The passages we have just heard from the gospel of Matthew are some of the most challenging in the New Testament.  Love your enemy, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give your inner garment as well as your cloak.  Challenging because we know, immediately,  that they go against all our basic instincts. Challenging also because we know that we do not live up to them. As we hear them we feel our selves condemned for falling short, or we feel that these words are so unrealistic, that we dismiss them. Maybe we say something like this to ourselves:  I am only human. I can’t be perfect.  Although I want to be a Christian,  how can I  go along with these ideas?  Some of my enemies have really hurt me.  Loving them might be a long term goal, but don’t ask me to do that today.  I don’t want to offer myself up for more hurt by turning my cheek.  I can’t constantly meet other people’s demands, or give up the little that I do have. I wish I could but Jesus, you are not being realistic.

          But are these really the only two choices we have—either feel bad that we can’t live up to a lofty standard, or reject that standard as unrealistic?

Perhaps there is another way.  It may in the long run be just as challenging –maybe even more so—but perhaps there is a way to look at these texts which makes them more useful and more inspiring than they seem at first to our ears.

          This third way of interpretation depends heavily on the work of Walter Wink, who was longtime professor of New Testament at Auburn and Union Theological Seminaries in New York City.  Wink died in 2012.  In his many books and articles, Wink wrote that Jesus offers to his listeners, his very first listeners,  poor Jewish peasants, a way to resist the oppressive Roman rule in Palestine, without violence, but without running away.  In interpreting  these passages, Wink did not erase the demanding parts, but he placed them in their original context, and by so doing, he helps us to understand what Jesus may really have meant.

          Let us look at each of these phrases to see what we can learn from them, and what they might mean for us today.

First : “Turn the other cheek.”  The typical interpretation of this text gives the impression that if someone hurts you, you should go along with it and even give them another cheek to hurt.  Wink explains it otherwise.  In Jesus day, such an encounter would have has a certain choreography.  Due to the mores of the time, one could not use the left hand, which was reserved for unclean purposes.  So in order to hit the other person, one would have to use the right hand, hitting, as the scripture says, the right cheek.  You can only hit the right cheek with the back of your right hand, which was an insult.  It indicated a relationship of higher  to lower.  But if you  hit someone on  the left cheek, it  indicated a relationship of equals.  If you hit an equal you might be subject to a fine.  By turning your cheek, you challenged the  status quo,  forcing the person who hit you into an equal relationship.  This cheeky behavior, as Wink explains,  destabilizes the power relationship.  And it is far from asking for more harm.

          The same holds true for going the extra mile.  In those days,  Roman soldiers could conscript anyone to carry their pack, for one mile.  The pack weighed around 70 pounds.  But the soldier was not allowed to demand more than one mile of such service.  If he did, there would be  fines to be paid or he could receive some type of censure.  So someone who offered to go the extra mile, destabilized the relationship.  What is going on, the soldier might ask?  How do I respond to this challenge?  The person who offers to go the extra mile creates a new situation, in which the soldier is at a disadvantage.  Offering to go the extra mile is facing the injsutice head on, and defeating it by going towards it.

          And our third phrase:  the cloak.  Here again, context is important.  First century Jewish  peasants were heavily taxed and often lost their land because of those unfair policies.  The law allowed the person to whom the debt was owed to take a cloak as collateral for debt, but it had to be returned by nightfall so that the debtor would have something warm to sleep in—there were no pyjamas in those days.  The debtor could keep his  undergarment,  for obvious reasons.

In this story Jesus says, give the undergarment too.  Not as a way of giving in but as a way of upending the power of the relationship.  If the debtor was naked, it was the person who looked at him who bore the greater  shame.  And so if the debtor offered the undergarment, it  put that person in a bad situation.  It was kind of like saying: you are so hard on me, you might as well take all that I have…calling out the person to realize the limits of what could be expected, what was humane and fair.

Now, I imagine that there is some cognitive dissonance in the room as you hear these interpretations.  I too doubted them and began to wonder how it could be that we could have been so wrong for so long, thinking that these phrases meant that we had to given a blank check to the enemy, the other person who might want to do harm.  And I do not know the answer to that.

But these interpretations are not so strange, when we see how they align with certain aspects of the person and character of Jesus.  Jesus does seem to have an ability to confront people and tell them the truth, cutting through a lot of baloney and stories and excuses.

          He meets the woman at the well and doesn’t gloss over her life and her entanglements.  He tells her up front, what she has done.

He confronts the money changers and runs them out of the temple.

He is upfront with Peter about the requirements for discipleship –the son of man has to suffer and die--and when Peter protests,  Jesus says, get thee behind me Satan. Strong words, those.

He tells people not to hide their light under a bushel, reminds them not to be afraid, and also says we are to be wise as serpents, harmless as doves.  And yes, he tells the story of the shrewd steward who figures out how to save his own skin and yet not cheat the master.

This way of Jesus is not acquiescence to the powers that be,  nor is it a violent confrontation, leading to a  cycle of  revenge.  It is a way of assertive self respect, which also calls the other person to take responsibility for her or his life.

Jesus’ words do not require us to be doormats, to give in to those who would try to hurt or harm.  These words are more powerful than we thought because they call us to take responsibility for our lives and  our choices.  These words ask us to go beyond the false choice of flight or fight, these two responses which are hard wired into our minds and bodies.  The way we usually react: Either get out of the way of harm , or confront it violently.

But Jesus show a third way, which is admittedly more complex.  But much more satisfying, and even thrilling as we seek to trace its path.

And if we follow this way of Jesus, we see that it is a determined and adroit method of turning toward those who would abuse, over reach, or act unfairly.

          As we stand up for our self, we begin to  show the other that how they are acting is unacceptable and needs to be corrected.  This is the work of tough love, and true compassion.  To see the other, the enemy as a  human being, like ourselves, who has some of the same concerns and need for self protection and has fault lines in his or her personality, just as we do.  And also to see the enemy as one who needs to change for his or her own sake and be willing to risk our own selves to get that point across.

This is what Maratin Luther King, Jr.   did against racists and what Gandhi did against the British—until the oppressors  could not continue to look in their own mirrors and into the mirror of public opinion, and gave way.  Their tactics were like Jesus’—lovingly confront, refuse violence, but hold the other accountable as well.

We can see from these examples, that this third way is not without its challenges.  It is easier to turn away and not stand up for oneself.  And it is easier to resort to the violent reaction.  But either fight or flight does not solve anything, it just postpones the reckoning.

Well, we are neither MLK ,Jr. nor Gandhi, and sometimes these examples from political life leave us a bit adrift.  We ask ourselves, How do we  translate this non violent resistance into my own day to day life ?  What could this third way mean for us, on a practical basis?
Here are a few  quick examples.  The first is taken from commentary on Wink’s work by Cate Waynick, Episcopal Bishop of Indianapolis.

You have a client who asks you to fudge some figures, or change some data, and you feel not only that it is wrong, but that the person is taking advantage of you.  One response is to get angry and quit the assignment, leaving with bad words and bad feelings.  Another is to give in, with its own costs of loss of integrity.  And the third way could be a simple statement to the client:  Put it in writing. It draws a line and throws the responsiblity back where it belongs.

Here is another: Your child, spouse, best friend or neighbor is chronically late while you are most often on time.  Sometimes it results in a fight, other time you wait,  but burn with anger.  The third way is to go on to  a planned activity without that person and when they ask, say, without rancor, I needed to get going and you were not there.  They no longer have the power to make you wait.  You have taken action, and its up to them to change if they want.

Third example: our own inner enemy, the part of ourselves we know all too well who on some days seems to be in charge.  An addiction, an obsession,  a hurt that doesn’t seem to heal.  Sometimes we deny, sometimes we despair.  The third way might be to acknowledge the powerless feeling, face facts and ask for God’s help.  Compassionate toward oneself and also willingness to change.

Now, a few word of caution as we move ahead on this third way. It requires maturity, a strong ability to discern one’s own motives and to understand one self.  If one is acting out of disdain for the enemy or desire to advance one’s own standing then one is not following this third way of assertive non- violence.  This way requires a deepening relationship with God and with one’s own soul.  Not for the faint of heart, nor the hard of heart, but it is full of heart.

And lets be frank.  This third way is hard.  It does not  guarantee a happy,  problem free life.  It may, even in extreme settings cost life, as it did  for Jesus.  It will at least cost us some efforts, some sacrifice of being strong and standing up for ourselves at moments we would rather run, and some effort to control our own angry or violent tendencies at moments when it seems easier to lash out.  It requires us to face full into reality and not expect to be parachuted out of our troubles.  But the promise of this way is great, and joyous.

Because it frees us to be true.  We don’t have to fake it when we hear these phrases, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile.  They don’t require us to be passive victims.  They ask us to be more ourselves, not less.  Grounded in compassion, yet realistic. Jesus is the ultimate, compassionate realist and these words are a window into reality, not an escape from it.

And thanks be to God for that, and for the word of God which is still speaking.

Amen