Teaching about Retaliation Do not take a position over against evil, do not entrench yourself in resistance as your response to evil. The Lord, who came into the world precisely to conquer evil, here teaches an astounding strategy: Defeat evil by surrendering to it! Triumph over evil by yielding it the right of way, by allowing it to triumph over you. Is this not cowardly? Is this not a catastrophic course of action? Or worse still, is it not treachery to the very cause of God, which is the service of the truth itself? Shall we let evil become rampant in the world by offering it carte blanche? Would this not be tantamount to becoming an accomplice of evil? The examples that follow Christ’s injunction make it clear, however, that far more courage and selflessness are required to be a disciple than to fight violence with violence, evil with evil. The Lord knows all too well that much of our militaristic idealism against evil and on behalf of the truth can be the pious mask for self-promotion and self-righteousness and the satisfaction of the brute human craving to win. We think we are serving God, whereas our real enterprise, our real motivation, hidden even from ourselves, is to make ourselves appear greater in our own eyes and those of others. We want to shine by reaction, evil for evil, is to lock the human situation of animosity into a hopeless impasse. It is, thus, to frustrate the work of God, whose deepest endeavor is the restoration of man to a state of harmony in the truth. The principle of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” does indeed stimulate us to become aware of the need for justice. Perhaps it is even a necessary step in our education to accountability, much as in ancient Greece the blind, bloodthirsty desire for revenge of the Furies was a step in the evolution toward rational, deliberative justice, as we see in Eschylus’ play The Eumenides. But it cannot be the last word. If I pluck out your eye because you have plucked out mine first, then the world is short two eyes instead of only one, and we will soon have a society of blind men. The willingness to surprise our adversary with compassion, with love, with forgiveness – with justice according to the Heart of Christ, in other words – performs a far more efficient and constructive task. It puts evildoers at the risk of being converted, and it dynamizes the whole of society by introducing into it the most divine of principles: self-giving at all costs. After my enemy has slapped both my cheeks, he will have run out of cheeks to slap, and perhaps he will be ashamed. After I have given him both tunic and coat, he will perhaps learn to have pity on my nakedness. If I go the second mile with him, perhaps this will give us both the needed time and shared experience to pass from animosity to friendship. Perhaps all of his aggressiveness toward me comes from a lack of imagination, from a real ignorance concerning what other courses were available to him besides injustice and violence. Perhaps my open hands and silent mouth become the most eloquent of teachers, and I will have won a brother in the Lord. Perhaps, perhaps. I must run the risk that my apparent weakness will be construed as an added invitation to even greater violence and that my enemy will move on to slap the next man’s cheeks…Is this not, however, the very risk our Lord took in coming into our midst, in handing himself over to us, in opening his arms on the Cross? Generosity of the sort practiced by Christ is incompatible with any kind of calculation. We must act as he taught and as he acted. Here, too, the law of Christ for us is always an extension of God’s own nature. He allowed his blood to be shed, and its sprinkling transformed the face of the man holding the lance. ‘By not resisting evil,’ our Lord would say, ‘ you allow it to spend its fury and show its finiteness; you allow it to exhaust itself; you allow God’s life to flow through you and fill the huge void you have, by your seeming passivity, created in your former adversary. By courageously choosing the path of humble and loving nonresistance, you have added one more stone to the construction of God’s Kingdom.” (Matthew5:38-42) do not resist [the] evil [one] Erasmus Merikakis
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 14:13:23 +0000
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