“You have heard it was said, ’Eye for
eye, tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone
slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” (Mt 5:38-9)
Some have argued that Jesus is not repudiating
Scripture, but merely human traditions, in his famous “but I say to you”
teachings in Matthew 5. This is arguably true for all his other repudiations,
but not for this one. The “eye for eye” command is given three times in the OT
(Ex 21:24; Lev 24:19-20; Deut 19:21), and in both Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the
instruction is not merely about violence that is permitted, as I’ve heard many
argue, but about violence that is required.
In fact, this “eye for eye” principle is called the
lex tallionis (law of retaliation),
and it’s at the foundation of all the laws of the OT that require violence
against perpetrators. Yet Jesus repudiates this principle and replaces it with
his teaching to never “resist [anthistēmi]
an evil person” (which, by the way, means that we aren’t to respond to
aggression with aggression, not that we’re to do nothing).
What makes this even more amazing is that Jesus
goes on to expound on his command on how to treat aggressors by saying,
“I tell you, love your enemies and pray
for those who persecute you, that 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” (Mt 5:44-45,
emphasis added; cf. Lk 6:29-36).
While the OT allowed for, and even required,
retaliation, Jesus commands us to instead love and pray for our enemies. (In
Luke 6 he adds “and do good to those who hate you” [vs 27]). Rather than to
ever respond to violence with violence, we’re to instead love like the sun
shines and like the rain falls – namely, indiscriminately. Whether the person
is a friend or life-threatening enemy, we’re to love and bless them. And Jesus
makes our willingness to love like this a precondition for being considered a
child of our Father in heaven – “that you may be.” By the standards of Jesus’ teaching,
therefore, anyone who obeyed the OT laws requiring violence could not be
considered a child of the Father in heaven.
It’s also important we notice that Jesus never
qualifies who the “enemies” we’re to love are (nor does Paul in Rom 12:14-21).
Indeed, his instruction to love indiscriminately rules out any possible
qualifications. What makes Jesus’ teachings even more radical is that any talk
about “enemies” to a Jewish audience in first century Palestine would immediate
call to mind the Romans – the one’s who unjustly oppressed, abused, and often
randomly killed the Jewish people. Jesus’ command to love enemies and to never
respond violently to them thus includes the very worst kind of enemies we can
imagine: the kind that threaten us, our country, and/or our loved ones. It
includes the kind of enemies people naturally feel most “justified” killing, if
they need to, in order to protect themselves. But these are precisely the kinds
of enemies we’re to always love and never retaliate against.
As radical as this teaching might sound to us,
however, I don’t believe it should surprise us that we’re commanded to love
this way. For God loved us to the point of death when we “were yet enemies,”
(Rom 5:10), and we are commanded to “imitate God” by living in this same kind
of love, “just as Christ loved us and gave his life for us” (Eph. 5:1-2).
To sum it all up, in this passage Jesus is doing
nothing less than telling us that our willingness to set aside a violent OT law
in order to obey his new command to love and refrain from violence toward even
the worst kind of life-threatening enemies is a precondition for being
considered a child of God.
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