Jeremy Duncan: When Jesus says, do not resist an evil person, he doesn't mean let them do whatever they want. He means don't meet their evil with more of the same. And so to turn the other cheek is not to invite a second slap. It's to confront that person with their bias to let them know that you refuse the designation as lesser than them. We wanna make sure that our feet are very firmly planted under us as we take some big swings this year.
And so in the first half of this series, we talked about our values. Intellectually honest, spiritually passionate, Jesus at the center. Those are ideas, phrases you hear all the time here. In fact, just this week in our staff meeting, we talked about some of our staff values. Those are a little different, but they govern how we work together as a team.
And during that conversation, I joked about how values are the kind of thing you need to talk about until it feels redundant. And then you talk about them a little bit more. Because these aren't just ideas that we want to remember. We are die ideas that we want to be so embedded in our life together that they feel instinctive for us. And so one of the ways that I think about our values as a community is that with every big decision we make as a church, we should be able to ask ourselves three questions.
Did we think it through? Do we feel it through? Can we imagine Jesus in the midst of it? And if we can honestly answer yes to those questions, then we're at least probably on track with the values that we espouse. Today, we're gonna shift into the back half of this series, and we're gonna spend a few weeks now talking about where those values land for us.
However, got a lot of ground to cover today, and I wanna hit some big ideas. So we're gonna set the recap we normally do aside. If you missed any of the opening weeks of the series, they're always available on our podcast or through our YouTube channel or on our website. You can head to commons.church/sundays anytime, and you'll find the sermon, summaries, discussion questions, song lists, liturgies, even prayers that we offer on Sunday. All of that is available to you every week on our website as a resource, so check that out as well.
But before we dive in today, let's pray. Gracious God, as we gather in this space, we open ourselves to your presence with us even now. Plant our feet firmly in love and study our hearts with peace, guide our minds toward your path in the world as we follow. Where we are perhaps tired this week from a long week, would you give us rest and recovery? And if we are restless from an anxious week, we ask for courage and calm.
If we find ourselves divided, perhaps within ourselves or maybe across some artificial lines that we've been handed, we ask that you would draw us nearer together in Christ. Might our worship today shape not only our words, but importantly our lives So that we might become the peacemakers this world longs for even if it doesn't understand it. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Today, we're gonna talk about peacemaking.
And for that, we're gonna turn our attention to a passage in the Sermon on the Mount to cover marriage stories, cheeks, cloaks, smiles, and making peace. But let's start with the opening because the sermon on the mount starts with one of really more iconic passages in the bible called the beatitudes. And this summer, we spent a bit of time there. We looked at this idea that the whole opening of Jesus' most iconic sermon is all about how God has already come to find you, regardless of whether you can make heads or tails of the divine. In these words, blessed are the poor in spirit.
It's important because you and I, we don't want to be poor in spirit. There's nothing meritorious in these folks that God is responding to. That's not the point. Poor in spirit is exactly what it sounds like. Poverty of spirit, lacking religious ambition, devoid of theological dexterity.
And if that's you, well, the good news is that God is already on your side. So pretty compelling opening for the sermon. What we want to talk about today is where that opening then lands. Because as Jesus is wrapping up the beatitudes, he finishes with these lines. Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for their righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And, yes, by the way, if you're reading the poor in spirit are given the kingdom of heaven in the first line and now that same reward is offered to the persecuted. This is a poetic way of saying that the beatitudes together as a whole describe the character of heaven. And it's not just some disembodied cloud based existence with harps and winged feet. This is something more tangible, concrete, an expression of God's neighborhood here on earth.
And so, what we wanna key in on today is how our values lived well can help make our world a little bit more like that heaven. However, for that to happen, this distinction between the preservation of the peace that we know and the creation of the peace that we long for, that becomes really important to understand. Let me tell you a story first. Early in our marriage, Rachel and I really struggled. Partly because we were young kids that did not know what we were doing, probably got married a little bit too young.
We can be honest about that now. But also largely because we did not understand the difference between keeping and making peace. In other words, I think we thought peace meant we wouldn't fight. What we had to learn was that peace was something worth fighting for. Except this was the problem.
I was a young, early twenties kid, driven, arrogant, hypercompetitive as I still sometimes am. And I had to understand that the best way to deal with conflict was always, without exception, to lean into it. My wife, on the other hand, Rachel, was far more cooperative by nature. She would rather walk away from a fight than come out swinging, and that just made, like, no sense to me at all. I had no vocabulary for anything but fight it out until one opinion is left standing.
In my mind, our marriage was gonna be the test bed for the free market of ideas. Let the best of bed here get their way all the time. And surprisingly, that did not make for the healthiest of starts. Thankfully, we had enough good people around us, enough courage to get some help through some counseling. I went to therapy.
It made a big difference. Now, is not a marriage sermon today, but I will say this. One of the most important things that we stumbled across, you really in our marriage was very simple tool for naming what was happening in a lot of our conflict. There's three words we learned in therapy, to ward away against. And the simple premise here was that we all have a default strategy for conflict.
Toward is about choosing the other person over your interests. Away is about stepping back from conflict to process or maybe to avoid. And against is when you lean in all the time ready to fight. Now none of those are actually bad. I mean, all of them have their place in our lives.
Sometimes it's better to give in. Sometimes it's healthy to disengage. Sometimes you really do need to stand up for yourself. The thing is, all of us generally have a strategy that comes very naturally to us. When we default to, if we don't choose consciously, Then we also have a secondary posture that we sometimes flip to.
So if we're tired or if we're stressed out, if we're anxious about something, maybe in a completely different part of our life, we'll often flip to a secondary posture. And so as a personal example here, my wife is away toward. I am against away. And what that meant was that early in our marriage, Rachel would back away from every conflict, and I would lean in against her. I would push hard enough until it would stress her out.
She would flip to a strategy like toward, and she would give in and tell me I was right, which would totally undermine the reason that I was fighting in the first place because I didn't get a chance to prove my case and feel like I had won, which frustrated me. So, I flipped to my away and disengaged emotionally from her. Now, that would be the end of the fight. It's a peaceful ish. But, certainly not the kind of peace that actually makes your marriage livable.
Now, is that a bit of a character? Well, yes, maybe sure a little bit, but honestly, at 25 years old, that is probably more accurate than I would like to admit. Still, the whole point of that model is that you try to be aware of your triangle of options. When conflict comes up, you pause and you ask yourself, am I reacting out of instinct, or am I responding appropriately? Truth is not every conflict is worth fighting over.
Sometimes it's better to just move toward the other person. Not every conflict is worth having right now. Maybe you need to ask for some space to back away and process first. Not every conflict is worth even fighting over, but some are. And so it's important that all of us learn how to express and advocate for ourselves in our relationships.
The difference is choosing consciously how you're going to respond. And for us, just very simply having that shared language between us, being able to name what was going on was absolutely a game changer in our marriage. All of a sudden, could talk about the peace that we needed to make, not just about who didn't do the thing they were supposed to do. I'm not saying three words in therapy fixed our marriage overnight, but shared language absolutely gave us a starting point to do the work to get to where we needed to be. And considering we honestly went from pretty tenuous in our marriage to 25 of marriage this spring, I think we did pretty well at that.
Still, I drag all of this personal baggage up out into the open because Rachel and I really did need to learn that there is a monumental difference between keeping a tenuous peace in place by tamping down conflict, And actually creating peace, making peace in our relationships by learning about what was happening to us. Understanding the conflict around us for what it was and then working diligently not to diffuse it, but to use conflict to bring about the change that we needed. And that is something that Jesus sets up in the beatitudes by talking about peacemaking, but it's something he drives home in a fascinating way a little later in this sermon. He does it in his, you've heard it said, but now I tell you section. It's a line.
It's a bit he uses a lot. But whenever you hear him say it's worth leaning in because Jesus is about to upend something we thought we understood, but probably didn't quite get. And so, Matthew five starting in verse 38, Jesus says, you have heard that it was said an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth. But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other as well.
If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go a mile, go to with them. Give to the one who asks, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow. You've heard it said, love your neighbor, hate your enemy. I tell you love your enemies.
Pray for those who persecute you. Then you may be children of your father in heaven. Now, couple things here. First, do you notice the callback to where we started today? Verse nine, blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God.
Now, verse 45, love your enemies for you may be children of your father in heaven. This section has something to do with that call to peacemaking. Question is, what is that? Because I'll be honest here, on first reading, if I was gonna filter this section through the same grid that Rachel and I use in our relationship, I would say that the only appropriate strategy is ever toward. Someone slaps you, you turn the other cheek toward them.
If someone steals your coat, you turn your tunic over to them. If someone forces you to jump, you say how high. In my experience, in my marriage, that doesn't work though. So I wanna assume there's more to this than that. And to interrogate that assumption, let's go back to the beginning.
You've heard it said an eye for an eye. That's a reference to something called the lextaliones or the principle of reciprocal justice. It's actually a very ancient idea, ancient law. It's quoted in the Bible, specifically Exodus 21, Leviticus 24, Deuteronomy 19, but it comes from long before our scriptures. Shows up in something called the code of Haramorabi, which was an Egyptian inscription from the eighteenth century before Christ.
And the lex talionis was an incredibly important idea in human history. It's in many ways, I think what allowed us to move beyond primitive tribal skirmishes into toward complex societies together. And without a law of reciprocal justice, revenge rules, and revenge escalates always. I mean, forget those childhood bible stories you've heard about him. Go and read the story of Samson with clear eyes to see exactly what I'm talking about.
Revenge is a recipe for disaster. Still, the lex talionis, an eye for an eye, reciprocal justice, reasonable retribution, that has been very effective throughout history, at least at keeping the peace we have. So if Jesus is advocating for a move away from that, I can't think he can possibly be advocating for an open season on bad behavior, can he? I would argue the answer is no, but that answer depends on a lot of first century context we might not have at our fingertips. And for that, we're gonna turn to the work of the scholar Walter Wink.
Now his books naming the powers, unmasking the powers, and finally engaging the powers were really a revolution in nonviolent resistance for the twentieth century. And one of his enduring contributions dealt specifically with this passage, bringing new light to probably one of the most famous lines anywhere in the New Testament, turn the other cheek. Well, the full line here is, if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other. And if you've ever read this and slowed down even just a little bit, you may have said to yourself, well, that's oddly specific, isn't it? I mean, what if they slap me on the left cheek?
Does this pacifistic command only apply to attacks that come from my dominant side? Is there a sinister caveat to Jesus' prohibition on retaliation? By the way, I get it. Only three of you in this room even liked that joke, but I wrote it for myself. For the record, sinister comes from Latin.
It means left handed, and, yeah, we used to be really weird about that kind of stuff. Anyway, the short answer is, yeah, kinda actually. Because this statement does only apply to your right cheek. And the reason is that in the ancient world, you only ever interacted with another human being with your right hand. Now the incessant details of that rule related to how people would clean themselves after using the bathroom, toilet paper, running water not readily available at the time.
And so to ensure that you could trust the cleanliness of your interactions, there were actually very clear rules about which hand you could use. In fact, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of documents from the period of Jesus discovered only in the nineteen forties, there was a document called the community rule. It's designated one q s in scholarship. But that document lays out a ten day penance for even gesticulating toward another community member with your left hand. Don't do it.
The big deal. The second part of the equation here comes in the cultural distinction between an open and a backhanded slap. Now, this one still persists today a little bit. Like, backhanded slap, even a backhanded gesture, a wave, feels kind of dismissive to us. In the ancient world, that was far more pronounced.
A backhanded slap wasn't intended to harm. It was intended to reset hierarchy. So a backhand is what you might use for a child or a slave, an underling that you wanted to assert your dominance over. The point wasn't to injure, it was to humiliate. The thing is culturally, can't use your left hand to do that.
That doesn't humiliate them. That humiliates you. And so to slap someone with the back of your hand using your right hand leaves their right cheek the only target of your disdain. And so what Wink argues is that when Jesus says turn the other cheek, he's not asking you to get slapped again. He's telling you to refuse to accept that position as beneath your abuser.
But you do it in social protest by turning back toward them, not through retributive violence. And I think the line that trips us up here is this one, do not resist an evil person. We hear that, and we think, I guess I should just let them do whatever they want then. But that's not actually the idea. The word resist in Greek is the word anthistemi.
Has a range of meaning, but it carries the connotation of justifiable though violent opposition. Think eye for an eye. So for example, Deuteronomy nine talks about a group called the Anakites who oppose the people of God, and there it says they're strong and they're tall. You've even heard it said, who can stand against or who can resist them? It's that same Greek word used in the Septuagint, but it's talking about going to war with the Anakites.
You see this in the New Testament too. There's this really interesting use of this same word by the apostle Paul over in Ephesians. In chapter six, he talks about the armor of God and putting it on so that you can resist or you can fight back against evil. Well, the whole point of that passage is about subverting violent rhetoric within the early Christian community. So Paul uses war imagery, armor, and weapons, but he relates it all back to truth, righteousness, and a quote verse 15 here, readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.
The armor of God, which even culminates in a sword, which is the word, which is, of course, the self giving sacrifice of Jesus. So when the word enthistemi is used even positively in the New Testament, it's actually in service of subverting the idea of violent response with the peace of Jesus. When Jesus says, do not resist an evil person, he doesn't mean let them do whatever they want. He means don't meet their evil with more of the same. And so to turn the other cheek is not to invite a second slap.
It's to confront that person with their bias to let them know that you refuse the designation as lesser than them. But you refuse that by refusing to get down in the mud and slap them back. Okay. So you turn the other cheek. Now we gotta give them our coat as well?
Again, there's context here. And the important words are shirt and coat, which are honestly, probably bad translations. Now I understand where they're coming from. They're trying to make this passage more relatable to modern audiences, but they've hidden a really important detail here. Because your shirt is actually your axon, ketone.
And the best parallel that we have for that is actually probably your undergarment, honestly, underwear. So Jesus says, if someone tries to sue you for your underwear, you give them your clothes or your coat as well. Now granted, that's kind of a weird situation. So what's going on with that? Well, the ancient world, your cloak or your coat, your outerwear was kind of a big deal.
Yes. It was your clothing that you wore on the outside, but it was also your blanket to keep you warm at night. It was what kept you covered from the sun and the dust in the day. And in fact, there are rules in Torah that forbid you from taking someone's coat. In Exodus 22, it says that if you take someone's coat as a pledge, you have to make sure you get it back to them before sunset.
The bottom line is you could sue someone for a lot of things. You could sue them for their home. You could sue them for their cattle. You could sue them to take basically anything they own except legally their coat. And what that means is that the scenario Jesus presents is not meant to be a legal test bed.
This is a parody. Imagine someone so bent on revenge, so filled with greed that they try to sue you for everything you have, everything they can get their hands on, including your underwear, which to be fair is not legally protected in scripture because honestly, who's gonna try something like that? But Jesus says, try to imagine a scenario where someone is so bent on greed, they can't draw a finish line for themselves. They want everything they can get from you. In that case, you've got nothing to hide.
You strip down. You remove your cloak. You take off your underwear. You hand it all to them. As if to say, which emperor has no clothes here?
Jesus isn't expecting you to do this, by way. Keep your clothes on. He's describing an intentionally absurd scenario that lays bare the pursuit of greed that we sometimes call justice. Because once again, it's not about not resisting evil. It's about not returning evil with more.
In fact, this act is about revealing evil for what it really is even if it's legal. So you turn the other cheek. You hand it over your coat. Now you gotta go a second mile? And this one is interesting because even Wink will acknowledge that his interpretation of this final teaching depends on the trajectory of a first two.
We do have some circumstantial historical evidence to back up his ideas though. The claim is this, that Roman soldiers were allowed to force non citizens to carry their bags for one mile. Technically, 1,000 paces. The thing is we don't actually have a specific law in Roman literature that says this. We do, however, have the Romans using a borrowed word from the Persian Empire.
The word is anjaria, which meant to press into service. And the Persians did have a specific rule about how far you could press someone into service. It was 1,000 steps. Now we have Josephus writing in two of his books, the Jewish War and Antiquities, about Roman impressment practices referencing this Persian word, and we have a reference in Matthew 23 where this same Persian word is used as the Roman soldiers force Simon of Cyrene to carry Jesus' cross for him when he collapses. He's pressed into service.
So we know that impressment certainly was a practice in Rome, but the specific reference to one mile comes from the original Persian use of the verb. Still, given, I would say, the pretty clear trajectory of the first two lines in the triplet, Wink, myself, and a lot of others think this is probably the most likely reference that Jesus is making here. If someone uses their unjust power over you to take control of your steps, make them make you stop. Show them that you decide your own steps in the world. See, in the context of a people group living under a world military superpower, what starts to become clear is that all of these lines, turn the other cheek, hand over your cloak, go another mile.
None of these are about ignoring what's wrong. They're about consciously choosing how we will respond to enact nonviolent resistance against evil. Or as Paul might say, how to wield the sort of truth in the pursuit of the gospel of peace. But then that is, I think, the difference between keeping the peace we think we have and participating in the making of the peace that God dreams of for us. Both eschew violence, but one is content with maintaining the status quo.
The second begins to dream with God about what could be. Said another way, the kingdom of God will not come because you look away when someone slaps you, but the kingdom of God will begin to take hold when you turn back toward them. And you make eye contact with them, and you let them know irrefutably their violence has no power to take you off the path of peace. Likewise, peace in your relationships will not come because you find yourself going in circles, repeating the same patterns, tamping down conflict because it's easier than digging down toward healthier soil. But peace in your relationships might begin to take hold when you acknowledge that conflict has something to tell you.
There's work to be done here, but it requires self reflection and conscious choice rather than reacting instinctively or defaulting to anger, resorting to the misdirection that comes quite easily to all of us. Finally, peace in the world will not come because we are pragmatic and partisan or because we are comfortable and compliant. And peace in the world might actually begin to take shape when we find within ourselves the courage to say, like suing someone for their underwear, sometimes what's legal is wrong. And it needs to be challenged so that it can change. Or that, like being forced to walk a mile, suffering that's imposed by military strength that assumes one group of lives is inherently worth more than another, that is counter to the heart of God.
And it is less than the world that we are called to make. Because peacemaking peacefully, the nonviolent resistance of Christ, this is not for the timid. It is for those of us who are courageous enough to follow the way of Jesus all the way to the end. So what does that peacemaking look like for you this week? Well, maybe it looks like your relationships or your marriage.
Being honest about the shift from keeping the peace you have endured to making the peace that both of you deserve. Maybe it looks like your politics. We find ourselves in the middle of a municipal election right now. Perhaps your peacemaking will be thinking through your vote this week through the eyes of what is good for your neighbor as your first priority. Perhaps it will be your engagement with global conflict.
Right now, we are watching as horrifying violence in Israel is being met with terrifying violence in Gaza. How revenge escalates always, and how the status quo politic of empire has absolutely no ability to save us from our own violent imaginations. For that, we need something different. We need a third way. We need one that refuses to turn away in the face of what is broken, but one that still scorns the call to visit our pain back on our enemy.
May that conviction and that courage got our friendships, our marriages, our politics, and ultimately our imagination of what is possible in this world this week. Because there's a lot of peace to be made, and the path ahead of us requires courage. Let's pray. God, those moments when we have accepted a pseudo peace because it was comfortable and it was easy and it didn't call us to confront conflict, to face into our fears, and to courageously walk the path of making peace in our world. We ask that in those moments you would reach somewhere deep inside of us and flip that switch so that we might understand that our movement, our steps, our ability to create change in the world is important and good.
And that when we engage in something as simple as our relationships, we take moments of conflict as opportunities to learn to self reflect, to be better, and then to call for something better between us. When we look at our politics and we understand the ways that we participate and the ways that we vote can do more than just good for ourselves, but being good for those near us. The ways we think about conflicts that are too big for us to change, but they shape our imagination of what is possible in our world. And we ask that your spirit would draw near and remind us that the truth of Christ and the path of Jesus can actually change large swaths of history and can invite us on paths that will change this world. May our commitment to peacemaking make our slice of the world better, and added together might that actually make our neighborhoods look more like yours.
Might we create peace? Might we make peace? May we start within ourselves and then work outward? All of this we pray in the strong name of the risen Christ. Amen.
Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.