Readings:
1st Reading: LV 19:1-2, 17-18
2nd Reading: 1 Cor 3:16-23
Gospel: Mt 5:38-48
Love Centered Resistance
“We have the power to turn our upside down world right.” These words were spoken by Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian woman and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. In 2003 Liberia was in the midst of a brutal civil war, and the president and other male leaders had been meeting for months for peace talks and a resolution to end the conflict but were not getting the job done. So a group of Liberian women led by Leymah Gbowee, who had been organized and engaging in protest to the war and putting pressure on the leaders to come to a resolution, they take over the building they are meeting in, surround the space, interlock arms, and say the men cannot leave until there is a signed peace accord. When the men attempt to leave anyway, the women threaten to rip off their clothing. In their culture, it was considered a curse to see an older woman deliberately bare herself. So the men stayed, got to work, and over the course of the next week under the constant presence of the women, they signed a peace accord that ended the war. Leymah Gbowee continues to teach and organize around creative nonviolent resistance. She is a living example of our Gospel story tonight.
In looking at our Gospel story tonight I want to first address the translation of the phrase we heard read as, “offer no resistance to one who is evil.” Walter Wink in his book, “Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way” talks about how the original Greek does not mean how it's been translated and interpreted into English. A better translation he offers is, “don’t respond to the one who is evil, with evil” or “don’t resist violence with violence. We hear this same sentiment in our first reading as well: Though you may have to reprove your fellow citizen, do not incur sin because of him. If we repay evil with evil we harm ourselves as well. In the sentence before this Jesus said “you have heard it said an eye for an eye, BUT I SAY to you… this implies a new teaching, do not repay violence with violence, but rather with creative nonviolence centered in love. He then gives three examples of this teaching, which I think are also important to dig into a bit tonight to really understand the context they are coming out of.
I pull a lot from Walter Wink’s book on Jesus and Nonviolence in learning about the context and implications of the examples Jesus offers us in the Gospel tonight. So what was first example? Turn the other cheek. This is a phrase we’ve probably heard quite a bit right. But what is it really saying. If someone strike you on … which cheek? The right cheek, turn the other. The custom in Jesus’ time was not to use the left hand, so if I’m striking you on the right cheek with my right hand, i have to use my backhand, which was common in a power differential. So if you backhand me, and I turn my other cheek, you can’t use the left hand, so that means to hit me again you would have to use your palm, which would be a recognition of equality.
Example two: what was it about? A debt settlement with a tunic and cloak. What’s going on there. Someone who was very poor would only have his tunic, his outer garment to use as collateral. So if someone was coming demanding payment and all he had to offer up was his outer garment, imagine him standing in court, in only his undergarments, and then taking those off too as a way to shame the one demanding of him when he has so little. Similar to the story of the Liberian women who threatened to expose themselves, nakedness was considered taboo in Jewish culture and the shame fell on the one who viewed or caused the nakedness. Again this was a way of calling out an oppressive system, asserting one’s own human dignity while shaming the oppressor.
And how about the third example, what’s going on there? If you are forced into service, which meant carrying the load for a Roman soldier, for one mile, Jesus is telling the listener to go two. There was a specific law under Roman occupation about what a Roman soldier could force you to do, and going one mile was the limit. Forcing someone to go further would incur serious penalties on the soldier. And so to continue an extra mile would throw the soldier off, make him worried, and it would allow again for the one being oppressed to take back their own power of choice and assert their dignity by challenging the customary practice.
So it’s clear the call is not: do not resist, but rather Resist! Engaging Jesus’ third way of creative nonviolence.
So how do we do this? Where does this kind of resistance come from? What fuels us or centers us to be able to engage in creative nonviolent resistance? Both our first and third readings talk about this: the answer is Love. Loving our neighbor, loving our enemy, recognizing they too are the temple of the Spirit of God, so I cannot destroy that temple, but I am called to challenge the ways they perpetuate injustice, centered in love.
I had the opportunity a few years ago at a CTA Conference to hear the amazing Diane Nash speak. She is an African American woman, freedom fighter, active in the civil rights struggles of the 60s who put her body on the line, engaging in creative nonviolent resistance to challenge the systems of racism and segregation. And she shared with us that the only way she was able to do it, was because they centered themselves in love and were fueled by agapic energy. The term agapic energy she created from the word for the kind of love God has for us, for creation, the perfect love Jesus talks about in the Gospel tonight: agape. She said that if we use agapic energy, we can disarm, heal, and transform every situation. We must take the time for prayer, for meditation, to nourish and center ourselves in this agapic energy in order to help transform the world.
Just like in the Gospel tonight, and as we have seen in so many nonviolent acts of resistance throughout history and even today, through this sourcing of agapic energy we are called to resist injustice in a way that draws attention to the unjust practice/system while lifting up the humanity of the person being harmed and shaming the one doing the harming so they can wake up to the ways they are oppressing the other.
There is creative nonviolent resistance going on all around us. Protests, marches, boycotts, petitions, solidarity economies, and various forms of non-cooperation with oppressive systems. As immigrants are being profiled, arrested, and deported in record numbers, it is an act of love centered resistance to offer safe haven and protection in the form of sanctuary. Given an education system that continues to fail our students and push students of color out and into the juvenile detention and prison systems, it is an act of love centered resistance to create and support freedom schools that promote the brilliance, power, and success of every student and focus on a curriculum of literature that reflects the student’s own lives and stories.
So what is our charge in all of this? In the Gospel, Jesus is addressing those who are oppressed by the empire, those who could be physically assaulted, forced into labor, or imprisoned for being poor with no repercussions for those who were assaulting or abusing them.
We all hold multiple identities, and under some structures we are the oppressed… BUT we also hold identities of privilege. This means we have to be ready to be confronted, be ready to be made uncomfortable, to be challenged and called out for the ways we perpetuate and support these systems oppression. We have to lean in when we are called out, and join with those challenging these systems of oppression, because I am not free until ALL of my sisters, brothers, and gender-nonconforming family members are free. And this is an ongoing process of learning and unlearning again and again.
So we have a double responsibility in our intersectional identities of oppressed and oppressor: we are called to assert in every creative, active, non-violent way we can our own human dignity as nothing less than temples of the Holy One, and we are called to recognize and dismantle the ways that we collude in systemic oppression and treat others as anything less than temples of the Holy One.
This is hard work friends. I struggle with this every day. It is a real challenge to love those I view as enemies, to not dehumanize them as I assert my own humanity. But the Good News is that we do not do any of this difficult work alone. We do it united with Christ. It is Christ’s perfect love that calls us together as church, as family gathered around a table. It is Christ’s perfect love that invites all to partake in the feast. And it is Christ’s perfect love which we are called to carry with us when we leave the table, and go out into the streets, trusting in that perfect love to teach us and guide us in what it means to be the Body of Christ in the world today.
Amen
