, and the old pagan Romans on their venerable 12 Tables.  You may think this sounds barbarous, but the original intent of such a law was humanitarian, to limit revenge. If I chip your tooth, you cannot knock all mine out of my jaw.  Should you put out my eye, I cannot take both of yours.  That’s only fair; that’s only just.

Besides, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” serves to prevent violence.  Who wants to inflict wounds upon another, knowing that in so doing he brings identical harm upon himself?  Would you cut off your nose to spite your face? It’s like the Americans and Soviets during the Cold War: nobody wanted to wipe all humanity off the face of the planet, but the promise that we would nuke them kept them from nuking us.

Yet here Jesus says, “Turn the other cheek.”  And what’s worse!  He goes on: “Do not resist an evildoer… if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.  Give to everyone who begs, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you… Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Oh yeah, sure, we’ll be perfect.  Perfect doormats.  Perfect pushovers.  Perfectly dead!

What in God’s Name is going on here?  Is Jesus telling us to be pansies?  Is He commanding us to roll over and play dead, not resisting wickedness at all? It doesn’t make any sense.  Jesus Himself is anything but a pushover.  Throughout the Gospels He faces down priests and soldiers, governors and kings, howling mobs and even the hordes of Satan himself!  Jesus comes roaring in like a lion. He’s so aggressive, in fact, so uncompromising in His pursuit of liberation and healing, that we crucify Him for it.  And He takes it like a man!  Even on the Cross, He commands His beloved Apostle to care for His dear mother; even on the Cross, He prays for His murderers and forgives us our sins. By God, such a man!

But never once does He raise a sword.  Never once does He strike a man.  He calls out no assassins, raises up no mob, like all the false messiahs both before and after His coming.  He never shies from confrontation in the name of truth—for is He not Himself Truth Incarnate! Yet neither does He ever abandon or forsake even one wicked wretch.  He looks at the options presented before Him: fight or flight; passivity or violence; and He abhors them both.  Never will Christ do nothing.  But never will He be a thug. Never will Jesus stoop to become a tyrant, a bully, a warlord.  Never does He call down His legions of angels.  Never does He knock the Earth out from beneath Him.  Never does He quench out the Sun.  And He could have—oh, yes.  He could have.

So what does this mean for us?  How do we live our lives turning the other cheek?  How, my dear fellow sinners, do we be perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect? Well, first off, we must do away with the false dichotomy provided for us by base and simple instinct.  Yes, we are animals, but we are not brutes.  Mere beasts do not have reason, free will, a God-given soul.  Fight-or-flight are the choices given to a shark or a bull or a snake—but Man is more than these. You and I, dear Christians, are fashioned in the image of God; male and female, He made us.  What’s more, we have been claimed by Christ in Baptism, made one in His Body, given the infinite gifts of God’s own Spirit and Word!  We are the Body of Christ now: we are the chosen hands and feet and heart of God!

And because of this—because we are saved by grace through faith—we are liberated, empowered, set free from the bestial options of surrender or war. We have been chosen to walk a different path, a Third Way: the Jesus Way.  For did He not declare Himself our Way, our Truth, and our Light?

It may interest you to know that the Prophet Isaiah and the Book of Lamentations both call a backhanded slap to the right cheek a horrid dishonor.  By turning the other cheek—forcing your foe to use his open palm on your other side—you not only defy his ability to shame you, but you force him to confront you as an equal. Moreover, by Roman law, any subject of the empire could be forced to carry imperial dispatches up to one full mile, but no farther—a sort of Roman Pony Express.  Go a second mile, and it is in fact the soldier who coerced you who breaks the law. Again, by law, a Roman soldier could demand your cloak, but not your shirt.  Giving him both not only shames him publicly, but makes him liable to his own courts.

Do you see now where Jesus is going with this?  “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” He told His disciples.  Yes, we are to pray for our enemies and to love them as ourselves.  We are to give to the needy and loan to the wanting. But the Church does not require, nay, the Church outright forbids, giving for wicked purposes, loaning to those who have cruel ends.  We resist evil.  We fight injustice.  But we do not shed blood.  We do not use force. Most people thought Christ was a fool Who got what He deserved: a short walk to a tall Cross.  Not long after His death, all of Jerusalem rose up in bloody rebellion, screaming hatred to the enemies of God and demanding an eye for an eye.  The Romans wiped them out.  All of them.

But then the risen Christ conquered Rome!  Not by armies, not by killing, but by treating the enemies of God as the children of God: by loving the other as our brother. Thus was Rome, mighty Rome, won for Christ.  And when Rome fell to the barbarian hordes?  Those barbarians in turn were won for Christ.  So came about the thousand-year Age of Faith, which eventually brought Christ to the entire world! All because Jesus turned the other cheek.  All because He went the extra mile.  The ethics of Jesus Christ are nonviolent—yet they are anything but passive surrender.

Note that I’m not talking about cops or soldiers or even self-defense; I’m talking about the Christian way of life.  Turning the other cheek is not cowardly; it is brave, it is noble, and ultimately, most importantly, it is the strategy that always wins. Think of King.  Think of Gandhi.  Think of any great hero from the last thousand years who toppled vast and sprawling brutish powers purely by words of truth and love! There you will hear the ethics of Jesus; there you will hear the battle-cry of God.  And our conformity to this aggressive, undying, inexorable love is the very perfection with which Christ blesses us in the Gospel this morning.

Every power that has ever arrayed itself against Jesus Christ by force of arms has eventually fallen, even as our Lord ever rises from His tomb.  Similar powers exist today, slaying Christians, burning churches, assaulting the Body of Christ. Oh, those poor, misguided fools.  Don’t they know it’s not us Whom they’re fighting…?  Don’t they know death is never our end…?  We turn the other cheek, and win.

Thanks be to Christ, Who wages endless peace.  In Jesus’ Name.  AMEN.