Love your enemies ... and pray for those who persecute youA sermon given at All Hallows by Beccie D’Cunha on 21 November 2004Matthew 5:38—48‘You have heard that it was said, “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.” But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. ‘You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons 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. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’ Ephesians 3:14—21For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
As a campaigner and someone who is concerned for justice as well as peace, I always used to struggle with Jesus’ command to turn the other cheek. I think this well known passage is often either ignored as one that cannot be taken literally or it is used as justification for turning a blind eye to injustice or violence, as a reason for staying neutral, sitting on the fence, being ‘apolitical’. I struggled with both reactions — whilst Jesus may be using hyperbole in his examples, my guess is that he does this for a reason, to add emphasis to an important challenge. But are we to expect a battered wife, an abused sex worker, a prisoner being tortured to merely accept their fate and allow the abuse to continue or even worsen? If we take this passage seriously, is it a naïve and unrealistic response to violence and oppression? Does it pave the way for further oppression? This interpretation seems to fly in the face of Jesus’ earlier words in his sermon on the mount, when he says ‘blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted’. It is only more recently that I feel I have discovered a far more challenging and convincing interpretation that I have seen illustrated in the lives of people I have met and read about. The first thing that needs to be looked at is the meaning of the word we have in many of our Bible translations — ‘resist’. In Matthew 5:39, Jesus says ‘Do not resist an evil person’. The Greek verb comes from the root word ‘stasis’ which means ‘violent rebellion’ or ‘armed revolt’. It signifies standing in battle array. So it would be more accurate to translate this verse as ‘do not respond in kind to evil actions’. So Jesus begins by urging people not to take up arms and repay violence with violence. He then sets out an alternative way of responding to the oppressor. I’d like to look in turn at two of the three examples Jesus gives. Firstly, he says ‘if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ Jesus himself responded firmly to an unjust blow to the face in John 18:22—23. When he is being questioned by the High Priest, an officer strikes him. Jesus responds by saying ‘If I have spoken wrongly, bear witness to the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?’ Thus it seems unlikely that Jesus is ruling out all forms of resistance or a questioning of the violence. In Jesus’ day, a backhanded blow to the right cheek did not imply a painful punch or shattered teeth; it was a degrading insult, the severest public affront to a person’s dignity. Being slapped backhand round the face was something often reserved for slaves or those seen as inferior. Therefore to turn the left cheek to the person who slapped you meant they would be confronted with a choice: if they wanted to hit you again, it would either have to be a slap with their palm or a punch — but this would reassert the victim as an equal. It would also give legal power of redress to the victim as it was an offence to punch someone in the face. Let’s look next at the third example Jesus gives — ‘If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles’. Under Roman rule, Jews were often forced to carry the packs of soldiers, but it was illegal to force someone to carry a pack more than one mile. There are so many points that can be made from these simple acts of what I would call non-violent resistance or defiance. They are far from being passive and resigned responses to violence and injustice. All are examples of humiliation, of someone being stripped of their dignity. And I wonder if Jesus is saying two things at the same time here. One, that we shouldn’t avenge our ‘honour’ — that by freely offering our other cheek or offering to walk the extra mile we show that we are secure in our status before God and therefore do not value human honour. But on the other hand, paradoxically maybe, this response forces the oppressor, in this case it may be the Roman soldier, to see the dignity of their victim. The oppressor’s power trip is rendered meaningless as what he or she demands is offered freely. The victim’s dignity is restored and simultaneously the Roman soldier is shown the injustice of his or her actions, as if a mirror were being held up to them. They are given a choice whether to break the law or cease their humiliating or violent behaviour. This model offers a way of breaking out of the cycle of violent relationships. It also gives power to the powerless and gives a chance for repentance to the oppressor. The theologian Glen Stassen describes Jesus’ response to the violence around him as ‘transforming initiatives’. Instead of retaliating or inciting revenge for the oppression he suffers or witnesses, he initiates transformative patterns of behaviour, challenging the world’s assumption that violence must be met with violence and finding new alternatives, a third way between the extremes of violent resistance and passive submission. During my last visit to Israel and Palestine last Easter, I spent some time in Bethlehem with a wonderful Palestinian Christian called Zoughbi Zoughbi and his family. Zoughbi is a truly beautiful person who radiates gentleness and forgiveness. He is director of a mediation and conflict transformation centre in Bethlehem. I’d like to share a couple of stories that he told me that I feel illustrate this idea of transforming initiatives or turning the other cheek. During the Easter 2002 siege of Bethlehem — a time of long curfews and arbitrary house searches that often resulted in destruction of property or even occupation of the house — Israeli soldiers came to Zoighbi’s house to search it. Palestinians live in fear of these house searches and they can often feel like a violation of their homes. Yet when his 8 year old son Tariq answered the door to the soldiers, he smiled and said ‘welcome’ to them. The soldier said ‘shut up’ or ‘sheket’ in Hebrew. Zoughbi also told us about a recent conference he was invited to in Harare, Zimbabwe. It is very difficult for Palestinians to travel around the West Bank and Gaza, let alone to travel abroad. However, Zoughbi went through the long and bureaucratic process of applying for a permit to travel from Israel. Having obtained permission to travel (via Jordan of course — Palestinians are not usually allowed to travel through Israel’s Ben Gurion airport), and making the arduous and expensive journey in multiple taxis through numerous checkpoints to the Jordanian border, the soldier on duty refused him access. Despite this arbitrary, provocative and unjust treatment, Zoughbi told us that he kept smiling throughout at the soldier and even told some jokes. This infuriated the soldier further — it obviously undermined his power trip. Zoughbi said he is determined not to give up or let the occupation conquer him. ‘If you surrender to injustice you become bitter and hateful’. So he responds cheerfully and defiantly. For me, these simple stories are examples of non-violence in action. It is not just the actions or words that inspired me, but the complete refusal to hate or become bitter. They show a refusal to be brought down to the oppressor’s level — responding in a different spirit that often infuriates the oppressor, but could also open up new possibilities for change or remorse or even reconciliation. A vivid example of transforming violence is a black man from the segregated US South who was quoted in the Catholic Worker newspaper in the early 60s as saying — ‘I will let them kick me and kick me until they have kicked all hatred out of themselves and into my own body where I will transform it into love.’ To me, these people and their stories are incarnations of God’s love. Knowing the anger I felt at the injustices of the occupation that I witnessed or experienced, I find it difficult to imagine this kind of gracious and loving response. Seeing Palestinians being forced to stand indefinitely at checkpoints and knowing their powerlessness in the face of this treatment made me so angry at times. But if we come back to Matthew 5, Jesus doesn’t leave us without further advice for how we can learn to respond in a nonviolent way. Jesus continues by rebuffing the popular interpretation of the Old Testament command to ‘love your neighbours’, which many took to mean ‘hate your enemies’. Instead he says ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ This part of the passage shows that Jesus is not simply calling for a disciplined response, a gritting of our teeth and bearing it, a suppression of our anger and violence. Jesus’ challenge goes much deeper — we are called to actually love our enemies or our oppressors. I also think that these words of Jesus hold the key to how we can learn to turn the other cheek and find non-violent methods of resisting violence. The writer Mary Lou Kownacki asserts that we need to find and develop a spirituality of non-violence. Without that any nonviolent actions or advocacy we undertake run the risk of being superficial or worse — they may be hypocritical, masking deep hostility, self-righteousness, and a desire to defeat and humiliate others. A spirituality of nonviolence should underpin all our nonviolent actions and advocacy for change. She asserts that a spirituality of nonviolence has something to do with grasping fully the depth, height, breadth and length of God’s love, experiencing it and making it visible. As in Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians, we need to be rooted and established in love —love for God and love for others, including, or especially, for our enemies. I have been on a tumultuous and often painful journey as far as my experience in the Middle East is concerned. In brief, my dad is what you would call a Christian Zionist — he believes that the Jews are God’s chosen people and that the modern-day state of Israel is the part-fulfilment of God’s plan. In his thinking a Palestinian State is contrary to God’s will. From what others have told me about my attitude when I was younger, his views rubbed off on me. On my gap year before University I spent 6 months in Israel, working on a Kibbutz and then in a church in Jerusalem. After developing my own politics and theology at University I was determined to return to the region to see the other side, to get a fuller picture of what was happening. So I returned with some friends partly to fact-find. We went on alternative tours of Palestine, visiting refugee camps and listening to people’s stories. We were so shocked by what we saw that we wanted to stay out there and found some voluntary work in a Palestinian Non-Governmental Organisation in Ramallah, a city in the West Bank. Since then, I went back in 2002 with International Solidarity Movement, and then again this year, when I took a small group out to visit peacemakers on both sides. Looking back I think I have been through three distinguishable stages. I have gone from being naïve and probably quite Christian Zionist or pro-Israel in my attitudes, knowing nothing about the conflict or the suffering of the Palestinians, to being a fairly insensitive campaigner for the rights of the Palestinians, to now realising the deep pain on both sides and wanting to be more reconciliatory in my approach whilst being committed to campaigning for an end to the unjust Israeli occupation. Looking back at the journey I’ve been on, I can see the zeal I had when I first realised the deep injustice being suffered by the Palestinians. I was committed to acting to end that injustice and wanted to show solidarity with the victims. However I think I was motivated primarily by anger and indignation rather than compassion, and because of that I may have been insensitive to the pain of Israelis or Jews in the Diaspora, or naïve or over-simplistic in my understanding of the conflict. My belief now is that love needs to be the foundation and motivation of all our nonviolent actions for peace and justice. I realised on my latest visit how deep seated the pain and fear in Israeli society is. We spent some time with a lovely young couple, Yaeli and Noam, at the start and end of our trip. Knowing that, like most Israelis, they had never been into the West Bank, we had been praying like mad that they would join us on a tour of the Separation Wall that Israel is building through the West Bank. It took immense courage on their parts, but in the end they agreed to come. It was great to be able to talk to them about the things we had seen in the Palestinian territories but it was also quite hard to realise that whilst they are self declared left wingers, they nevertheless were in favour of the wall being built. There is no greater symbol of fear and mistrust than the 9 metre high wall that Israel is building, but it is impossible for me to understand the fear that ordinary Israelis feel that causes 80% of them to want this wall to be built. It is always humbling to be reminded of just how little I know about the situation. I’d like to share a story about another wonderful Palestinian man we met in Hebron, the southernmost city in the West Bank. His name was Mohammed and he told us a story of how he passed an Israeli car that had broken down. He stopped to ask if he could help and the driver asked if he could give them a lift to the next Israeli town where he could get some help. Mohammed described how he looked into the car and saw this man had his wife and children with him and felt sorry for them all. He said to the man, ‘if you can trust me, I will take you all to my house and my neighbour will repair your car. Can you trust me?’ The man agreed and the whole family squeezed into Mohammed’s car. Once back at his house his wife welcomed the family. It took three days to repair the car. For three days and three nights the Israeli family stayed with Mohammed’s family. When they parted, Mohammed said he told his new friend ‘we are brothers now’. They kept in contact and Mohammed’s new friend made him promise to visit him. After a few weeks he set out to his friend’s house. On entering the Israeli town, he realised he had forgotten to bring the address and phone number. Feeling quite nervous he wound down the window to ask for directions. The old man he asked was quite suspicious to start with and asked why he wanted to find this man. Mohammed told him the story of how he had helped his family when he had broken down. The old man said to him, ‘I will tell you where he lives, but first you must come back to my home and meet my wife and drink tea with us.’ Mohammed was surprised but didn’t want to offend him. Later, when they said goodbye, the old man said to him, ‘that man you rescued and looked after is my son’! We were so moved by this story and I think it is a great example of someone who was able to love his so-called enemies. Both he and his Israeli friend had to make themselves vulnerable and trust in the humanity of the other and that made a beautiful transformation possible. The sad thing about this story is that they can’t meet any more as the curfews and travel restrictions on Palestinians are so severe now. But they still try to defy this by maintaining telephone contact. Paul tells us in his letter to the Ephesians that the love of Christ is beyond knowledge or explanation. It is a love that cannot be grasped unless we take a leap of faith while grounding our lives in love. I think Mohammed’s action shows that leap of faith that comes out of a deep love for others. Another example of this self-giving love for enemies is Christian Peacemaker Teams in Baghdad who have been working in Iraq since before the war. I was inspired to hear how they had offered the use of their mobile phones to US soldiers so they could call home. It is small gestures like this that I think open up possibilities for transformation — the recognition that while these soldiers may be symbols or even instruments of oppression and occupation, they still have human needs and probably feel homesick and lonely, and are in many ways victims themselves of a violent system. So how do we go about learning to love our enemies? I believe one of the keys is being a non-judgmental presence to both victims and oppressors. If we are truly compassionate and open-hearted we will recognise and empathise with the pain of the oppressors too. The word compassion means to suffer with — we need to be able to suffer with oppressors and victims alike. In Luke’s gospel, immediately after Jesus talks of loving your enemies, he says ‘Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven.’ (Luke 6:36—37) Refraining from judging and condemning is part of the mercy we should show to our enemies. For me the biggest challenge has been learning how to be reconciliatory and loving in my attitude yet still uncompromising about the injustice of the Israeli occupation. How can one stand in solidarity with the poor and powerless — in this case the Palestinians — whilst also empathising with the deep pain in Israeli society, when Israelis will naturally feel betrayed by any solidarity that is shown with ‘the other side’? I have found that I need to learn humility. I think we need to be willing to listen without judging. God’s spirit living in us creates a sacred space where we can accept and listen to others. God’s spirit prays in us and listens in us — when we trust fully in this we can start to see true healing occur. When we are free of the need to judge or condemn, we can become safe places for people to be vulnerable and take down the walls that separate them. Being deeply rooted in God’s love, we cannot help but invite others to love one another. Every Palestinian and Israeli has a story to tell but some are easier to listen to than others. It was much harder to listen to people who are angry or extreme rather than hopeful, but I think that these are often the people who need to be listened to the most. As outsiders who had the privilege of being able to visit for a couple of weeks and then return to the UK, we realised the importance of listening without prejudging people’s various responses to their suffering. One of the harder stories is of a Palestinian doctor in a hospital in Hebron who was waiting for the day that Israel would be annihilated because he believed only one people group could survive and the conflict would end in an Armageddon style battle. We were learning rapidly that people often don’t fit neatly into the boxes or categories of goodies and baddies that we construct for them. Here was a doctor who was saving countless Palestinian lives and yet he felt little compassion at the thought of Jews dying. Yet who are we to judge him when we have not experienced the pain of nearly forty years of military occupation? We often desire clarity, a clear picture of a situation. But the borders between evil and good, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, heroism and cowardice, guilt and blamelessness are mostly vague, ambiguous and hard to discern. It is not easy to be faithful in an ambiguous world. But this doesn’t mean we can sit on the fence when it comes to injustices. It just means we have to learn to make wise choices without needing to be entirely sure. I want to also tell you about Eli, an Israeli soldier in Hebron we met. On our second day in Hebron we passed a checkpoint and realised that 7 or 8 men were being detained there for no reason. It was Friday and they had been on their way to pray at the mosque. This soldier Eli had detained them for over an hour and had it not been for a CPTer we were with speaking with him who knows how long they would have been kept there. He explained to our friend Ed that he becomes more aggressive at the checkpoint with Palestinians because he thinks that is how he should be. There is a book called Checkpoint Syndrome written by a former Israeli soldier. The author is from a fairly liberal background but he describes the brutal things he did to Palestinians at the checkpoints. ‘Sometimes these Arabs really disgust me’, he writes, ‘especially those that try to toady up to us — the older ones, who come to the checkpoint with this smile on their faces … If they really annoy us, we find a way to keep them stuck at the checkpoint for a few hours. They lose a whole days work because of it sometimes, but it’s the only way they learn.’ He gives more chilling accounts too, in particular he confesses a time that he punched and beat up a retarded 16-year-old boy, while his comrades laughed and egged him on. He says this is not a one-off rare example. He thinks it is systematic abuse — that it becomes like a syndrome. Soldiers become brutalised. I wanted to share this story to show that we need to feel compassion for young soldiers who are brutalised in this way. Meeting Eli, talking and listening to him made us realise that he is a victim too in a way. He was 18 and didn’t want to be in Hebron. Our natural instincts, had we not have heard his story, may have been to demonise or judge him. When Ed — our friend — said goodbye to him, Eli told him that we had brought peace to Hebron. One of the exciting characteristics of non-violence is the belief that everyone is capable of change or of being changed. No one is irredeemable and we should never write anyone off. We need to trust in God’s power to transform people. Thomas Merton said that if we could see with the eyes of God, our problem would be that we would fall down and worship one another! I think we will only experience the breadth of God’s all encompassing, unconditional love if we practice loving others — we need to get into the habit of loving. As Henri Nouwen puts so beautifully — to listen and be kind and gentle when we are feeling miserable and mean-hearted, to give of ourselves with abandon even when there is no consolation and no end in sight, to keep courage and hope alive in the worst of times. This requires a true renewal of our minds and attitudes — we must allow God to transform us and give us strength to love with his kind of deep, long, broad, high love. We can trust that God is working this transformation in us, as Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians says. I believe that if we can grasp this, it can truly change the way we campaign or challenge injustice. Whilst there is a place for righteous anger, I think we will be far more effective and fruitful if we are motivated by love and mercy rather than anger and frustration. To be able to love our enemies and move past judgementalism, we need to recognise the violence in us and our need for Jesus too. We need to dare to look at the myriad hostile feelings and thoughts in our minds and hearts and realise that we need reconciliation too. Our enemies could be a family member, a neighbour, someone who doesn’t think or act like us. But we also need to recognise the fact that we are forgiven and reconciled to God. Otherwise we will keep creating divisions among people because we expect from them a healing power that they do not possess. We need to go beyond self-knowledge to self-acceptance. Often peacemakers realise with a shock that there is violence in them — they may suddenly snap, feel road rage or lose their temper with their kids. This can make them panic that they are not worthy of being a peacemaker. Nonviolence requires me to accept the weaknesses in me so that I can better accept them in others. It requires a sincere self-love that allows us in turn to love our enemies. Who are our enemies? Who do we find it hardest to love? Who are our tax collectors? For some of us, it is natural to want to love the underdogs of our society (I suspect that this is the case for people in this church) — the prostitutes, asylum seekers, drug addicts. But we need to look deeper into our hearts for those we find it difficult to love, or even those we self-righteously enjoy hating. They may be arms traders, people smugglers, bigots, soldiers who torture, neighbours with different values, oppressive leaders. Those we cannot imagine changing. Nonviolence requires creativity and perseverance — we need God’s strength to keep loving our enemies and yet keep finding creative ways to resist injustice. And we need to keep returning to the source of our inspiration for non-violence — Jesus, who not only taught us how to turn the other cheek, but who illustrated in his own life the meekness and love he describes. When the time came, he allowed people to crucify him, trusting his Father’s coming vindication to raise him from the dead. He was rooted and established in love, and from that place leapt in faith. Prayer to close — Ephesians 3I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. Copyright © 2004 Beccie D’Cunha This page was last updated on Wednesday, 29 December 2004home | about all hallows | what’s on | worship and prayer | discussion and reflection | action in the community | projects | an open, welcoming … | weekly bulletin | site map | search site | admin | |