This is a talk I gave at Doxology this last Sunday, February 20, 2011.
Matthew 5:38-48
38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ 39 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. 40 And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. 41 If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. 42 Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 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. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”In the past few weeks, I paid a lot of attention to the political drama in Egypt. Everyone watched the excitement unfold over 18 long days as the protesters sieged Tahrir Square in Cairo. I kept expecting the kind of half-hearted political movement seen among America’s youth, and fully anticipated that if their demands were not met within a few days, they would lose resolve and drift away from the square, and forever reminisce with each other of that time when they almost changed the world, but got bored instead. I know I’ve certainly been known to get passionate about a social injustice and then forget about it by the time I was ready for a good meal. Everyone watched as these protesters, young and old, just kept coming back. In this kind of story, how do you not root for the underdog, the impoverished, the disenfranchised, the hurting, the ones who have absolutely no chance of winning. And then somehow they win! That is the making of a good story. That is a story that pulls at something deep inside of us.
So it makes sense then that we would analyze every story out of Cairo for some clue about Humanity, with a capitol H, some insight into our human nature. On the one side are stories like this one. [Show picture].
According to the story, this is a picture of Christian protesters forming a massive human shield around their Muslim country-members for daily prayer during violent protests. It just excites me to see images of Christians protecting the people we often think of as Christianity’s “enemies.”
On the other hand [show picture], we hear stories of how in their moment of celebration - they had won! Mubarek was stepping down! - CBS reporter Lara Logan was brutally assaulted and raped. This now-famous image is of the moments in Tahrir Square before the crowd turned on Ms. Logan. Suddenly, our whole opinion on the Egyptian protesters changes! Maybe we assume that these men are Muslims or we just assume that they are different, but suddenly, they are very “other” and we yearn for retribution, for justice.
There are plenty of stories at both extremes and plenty of stories that are right down the middle: stories that make us think, “Humanity is good because we help strangers” and stories that make us think, “Humanity is full of so much evil!”
This question of goodness or evil in humanity is important because it is a lead-in to a more important question: “How then should we live?” Is the world out to get me or do people want to help me? Should I help others or should I take care of me and my own? The world is a scary place!
From that mindset, our verse today is especially terrifying, and we are left wondering, is that really saying what that seems to be saying? Hold onto that terror for a moment, because we’re going to come back to it, but before figuring out how Jesus says we should live, let’s take a look at how our own bodies, our instincts, and our human nature, tell us to live, and to do that, I want to introduce the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
I’m sure some of you have heard of the prisoner’s dilemma, but let me summarize it. Here is the prisoner’s dilemma: Two hardened criminals, let’s call them Bobby the Bookie and Leo the Wolf, meet at a coffee shop to form their plan to rob the bank across the street. Thanks to Frankie the Squealer, the police have inside information and apprehend Bobby and Leo at the coffee shop and throw them in separate interrogation rooms. They go to each and give them the same offer. They say, “We have information to send you to prison, but not as much as we want. If you rat on the other guy and he doesn’t rat on you, then you go free and the other guy goes to prison for 10 years. And if he rats on you and you don’t tell on him, then you go to prison for 10 years and he walks home free. If you both rat each other out, then you each go to prison for 5 years. But if neither of you talks then we only have enough information send you to prison for 6 months for gun possession. What are you going to do? Do you squeal or not?
In this dilemma, ratting on the other person is, on average, the best option, because while it’s possible that if you keep your mouth shut you’ll only go to prison for 6 months, it’s also possible you’ll end up in prison for 10 whole years. However, the proper strategy gets a lot more complicated if you play the Prisoner’s Dilemma many times in a row. Assume that after they get out of prison, Bobby and Leo try to do another job together, and get caught again, except this time they know how the other one answered last time. Now imagine that both men know that no matter what happens, they will go through the prisoner’s dilemma over and over again for the foreseeable future. They are, apparently, very bad bank robbers. This situation is called the Infinite Prisoner’s Dilemma.
During the Cold War, the Infinite Prisoner’s Dilemma became a very huge pressing question, because people were hoping that it held the solution to how to deal with Russia. When should we be nice (a technical term that means keep our mouths shut) and when should we be mean (or turn the other guy in)? A lot of game theorists developed a lot of strategies. One strategy was to be nice first, do the thing that helps Russia out, but the moment the other guy is mean, to be mean for the rest of eternity. On the other hand, you might try to “fend for myself”: strategy in which you always screw the other guy over. If it’s a question of cooperating or not, always choose not. Another strategy might be to be nice all the time. If the other player is mean, you keep doing what is good for that player, even if it hurts you. You may notice that the “be nice” strategy sounds suspiciously like Jesus’s command in Matthew 5 to turn the other cheek.
So one day, a game theorist by the name of Robert Axelrod had an idea. He created a computer program in which all these game theorists would submit to him their Prisoner’s Dilemma strategy and he would pit these programs against each other in a 200-round dual. So the “fend for myself” strategy would go head to head with the “be nice” strategy along with hundreds of other strategies and at the end of the day, they would see which strategy was actually the most effective. What Mr. Axelrod found was surprising. The winning strategy was just 2 lines of code: the first line said, “Be nice first.” The second line said, “Do whatever the other guy did on his last turn.” This strategy was called Tit-for-Tat. Basically, what it meant was that the player would never be mean first, but once their enemy was mean, they would punish them once, and then go back to being nice, at least until the enemy was mean again! You might call this the “Eye-for-an-Eye” strategy and it was the most effective strategy.
Basically, the Old Testament rule, the eye-for-an-eye rule, makes complete sense! Are you starting to get scared yet? As an example, many of you may have seen the movie Joyeux Noel about the Christmas Ceasefire of World War I, in which soldiers from both sides of the line quit shooting at each other and instead celebrated Christmas together and played soccer and drank German beer together. We watch the movie and it seems like a celebration of humans acting - for once - better than our nature. But the truth is so much more tragic. It makes perfect sense in the tit-for-tat system, the eye-for-an-eye system, that when the other guy is being nice, you would be nice too and that is the system that is engrained into our very cells; our instincts are to be nice when the other guy is being nice. But in the story, when the generals found out that their troops were not fighting each other they broke the cycle. In one story, a British regiment in one trench played the German national anthem, and when the Germans peaked their head over the trench to see what their English friends were doing, the British launched every grenade they could into the German trenches. Feeling betrayed, the Germans would hit back. And then the British would hit back. Tit for tat. The beautiful friendship was gone as quickly as it had come.
Which brings us back to Matthew 5. Game theorists tell us that “an eye for an eye” is the most effective system in the world. It is what works. And yet Jesus tells us different. Jesus says to turn the other cheek, and even more appallingly, to love the enemy and pray for those who persecute you! In effect, God commands us to follow a Prisoner’s Dilemma strategy that simply does not work, and asks us to have faith that he will sort it out. To me, this is absolutely terrifying!
Since we started by talking about Egypt, let’s look again at how “turn the other cheek” plays out on a global scale. A lot of people hear Jesus saying, “Do not resist an evil one,” and hear a call for passivity in the face of injustice and balk at that. How can we possibly stand by when bad things are happening?! When someone hits us, how is it right or even possible to turn the cheek?! In his essay, Christian Nonviolence, Walter Wink argues convincingly that Jesus was not passive and that Jesus stood up to injustice, and that this verse is not at all a call to passivity but a call to nonviolence. He suggests that, “The Greek word means more than simply to "stand against" or "resist." It means to resist violently, to revolt or rebel, to engage in an insurrection. Jesus did not tell his oppressed hearers not to resist evil. His entire ministry is at odds with such a preposterous idea. He is, rather, warning against responding to evil in kind by letting the oppressor set the terms of our opposition.” I can buy that to a degree, but Christian history is full of people who try to make the words of Jesus easier to swallow and less difficult to act out. On the other hand, some of the greatest heroes of the 20th Century are men and women who found ways to challenge the status quo and yet still love their enemies.
Dr. King said, “To our most bitter opponents we say: “Throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our houses and threaten our children and we will still love you. Beat us and leave us half dead and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory”
That sounds noble and uses the language of combat and victory and so it’s easier to swallow, but really, it’s saying one thing: we will suffer! We will suffer at your hands, but we will not lose our humanity and we will not stop loving you, and through that, we will win. It’s a tough case to make to anyone who has ever been hurt any time in their lives.
For an even more amazing example of loving our enemies, I have to brag on the Amish. Do you remember in 2006 when a gunman went into an Amish schoolhouse and killed several children before killing himself? In response to this horrible act, the Amish community completely denied Tit-for-Tat it’s supremacy. First, some elders visited Marie Roberts, the wife of the murderer, to offer forgiveness. Then, the families of the slain girls invited the widow to their own children’s funerals. Next, they requested that all relief monies intended for Amish families be shared with Roberts and her children. And, finally, in an astonishing act of reconciliation, more than 30 members of the Amish community attended the funeral of the killer.
Isn’t that insane?! As someone who has never lost a loved one to murder, it is easy for me to nod approvingly and say, “That’s the way things should be,” but really, I cannot even begin to imagine what that community must have gone through. I cannot imagine how hard it must have been to extend that forgiveness. And yet they did it!
How did the Amish have the incredible wisdom to forgive their enemy like that? I believe the answer is that they lived it out every day. So now we’re at the punchline, but I hope it feels a little more like a punch in the gut. It does to me. Soldiers in World War I should have showed more love to their enemies. Protesters in Egypt should show more love to their enemies. It’s really cool that an Amish community was able to show such love to it’s enemies, and if I’m feeling particularly magnanimous, I might decide that America should show more love to it’s enemies, to the terrorists who attacked us a decade ago, but often even that is too much to ask. This Turn the other Cheek thing feels like a problem for people who have real enemies, people who are really oppressed and beaten down like the Jews were beaten down by the Romans. How does this affect me?
Somehow, I must live out “Love your enemies” even though I have no real enemies to speak of. (If you feel that I am your enemy, then please talk to me after church!) Shane Claiborne said, “Most good things have been said far too many times and just need to be lived." Matthew 5:38-48 is a verse about which most good things have been said and it is time for us to live it. I find in my life that my biggest enemy is myself. I am the greatest enemy to Seth that I have ever or likely will ever meet. I very often feel that when life is not going exactly the way I want it to, when I don’t get what I want, when something or someone stands between me and my goal, that I have a right - a God-given human right - to be upset about it! I have a right to whine and complain! A right to just be generally pissed off! Sara tells me this is a trait of an eldest child, and I’m sure that’s true, but I suspect that to some degree this is a trait of human nature, this is a trait of the tit-for-tat eye-for-an-eye world we live in. When life is nice to me, I want to be nice to life, but when life rats me out, I want to find someone or something to blame. From that perspective, sometimes my enemy is tragically, someone I love most, Sara or Katie or Chris. Sometimes it’s my employer. The call to love my enemies may not, for me, mean carrying the pack of my oppressor another mile. For me, loving my enemies means trusting in God to sort out what is right or wrong. Loving my enemies, truly loving my enemies sacrificially in the way Jesus loved us when he died on the cross, loving my enemies, means something terrifying and amazing: dying to myself. I have this horrible and destructive need to be understood, this need to be right, this need to have all my desires met, this need to win, and it leads to this horrible and destructive tendency to turn other people into objects, into obstacles, and Jesus says, “No. That doesn’t work.” Jesus says, “Trust me and love others, and let me sort it out.” It is a truly terrifying call to be like Christ and to die to myself every day. If you really get this, then Christianity just became a lot less appetizing, but then maybe that is how it is supposed to be. Again, Shane Claiborne said something I want to share. He said, “Christianity is at its best when it is peculiar, marginalized, suffering, and it is at its worst when it is popular, credible, triumphal, and powerful.” Loving our enemies is absolutely peculiar, unheard of in history, and there is no mistaking that without God, it doesn’t work. It is not the most effective system for playing The Prisoner’s Dilemma or for playing life, and it requires a lot of faith and prayer that God really is in control. Loving our enemies means suffering like Jesus suffered on the Cross. So to answer the question, “How then shall we live?” Jesus answers, “Sacrifice. Love your enemies at all costs. Die to yourself.”
For an even more amazing example of loving our enemies, I have to brag on the Amish. Do you remember in 2006 when a gunman went into an Amish schoolhouse and killed several children before killing himself? In response to this horrible act, the Amish community completely denied Tit-for-Tat it’s supremacy. First, some elders visited Marie Roberts, the wife of the murderer, to offer forgiveness. Then, the families of the slain girls invited the widow to their own children’s funerals. Next, they requested that all relief monies intended for Amish families be shared with Roberts and her children. And, finally, in an astonishing act of reconciliation, more than 30 members of the Amish community attended the funeral of the killer.
Isn’t that insane?! As someone who has never lost a loved one to murder, it is easy for me to nod approvingly and say, “That’s the way things should be,” but really, I cannot even begin to imagine what that community must have gone through. I cannot imagine how hard it must have been to extend that forgiveness. And yet they did it!
How did the Amish have the incredible wisdom to forgive their enemy like that? I believe the answer is that they lived it out every day. So now we’re at the punchline, but I hope it feels a little more like a punch in the gut. It does to me. Soldiers in World War I should have showed more love to their enemies. Protesters in Egypt should show more love to their enemies. It’s really cool that an Amish community was able to show such love to it’s enemies, and if I’m feeling particularly magnanimous, I might decide that America should show more love to it’s enemies, to the terrorists who attacked us a decade ago, but often even that is too much to ask. This Turn the other Cheek thing feels like a problem for people who have real enemies, people who are really oppressed and beaten down like the Jews were beaten down by the Romans. How does this affect me?
Somehow, I must live out “Love your enemies” even though I have no real enemies to speak of. (If you feel that I am your enemy, then please talk to me after church!) Shane Claiborne said, “Most good things have been said far too many times and just need to be lived." Matthew 5:38-48 is a verse about which most good things have been said and it is time for us to live it. I find in my life that my biggest enemy is myself. I am the greatest enemy to Seth that I have ever or likely will ever meet. I very often feel that when life is not going exactly the way I want it to, when I don’t get what I want, when something or someone stands between me and my goal, that I have a right - a God-given human right - to be upset about it! I have a right to whine and complain! A right to just be generally pissed off! Sara tells me this is a trait of an eldest child, and I’m sure that’s true, but I suspect that to some degree this is a trait of human nature, this is a trait of the tit-for-tat eye-for-an-eye world we live in. When life is nice to me, I want to be nice to life, but when life rats me out, I want to find someone or something to blame. From that perspective, sometimes my enemy is tragically, someone I love most, Sara or Katie or Chris. Sometimes it’s my employer. The call to love my enemies may not, for me, mean carrying the pack of my oppressor another mile. For me, loving my enemies means trusting in God to sort out what is right or wrong. Loving my enemies, truly loving my enemies sacrificially in the way Jesus loved us when he died on the cross, loving my enemies, means something terrifying and amazing: dying to myself. I have this horrible and destructive need to be understood, this need to be right, this need to have all my desires met, this need to win, and it leads to this horrible and destructive tendency to turn other people into objects, into obstacles, and Jesus says, “No. That doesn’t work.” Jesus says, “Trust me and love others, and let me sort it out.” It is a truly terrifying call to be like Christ and to die to myself every day. If you really get this, then Christianity just became a lot less appetizing, but then maybe that is how it is supposed to be. Again, Shane Claiborne said something I want to share. He said, “Christianity is at its best when it is peculiar, marginalized, suffering, and it is at its worst when it is popular, credible, triumphal, and powerful.” Loving our enemies is absolutely peculiar, unheard of in history, and there is no mistaking that without God, it doesn’t work. It is not the most effective system for playing The Prisoner’s Dilemma or for playing life, and it requires a lot of faith and prayer that God really is in control. Loving our enemies means suffering like Jesus suffered on the Cross. So to answer the question, “How then shall we live?” Jesus answers, “Sacrifice. Love your enemies at all costs. Die to yourself.”
Let's listen again to the words of Jesus in Matthew 5, this time in The Message, for some perspective.
38-42"Here's another old saying that deserves a second look: 'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.' Is that going to get us anywhere? Here's what I propose: 'Don't hit back at all.' If someone strikes you, stand there and take it. If someone drags you into court and sues for the shirt off your back, giftwrap your best coat and make a present of it. And if someone takes unfair advantage of you, use the occasion to practice the servant life. No more tit-for-tat stuff. Live generously.
43-47"You're familiar with the old written law, 'Love your friend,' and its unwritten companion, 'Hate your enemy.' I'm challenging that. I'm telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.
48"In a word, what I'm saying is, Grow up. You're kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you."
As we try this week to be like Jesus in dying, I wanted to take this time to celebrate the revolutionary example that Jesus set in dying on the cross."The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes."
Please come forward and take communion as you are ready.
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