READINGS

Matthew 5:38-48
Leviticus 24:19 (lex talionis)
Leviticus 19:17-18 (neighbour)
Leviticus 19:33-34 (alien as neighbour)

HOMILY

Today we continue straight on with the Sermon on the Mount and the remainder of the so-called antitheses.

As I attempted to bring out last time, these aren't really antitheses, which presupposes one being against the other: like the old way bad; the new way good.

Its attempts to bring out what the heartfelt intent, the real matter at the center of the law was really about.

So we begin with what is known as the Lex Talionis: you have heard that it was said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

We hear this we think 'oh that's awfully cruel'... but, in fact, it's worth remembering that this law was an enormous step forward in the ancient world, into the business of what law was all about at all.

We get elements of it from the Code of Hammurabi and other ancient Middle Eastern legal tablets that have survived.

It also appears three times in the Hebrew scriptures.

Levitical example as a just as a point of reference:

anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return 
a fracture for fracture 
eye for eye 
tooth the tooth 
the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered

What we typically forget when we hear that is that the purpose of this law was not to inflict punishment, but to prevent vengeance.

It was a strict limitation of the amount of violence you could extract on the person who had done you harm.

You could not take back from them more than they had taken from you.

The point of it was to stop the spiral of vengeance, which this can be so devastating amongst groups and is how things were before it became possible to have a system of laws.

Jesus:

What I say to you do not resist an evil doer, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek turn the other also.

He's going to give some examples, which are about stepping outside the world of Vengeance.

Rivalry and vengeance are the two great enemies of humanity in both the Hebrew scripture and in the New Testament.

Here we see Jesus teaching absolutely firmly against those two.

The whole point of the Holy Spirit, which he's going to give us, is that it's going to take us away from the world of rivalry and vengeance.

So, when it says 'do not resist an evildoer, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also', this is not an instruction saying if someone does you harm allow yourself to be walked all over, but it's saying 'respond in a clever way that doesn't actually meet them face to face'.

It's not a question of being pushed into rivalry with them, because if you do that, you'll simply be going back and forth until one of you destroys the other - it goes on forever.

The suggestion is someone strikes you with the outside of their right hand - that would be assumed to be the strike that would knock you on this cheek - that will be the way to show your utter contempt for someone -, but, by turning the other cheek, you're inviting them to slap you with the inside of their hand, which is:

a way of bringing you close together with them;
comes closer to the form of slap that is a friendly comradly way of twitting each other.

In other words, you are beginning to undo, by your gesture, the frame of violence that the original smiter wanted to do to you.

You're showing you're not run by the same engine as he is.

In fact, by him carrying on in the same violent way, he's actually ending up in an entirely different position than the one he wanted to.

You're producing a trick.

And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.

This is the equivalent of 'if anybody wants your outer garments, give them your inner garments as well'.

In other words, 'you want my shirt have, my underpants'.

This is a way of saying 'yeah yeah go on, go on, go on, I don't mind being here naked in the midst of you'.

But of course that puts the person who's making these demands on you in the uncomfortable situation of having made someone naked in public, which means that other people are likely to come in and want to sort the situation out.

Your refusing to be caught up in the same dynamic of violence as the other person and so you're putting them in a position whereby their own impetus gives them away.

Doesn't allow them to get away with it.

If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.

You have you need a little bit of technical knowledge to understand this.

This was the provision in Roman law called ἀγγαρεία (Angareuein, Angaria) which is actually a Greek name and it's derived from a Persian person.

By this law, any Roman soldier could require of any non-roman citizen in an area governed by the Romans, which included Palestine at the time, to carry their rucksack (backpack), which was heavy and contained their equipment, their clothes etc for a thousand pesos, what we call one mile.

The Roman rule was very strict on this: not one step longer.

You would then have to, if you were a Roman soldier, find someone else if you wanted them to carry it.

Why? Well, the Roman soldiers governed lots of places and they were well aware that, while they needed to impose burdens of taxation and so forth in order to keep their system going, they didn't want to provoke unnecessary hatred and violence amongst their subjects.

So they had for the time at least relatively just laws concerning how much exactly how much they could demand of somebody.

Now if someone forces you to go one mile - at the moment that mile is over - that person's right overview stops.

But, if you go a second mile, you are actually inverting the bar structure, because from then he strangely is entirely dependent on your generosity.

He's actually doing something illegal.

He could, at any time, be stopped and would be punished for abusing.

You have completely reversed the power dynamic by going the second mile.

So in each one of these, Jesus is saying 'don't get caught into rivalry and vengeance, allow yourself to have a completely different pattern of desire, even towards people who are harming it, because that's actually how you'll undo their power from within'.

Give to the one who begs you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

It's curious that it doesn't use the word for beggars as in poor people, but for anyone who asks of you and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

Don't run away from these things.

If that's the case, then I must think positive about how I'm going to approach these people.

Get out of rivalry and vengeance.

Now he moves on:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’

They may well have heard it said it isn't exactly written like that anywhere.

In fact, the relevant passages are in again from Leviticus:

You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; 
You shall reprove your neighbour, or you will incur guilt yourself. 
You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: 
I am the Lord.

Obviously, if it says 'You shall not hate in your heart any one of your kin', the suggestion is that: if you hate anyone else, that's no problem.

Naturally enough, the moment you do love your kin and your neighbor as yourself, you're creating an in-group, which tends to have an out group that you do hate.

So the whole question is what are the limits of those people whom I can hate.

Those people who were just admissible for me not to love, not to avoid grudges and so on.

This was a question alive in Jesus's time.

This is shown by the question of the lawyer to him concerning who is my neighbor, where Jesus's answer was actually to bring a further point from the Book of Leviticus, which is when 'an alien resides with you, you are to treat him as yourself; you shall love the alien as yourself'.

Even within the Book of Leviticus, the tendency is to stretch out the in-group further than might be comfortable.

Jesus is saying this is the innermost core of the thing: that there should be no out group.

There should be no one out there whom you do not love.

This is the purpose of the law.

It's not so as to limit; it says to open you out ever further to finding more and more people who are your neighbor and fewer and fewer people who are your enemy, however much they hate you.

So he says:

But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ...

I want to just stop here and say that I think this is one of the most important passages in all the Gospels and one of the most demanding or otherwise difficult to understand and absolutely central to understanding Jesus's relationship to us.

With this, we begin to understand what Jesus is about to undergo, which is traversing our hostility towards him and everything he stands for out of love for us.

This is not a nice 'squishy-washy' extra in the Gospel; this is absolutely central to the Gospel: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Why pray for those who persecute you?

In as far as you pray for them, you start to see them as God sees them and you cease to be over against them.

God is not over against you or them or anyone else.

God is not over against anyone at all, but towards all of us in the same way.

In the same way, it means to overcome our hostility.

... so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

In other words, God's love does not depend on our goodness.

The Gospel is not moralistic the Gospel is about loving people in the midst of hostility

That is an incredibly incredibly difficult lesson for us to learn, because we would far rather that it be a question of moral rights and wrongs.

And yet, here we have absolutely the center of the Gospel: 'love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you' with the assurance that Jesus is going thereafter to walk the walk of the talk that he has talked.

For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same?

And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? 

Do not even the Gentiles do the same?

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

This means being over against nobody at all; being over against nothing at all.

That means learning not to be driven and not to be run by the evil that others may do to you.

It's not the demand to be a floor cloth over whom people can walk through, but it's the far far greater demand of learning to be as God is towards us: someone who is endlessly loving and patient and kind towards us, even when we are actively hostile for God in ways that we don't even understand.

Thinking that we need to grab things: bits of identity, bits of security and therefore actually hurting God's plan the whole time.

As far as we begin to get a sense of loving in the midst of hostility, we begin to get a sense of God whose love traverses hostility so as to bring us into being.

'Be perfect therefore as your heavenly father is perfect' is a reference to be holy even as 'I am Holy', the Holiness of God, the culmination of the whole of the Hebrew scriptures, the whole of the Torah: being holy as God is Holy.

Jesus is saying that's still exactly what this is about: it's undoing the whole world of rivalry and vengeance, which is the world of hostility to God.

I am prepared to walk into that, to traverse that hostility now for you, so that you can see what it looks like.

Then, as far as you do that, you too will be sons and daughters of God.

This is the path that I'm calling you to and I think that this is a very striking place for us to end ordinary time just before Lent.

Over the next few weeks, we will be watching Jesus walk the walk.

It will be traversing hostility to show that he loves us not in as far as we are good or not; not in as far as we are on his side or not, but because he loves us even when and even as we are so often completely blind to quite how hostile we are.

Completely blind to the extent, which we live in a world of people like us and with the safe enemies who can agree to hate.

He's going to undo all that by traversing hostility.

Love and the opening out of catholicity, the possibility of all of everything, being united depends on this walking the walk through hostility through rivalry and vengeance, so as to be towards others as our heavenly father.