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The readings for this weekend could challenge the very lifestyle we tend to defend, calling ourselves the twenty-first century Christians. In our First Reading we are taught that holiness means separateness, distinctiveness, from the world. It was first of all the quality of God. Then, by making Israel his people, God made them holy, too. This is not expressed here but is presupposed by the context of the Old Testament Law, given as it is after the exodus; it is however made clear, as far as the Christian Church is concerned, in the Second Reading: “God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple”. But the concept of holiness as a call to walk the higher path is falling on deaf ears these days.
The demons of the world and of our hearts seduce us into thinking that the ways of God cannot be followed in this time-bound journey of our life. Even the commands that the Lord gave to Moses seemed so impractical. “Speak to the whole Israelite community and tell them: be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” The biblical scholar John L. McKenzie says, “You cannot be a Christian in private and a secularist every place where your life impinges upon the public.” Such a character maneuvering courts tragedy, as our life vision spells out a value system as if Incarnation has not happened and Jesus has not died for our salvation. There is a temptation lurking around the corner to throw the concept of sin out of our conscience.
The Gospel Reading continues the Sermon on the Mount from last week. This part is popularly known as the “antitheses”: “You have heard that it was said ... but I say to you.” Here two antitheses are drawn out. The first is taken from the Torah: “eye for eye and tooth for tooth” (Lev 24:19). The second is a maxim that combines the commandment to love the neighbor from our first reading with an injunction not found anywhere in the Old Testament but representing much of what is taught or assumed there, namely, that one should hate the enemies of God and of Israel. Jesus is not contradicting the Old Testament but is radicalizing it, going much further though in the same direction. For the “eye for eye” injunction was not meant to sanction revenge but to restrict it. This is a norm in vogue in most tribal legal systems around the globe even now. Now Jesus rules it out altogether.
So in the Gospel Reading Christ is not commanding you to be an enabler of people doing bad things. He is exhorting you to love even your enemy as yourself. If you love your enemy in this way, you will want to help your enemy be what you yourself want to be: someone trying to love and obey Christ. Think this way of Christ’s command to turn the other cheek, then.
Ordinarily, a person given to evil will become worse and worse if he thinks he can hurt others with impunity. That is why to threaten him with reprisal is to tug him back from his own moral destruction. But sometimes a person is so sunk in evil that no threat of punishment would deter him. And then your best bet is to let him hit you again. If he does, he may finally understand the evil in himself and hate it. In the mid-twentieth century, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., applied Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence with great historical impact to situations that curbed the spiraling violence to lasting peace settlements.
Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O.