Genesis 45:3-11, 15, 1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50, Luke 6:27-38, Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42
When I was about 20, I got invited to an event where I wanted to make a good impression. The people I knew who had invited me warned me about one of the attendees, with sentences like this, “You’ll have to forgive him, he can’t help it, but he’s probably going to sneak up behind you and give you a hug. Like, a really big hug. And maybe he’s going to lift you up and not let go of you. And maybe make an inappropriate joke. But he doesn’t mean any harm by it.” I won’t share the details of this gathering and who was there, but I will share that this person’s name was, actually, Bucky, which is a detail you can’t make up.
Now 20 year old me didn’t really feel a ton of anger about this situation. I think I was probably just glad for the warning to steer clear of Bucky, which is more than you usually get when you’re a woman entering a space like this for the first time.
Looking back now, I see how messed up that story was, and I do feel angry about it. If everyone knew that this guy was going to basically attack me, like enough that 5 different people would warn me, then why didn’t someone say something to HIM, instead of making me spend the whole time keeping an eye on this guy? Why was I the one pressured to forgive him in advance, to be hurt and uncomfortable because no one was willing to reign in someone who absolutely could control his behavior if he had wanted to?
I owe my change in perspective to learning, in part. I have a better ability to think critically about situations like these than I used to, thanks to feminists who have helped me to think in new ways and to envision a world where young women don’t have to always be on their guard.
I also owe my change in perspective to a growth in my ability to feel and accept my feelings. One of the messages I accepted, growing up, perhaps especially as a Midwestern white Christian girl, was that anger wasn’t something I was supposed to feel. So, being eager to please and be accepted, I just suppressed any feelings of anger that came up. It took me a long time to learn that it was okay to feel angry about things, and to ask for accountability when things were wrong. It’s something I’m still working on.
This Gospel passage from Luke has an interesting relationship to our Christian understanding of anger and accountability and forgiveness, one that takes some unpacking. These commandments- to turn the other cheek, love your enemies, let people take your stuff and don’t ask for it back- have been used to justify all kinds of abuse and exploitation over the centuries. Many, many Christian leaders have told abused spouses to turn the other cheek to their abusers or told people who were robbed because of their race to give it all away because Jesus tells them to.
Other Gospels and other interpreters help us here to flesh out these commandments, to complicate them and put them in a little more context. Walter Wink, a theologian, famously interprets Matthew’s version of this passage, which has some richer examples. Wink argues that this passage is about Jesus advocating for active nonviolence, not passivity. He gets into the practical context of these situations: If someone takes your coat, offer them your shirt too- which, given the dress of the day, meant you’d end up stripping naked in the middle of the street, making the person trying to bully you look ridiculous. And if you were a rich or powerful person, when you hit a servant or a lesser person, you would do it with the back of your hand to show disdain- them turning the other cheek would make it so you’d need to hit them with the palm of your hand, something you only did when you were fighting with an equal.
All of these examples, as Wink and many other theologians committed to nonviolence and liberation argue, are Jesus giving people ways to unmask the game of exploitation that they felt trapped in, of claiming their dignity, of disrupting the status quo, all without resorting to violence.
The other thing that seems important about this passage is that the commandments are plural. You all, all of you, Love your enemies, you all together do good to those who hate you, you all bless those who curse you, you all pray for those who abuse you.
Given these two important guideposts for interpretation, I think we can safely reject the notion that Jesus is recommending that people in positions of less power and privilege let those with more abuse them and exploit them and hurt them. But what do we do with these words about loving our enemies, which it seems clear that Jesus really is wanting us to do?
Well, if we lean into Walter Wink’s interpretation, I think we recognize that loving our enemies doesn’t mean letting them hurt us with no response. In those examples, Jesus seems to be recommending that his disciples disrupt an unjust, exploitative system, in a way that is clever, and nonviolent, and that shows other people around it the truth. It doesn’t ask us, as disciples, to hit a person back, and thus accept the violent premise of the way things are. It puts the disciple in a position of being a kind of truth-telling irritant, showing the person doing the hurting that the other person has unshakable dignity, and that they are capable of thinking and feeling and operating outside of the abusive ways that can come to seem normal. There’s something a little performative about these examples- they tell the truth to the person doing the abusing and exploiting, but also to the people watching. Their actions point the way to freedom and liberation, toward a different way of living together.
I think of Bree Newsome Bass, who climbed the flagpole at the state capitol in South Carolina to take down the confederate flag, shouting psalms as she climbed. I think she ultimately tipped the balance of the state eventually removing that symbol, because she had unmasked all the arguing about whether or not they could take it down- she just climbed up there herself and got it. It made me wonder- what else could I just go and change, just because it’s wrong, just because it’s racist? I’m sure you can think of other examples that have pointed you toward greater freedom, greater humanity, toward acting like you belong to a different way than the way we’re living now.
I also think that we should pay attention to the plural quality of these commandments. Jesus doesn’t say that people who are getting hurt by abusive, racist, sexist ways of being should bear all the cost of them. You all need to love your enemies, he says- the whole community together. We don’t get to foist off this work onto just a few people- we all do it together.
It was not all that loving to send 5 messengers to tell me to avoid Bucky. It wasn’t loving to me, but it also wasn’t loving to Bucky. I didn’t really ever get a chance to know him, because I was trying to avoid him, but I presume that he had good qualities as a person, that were greatly overshadowed in most people’s mind by how he was allowed to behave in a group. If people had set a boundary, held him accountable, maybe he was capable of change. I was probably not best situated to do that work, but others could have. But they loved a fake peace more than they loved me or him.
I think the other piece that is important to engaging with this passage is that sometimes, we are the person doing the hurting, the exploiting, the abusing, or the people standing by wondering what to do when it happens. Jesus doesn’t say anything to us here. My best guess is that we’re called to be open to the times when others might reveal how our behavior is hurtful, how we are propping up a way of life that is bad for some of our fellow humans, and to believe that Jesus loves us enough that we can change. Jesus’ words here put the people who are being hurt at the center of the narrative, and it puts the truth into their hands. I know I have been in that place too, many times- one example that came to me while I was pondering this was when I was teaching- there were lots of times when I acted in ignorance, or even beyond that by not being able to listen to and interpret the pain of my students of color, when I thoughtlessly reinforced all kinds of norms for learning that I now see were probably meant to hurt and shut down their learning and their communities. I see now more ways that my words or actions were hurtful, and I had to listen to them and others in order to understand that. We need to continually look at how power works in our day and time, to recognize where we fit in terms of who is more and less powerful, and act and listen accordingly.
Finally, I think this passage gives us permission to feel and listen to negative feelings that can help us to love each other better. There are things worth being angry or sad or frustrated about in this world right now- if we never feel them, if we refuse to allow them in our community, it’s probably because we’ve either shut things out or shut ourselves down. We aren’t called to turn those feelings against other people, or use them as an excuse to hurt others because we’re so hurt ourselves.
But it’s okay to feel them- they have something to tell us. Maybe you’ve heard of these gatherings of parents of young children, who don’t have enough childcare or help and the systems that are supposed to support them have completely fallen apart- they’ve been meeting up in fields and parking lots for 10 minutes of screaming together. Just screaming at the top of their lungs, getting it out. I think that’s actually a totally reasonable response to our current world, and one that might just help us keep moving into something better, to know that we’re not alone, that we can imagine a different way. It starts by acknowledging that things are not okay, and that we have feelings about that.
We can bring those feelings to God, who can help us transform them into action, into love. We are also, I think, called to share them with each other, because Jesus is calling us into that transformative work together, as a powerful collective community, not as individuals doomed to struggle with these things alone.
I do really believe that this is true on a large global sense, but we also have two local ways that we can enact this together here at St. Clare’s. The first is a more gentle way- we are having a labyrinth service on Wednesday night at 6. The labyrinth is like a giant spiritual walk where you can take whatever you are feeling, whatever is too big and mysterious and hard, and just bring it right into the center, right to God. And you trust that by bringing it to lay at God’s feet, by setting it down, that God will not send you away empty. Our walk is our own, but we’ll do it together- singing and with music and prayer and just being in the same space, supporting each other.
The second one is where you can be like, wow, this new rector is a little weird. Inspired by the screaming in the field movement: on Shrove Tuesday, you can join the rest of us on the sidewalk outside the social hall, put on some safety goggles and gloves, and bring all the anger and frustration you have- and you can smash a plate. You can yell while you throw it on the sidewalk or you can hit it with a hammer, whatever works for you.
Eventually, we’ll take those broken pieces and make something beautiful together with them. But first we’ll just know that God can take our anger and trust that God can transform it into love. So come, walk the labyrinth, break a plate, share where you are- because God isn’t about to leave us where God found us- God is bringing us together to live in the way of justice and love.