February 23, 2025

 Last week at my pastor’s retreat, I went to the kitchen to wash out my bowl from lunch. I saw there that one of my beloved colleagues had left his dirty bowl in the sink to soak. I decided to wash his bowl for him. As I stood there feeling really good about myself, and congratulating myself on my kindness, all of a sudden this reading came back to me: “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even sinners do the same? … I say, love your enemies.” Even jerks do kind and loving things for people they like. I wasn’t really doing anything special at all!

What if this had been the bowl of one of the pastors I don’t like very much? I probably would have said to myself, “What a slob!” and left it there.

We often see the world as transactional.  If I give this, I will get this.  People get what they deserve, etc.  The values of this world teach us to love our neighbor and hate our enemy. We didn’t hear it from the Bible, but we hear it and see it in those around us and in the internalized values we hold. Even our own hearts usually tell us this is the way to be. But God’s values are different.  This scripture today is asking us how we are different than the world. If we are just going to keep living under the world’s value system, what is the use of believing in God and of having faith? We are called to be God’s children and to take upon us the values of God, not just to follow the rules but to make life better for ourselves and others. God’s values are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. God’s values are not hating anyone, being kind to those who are unkind to us.

What would have happened if that bowl had been my enemy’s bowl and I had washed it? I think there is about a 5% chance that he would have noticed and then been nicer to me in the future because of this small kindness I had paid. When I am kind to my enemy there is no guarantee that my act will change him. So why do it?

As I washed that bowl, how long would I be able to continue that story I keep telling myself about my enemy? You know the loop: the one that rehashes every wrong he’s ever committed, the one that makes him out to be uncaring, unfeeling, and hurtful. As I washed that bowl, could that act begin to change me? In that bowl, I might begin to see that he’s flesh and blood like me. He’s got concerns like I do about food and drink. He’s got insecurities just like I do. He is fragile and vulnerable and needy, just like me. He’s got fears, and that’s probably why he acts like he does. He, too, probably lays awake inventing clever rebuttals to his perceived enemy’s onslaughts. There is not this huge chasm between us. We are the same. As I stood there washing my enemy’s bowl, I might begin to think of his mother washing his bowl as a child. I might begin to feel some tenderness toward my enemy that his mother once felt. Could this small act of kindness begin to soften my hard heart against my enemy?

And would it be such a leap to think of God creating him, with hands and a mouth and digestive system for eating—to think of all the complex cells and bacteria and muscles that go into eating, the reason this bowl is here in this sink. And would it be so hard to see this person through God’s eyes, facing life troubles and crying out to God for help, suffering injuries and experiencing God’s healing, being hungry and God providing? Might I be changed by this little loving act?

Usually in life when we are faced with anger or violence or conflict, we either react with violence ourselves or we let people walk all over us. Jesus is asking us to consider God’s way, instead, which is a kind of loving resistance. It is resistance to powers of violence in our world, both outside of us and within us that keep us from wholeness, that make our lives less than what they could be.

To turn the other cheek, is creative resistance. Here someone has acted in anger and violence and slapped you. To some, turning the other cheek might seem like a doormat response and this scripture has been shamefully used to keep some people in abusive situations. Let me be clear that if someone is hurting you, there is help and I encourage you to seek it out.  I am prepared to refer you to help should you come to me.  To turn the other cheek is not to submit to abuse, but to challenge the other person by looking them in the eye. It may shame them into seeing what they’ve done. When you turn the other cheek, maybe you would see what it is that is so threatening to this person, they would be revealed as being weak and afraid. Maybe you’d see the little child having a tantrum and not having the tools to calm themselves and think rationally. Maybe you’d start to feel sorry for the other person instead of violent in return.

Jesus’ whole ministry is one of creative resistance. He doesn’t act out in violence. Instead he feeds people, he teaches them, he builds relationships with all kinds of people.  He is inviting, he heals them from physical, social, and spiritual illnesses. This kind of healing relationship was very threatening to people who liked the power they had to control others through violence, through threats, through hunger and disease. And because we think we have a right to hate our enemies, we put Jesus to death on the cross. We took his cloak and shirt. We made him carry our  our sins. We struck him on the cheek and more. He didn’t lash out. But he didn’t acquiesce either. He took our violence upon his body and he died a very public death. In doing so, he shined a light on our violent ways, on systems of oppression that rob people of their livelihoods, that leave the earth dead and lifeless, that leave millions of people hungry.

Jesus didn’t just rise again, but in an act of creative resistance, rose again to take away the power of death. Those who die in the Lord will rise to eternal life. The physical death is meaningless to us now. It isn’t a real death. The only real death we can die is in this life—we can die to our violent ways and die to all the ways we take life from others and from ourselves. We can die to our selfish desires so that others might have the opportunity to live today in God’s Kingdom on earth. We can die so that we quit wasting our time resisting the new life God is trying to give us and those around us.

In the end, we can’t be perfect or holy like the scripture suggests. Only God is holy and perfect. But we are made in God’s image and God is revealing God’s own holiness and perfection through us. If we think of things that way, we might start to regard that bowl in the sink a little differently—that annoying person, that terrible driver, that trying family member--they belong to God—they are God’s precious children and it isn’t up to us to punish them or reform them. We belong to God—it isn’t our decision to use violence. God forbids it. Instead, take a step back and ask ourselves—what would it mean to use creative resistance here? What would it mean to turn the other cheek, to pray for our enemies? How might that change the enemy and how might that change me?

Most of what I’ve said so far is about times when we are on the receiving end of violence and hatred. But we must also ask ourselves, how are we sometimes the one striking with a hand, taking the cloaks of others, and reacting with anger and fear? Often we don’t think before we act or we don’t have enough information and sometimes we are so isolated from one another that we don’t see the violence we have done. This scripture reassures us that no violence can take away who we are, children of God, and that it’s never to late to admit our mistakes and try God’s way of love.

What this scripture is asking is who we are and how we behave when someone wrongs us, or we perceive we have been wronged.  The world tells us to strike back, to use violence, to hate, to get revenge.  Those are reactions from a fear that we are weak or less-than if we don’t.  Jesus is saying, we are different, as Christians.  We are people of love.  If we resort to the tactics of the violent, fearful world, we are part of the problem.  God loved us from the beginning and we have acted as an enemy, struck his cheek, rejected him, mocked him, hung him on a cross.  But he is the son of God, and God is love.  So he came back and forgave Peter for denying him, forgave us for all our sins that put him there, and in his followers he created a family of love that use different tactics than the world.  We know who we are, children of love, and love is our tactic.  It isn’t doormat love.  It is fierce love.  It is look the one who has wronged you in the eye love.  It is speaking the truth love.  It is the love that resists the violence and hate of this world, that resists the othering of this world, the blaming of the poor, the rejection of immigrants, the intimidation of women, the fear of people who are different.  As Christians, when we are wronged, we resist with love and we say, no, this is not the way to new life. 

Jesus teaches us to resist with love.  A place to start is praying for our enemies and those who have hurt us.  The Christian community prayed for centurions who oppressed them, they prayed for tax collectors who took a big cut for themselves, they prayed for Saul who dragged them onto the streets and had them killed by stoning.  And because they prayed for them, they were ready when these oppressors needed them.  When Saul fell blind from that horse on the road, the Disciples were ready to receive him because they had prayed for him.  They didn’t put their faith in violence and anger to pay him back for what he’d done.  They used the most powerful force in the world.  They loved him and he was overcome by that love and forgiveness and raised from his blindness to see the light of Christ and then share it.  We do not put our faith in violence and hate and division.  We worship the God of love and so we resist the transactional mindset of this world that says to give people what they deserve. Instead we give the world what it needs, a healthy dose of loving resistance until all are raised to new life.