Best. Sermon. Ever: Radical Love Over Revenge

We're gonna read this aloud together, Matthew 5:38 through 42. Would you read aloud with me?

You have heard that it was said, "Eye for eye and tooth for tooth." But I say to you, do not show opposition against an evil person, but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other toward him also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him too. Give to him who asks of you and do not turn away from him who wishes to borrow from you. — Matthew 5:38-42

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

This passage contains a lot of phrases that have made their way into our English vernacular. So you'll hear people say "an eye for an eye" or "going the extra mile" or "turn the other cheek." A lot of our culture may use those phrases and not even know where they come from. But this is a hard teaching, and I want you to visualize with me where Jesus is and what's happening as he is in the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus is on a hillside teaching his disciples in true rabbinic style. Jesus is probably either kneeling down or sitting, and his disciples are standing and they're listening. I can imagine if you could picture the scene in the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus walks through it—as we have over the last months—they probably started off like this, and started going like this, and then started shuffling. This is a hard set of teachings as we've walked through it, but especially the part we just read.

I think sometimes we think the disciples must have been just on board with everything, but I actually imagine that as Jesus taught through this passage, all the hands went up. I could picture the disciples saying, "Wait, wait, wait. Time out, Jesus. I got some questions here. Are you saying that if my kid is getting bullied at synagogue, I just let him get pushed around? And are you saying that if somebody breaks into my house and steals my wallet out of my tunic, I should say, 'Well, you forgot my wife's wallet over there in her purse'? Or are you saying, Jesus, that we should just let Rome do whatever they want to us? Are you saying I can't have a sword at home for personal protection?"

I'm glad some of you are laughing. This is meant to be funny. But do you hear how challenging this teaching is? And I can't imagine that people then, just like us today, are really happy about this teaching. I'm thankful I didn't write any of this. It's just my job to help you understand it.

I want to help us walk through what's a confusing passage—both what Jesus meant and what Jesus means. We're gonna take this on a couple of headings. We're gonna talk about the meaning of the law, the practice of the law, the fulfillment of the law, and the power to obey the law.

The Meaning of the Law

This section is Jesus teaching through the Ten Commandments—those commandments given to Moses, handed down on tablets of stone. He keeps saying this: "You've heard it said, but I say." He quotes part of the law, the Mosaic law, and then gives a fuller explanation of it.

When I've taught this before, when I've heard other people teach it, we sort of talk about it sometimes like Jesus is playing poker. Moses said this, Jesus ups the ante. He's like, "I see you, Moses, with $5. I raise you 500." Yet as I study for this, I think that's not actually right. I think what Jesus is doing is showing us what was in the heart of God all along in the law that he gave.

This section that we just read is often called the Lex Talionis. If you took Latin in high school, you might remember this. Lex Talionis is Latin for the law of retaliation. It was to prevent retaliation and escalation. It was not saying you have a right to retaliate. It was a limiting principle.

This is laid out in Leviticus 24. It's meant to set a boundary of fair and equitable criminal justice. So it goes like this: someone accidentally damages or kills your sheep, you don't have the right to go kill all their sheep. That owner gives you one of their sheep. If someone accidentally knocks out your tooth, you don't have the right to go kill them. It's tooth for tooth. There's a payback that is equitable and reasonable and actually meant to restrain—to prevent escalation.

We know something about this in our culture of escalation. One of my favorite TV shows of the last years, I think with great writing, was West Wing. Anybody like West Wing? It's about President Bartlett and the inner workings of his cabinet and his staff.

And so this is in season one, there's an episode in which a plane full of Americans is shot down over the Middle East. And President Bartlett being new in the office is ready to just bomb that country back to the stone age. He is ready to get revenge. And so he goes into his chief of staff meeting and they have this conversation which ensues, which is about the chief of staff argues Lex Talionis. There were a loss of a few hundred lives here. We cannot go and take thousands of lives. Surgical strike. There needs to be a measured and proportional response, and he's disappointed by this, but that's what's being argued back to him.

Now remember what Jesus said, as we started this whole series, when we started talking about the law, He said this in Matthew five:

I didn't come to wipe out the law, to erase the law, to get rid of the law. I came to fulfill the law, and there's not any part of the law that can be erased or gotten rid of until it has all come to be. This will not pass away until everything is accomplished.

Jesus didn't invalidate the law. He didn't wipe it out. He's explaining it. He's underscoring it. He's like, this is actually what was in the heart of God from the very beginning. Not just don't retaliate, but promote what's fair and right, preserve life. It's and this is the phrase I'm gonna use over and over: non-retaliatory sacrificial love. That's what's in the heart of God. That's his heart toward us. That's what he wants his people to reflect in our relationships with one another.

So then Jesus gets really specific and I wanna walk through just really briefly all these little examples. So let's look at the first one. Turn the other cheek, The slap. Now we all know about the slap. We're in the year of the slap. Right? The slap heard around the world. Will Smith and Chris Rock. But I want you to think about this. Will Smith did not slap Chris Rock in order to physically hurt him. It was not a physical attack on his body. It was an attack on his honor, on his dignity. It was to shame Will Smith. That was the purpose of the slap.

The Demonstration

Now, I am going to do a demonstration this morning. So Matt's gonna come on up. Really grateful to have Matt. No one will be hurt in the process of this sermon this morning. Matt is here for me. Good. So Matt is gonna be on the receiving end of all this.

So Matt, Jesus says something here that's really specific. Did you notice which cheek does he say you get slapped on? The right cheek. Very good. I see Matt, he's paying attention.

Now here's what I want you to know. In the ancient Near East and in modern day Israel, and in that whole region, you do not use your left hand for any engagement with anyone else. Your left hand is entirely for the bathroom and only for the bathroom. It's unclean. You don't touch anybody with it. You use your right hand. So if I'm going to slap Matt here and I'm gonna slap him with my right hand, what cheek am I probably gonna hit? Left. But if I am supposed to hit, as Jesus says here, nothing's extra in scripture. I'm supposed to hit him on the right cheek. How am I going to do that? I'm going to backhand him. You ready? So let's go. That's it. Good. Thank you all. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you Matt.

So a slap was an insult, but a slap on the right cheek was considered to be a much greater insult. In the Mishnah, which is the teachings around the law, a slap on the left cheek could get you a fine of 200 silver pieces, a slap on the right cheek 400. It was considered to be degrading to another person. In fact, it was demeaning. It was more than violence, and it was something that was used commonly toward someone who was a slave in the Roman Empire.

Slavery in the first century is not the same as slavery in our history in the United States. It wasn't based on race, it wasn't for life, it was a financial arrangement, but it still had a status to it, a lower status. And so someone would use a backhanded slap to only slap someone of the lowest class, someone they considered beneath them or a slave.

And here's Jesus. You know what he's saying? I want you to offer your right cheek. And then when after they've slapped you on the right cheek, what other cheek do they have in front of them? Think about it. Slapped on the right, faces this way, they can only slap your left. In other words, what he's calling his people to is some level of demonstrating the injustice, of showing off, look, you're treating me as if I'm a person less than you. And by taking the slap on the right cheek and then offering you the other cheek, you're saying, no, I am actually calling this out and showing you I am of equal status as you. You have no right to treat me this way and yet I'm not gonna protest.

You see what Jesus is calling us to? It's a subversive act that confronts a power dynamic. So let's think about that.

You therefore cannot apply this phrase, "turn the other cheek," to staying in a situation where someone is allowed to keep hurting another person. If the law of the Lex Talionis was set up to prevent escalation, to prevent someone being hurt, you can't say you've got to stay in an abusive marriage where someone can continue to hurt you. This isn't about bodily harm. This is about honor. This is about non-retaliatory, sacrificial love.

People can turn this to be, "Oh, that's the Christian thing to do." That is not what Jesus is calling us to. Jesus instead is calling us to be confrontational about things that are wrong in a way that's non-retaliatory and sacrificial—a place where people are being treated like animals.

If you're familiar with the world of addiction recovery, this is called an intervention. An intervention is when you show somebody that something they are doing is destructive to them or to other people. You're showing them that something they're doing is wrong.

Famously, Jim Morrison, who was the lead singer of The Doors, had this phrase about friendship that sort of became the standard for what people think friendship is in our culture. He said this:

A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself. Whatever you happen to be feeling at that moment is fine with them. That's what real love amounts to—letting a person be what he really is.

Now, what's fascinating about that quote and who it came from is Jim Morrison died of a drug overdose at age 27. If I could go back and ask him this question: Jim, which self do you want us to stand around and be okay with? Your self-destructive self? The self that you're fine with whatever you're doing? That kind of live-and-let-live principle is all over our culture right now. The only sin is to tell anybody what you think is a sin, right? And yet that's somehow love.

But love is not apathy. The opposite of love is apathy, indifference. It's actually a form of hatred to allow someone to be in that role. So Jesus is calling us to a type of confrontational love that's really challenging. Do you see that?

The Tunic and the Coat

Second example here: the tunic and the coat. In your translation, it says the coat and the shirt. First century clothing consisted of two parts. You had the outer garment and then the undergarment, just like we have an outer garment and undergarments.

Jesus is saying this: if a person is coming to you and suing you to take the outer garment, your response should be, "If you need this so badly, I'm gonna give you the undergarments as well." Thank you for laughing. It is meant to be ridiculous. A lot of rabbinical teaching teaches in hyperbole to make a point. Jesus is not saying, "Hey, go naked." That's not the point of this passage.

Instead, again, Jesus is calling us to a type of love—a type of non-retaliatory, self-sacrificial love—that says, "I am not concerned about self, about my own dignity, about my own honor, about my saving of face, about reputation." This should be really hard for us to hear.

If someone wrongs me, my response—and just about everybody's response in this culture—is like, "Do you know who you think you are? How dare you? Don't you know who I am? How can you do this to me?" It is to stand up for myself and my rights.

I've heard other pastors say this, and I'm not sure I agree with this. They say, "A Christian is someone who has given up all their rights." I appreciate what's being said there, but I think that's too big a gloss. I think that's overstated. But I think this is what Jesus is saying: once you have become a Christian, you hold your rights like this.

Citizens of Two Kingdoms

Christians are actually residents or citizens of two kingdoms, and we can see this all over Jesus' teaching. He says this:

My kingdom is not of this world.

He calls it over and over—the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God. If you're a born-again Christian, you're a citizen, a resident of that kingdom, and yet you also still live in an earthly kingdom.

So Jesus would say things like this:

Give to Caesar what is Caesar's. Give to God what's God's.

You're a resident of this kingdom of America, your earthly kingdom, and a citizen of a spiritual kingdom—a kingdom which is above. These lie in tension with one another.

Jesus is not saying, "Hey, once you become a follower of mine, you don't have any right to vote anymore. You don't have a right to your Miranda rights if you're being arrested." But he is saying that if you're a Christian, if you are a citizen of my kingdom, you hold your earthly rights like this—with open hands.

This is why we see lots of interesting interplay with Christians and their rights throughout the New Testament.

Paul is, at several points, beaten and arrested and thrown into jail unjustly, and at points when the safety of the baby church or the reputation of the gospel is on the line, he insists on his rights so that he's brought out and vindicated and people have to take him seriously. And yet the same apostle would write:

Though I am free and belong to no one, I have not used any of my rights. I've made myself a slave to everyone that I might win as many as possible. — 2 Corinthians 9

He goes through this long list of all the things that he has given up. He's become a servant for everyone. He's held out his rights like this. It's like I would rather be wronged in all these ways so that other people can hear the gospel. It's a complex interplay, but what's being held out to us here in this teaching is your rights are held out like this if you're a kingdom citizen in this life. Yes, a kingdom Christian has rights, but a Christian is willing to meet hate with love, to lay down the right to be wronged.

One of the things that we see over and over with Christians right now is we can never be wronged, and yet this passage calls us. There are times like it's okay to say, it's better to be wronged. A Christian is one who also doesn't insist like, hey, I've got to make sure everyone sees how bad things are. There's a sense of suffering, non-retaliation, not to lash out.

The Extra Mile

Third example here: go the extra mile. It's unfortunate we've adopted this in our culture and language that has to do with all kinds of things that are so far from this passage. You know, the person on your block who kind of goes beyond everybody else in Christmas decorations—they really went the extra mile. That's not really what Jesus is talking about in this passage.

This is referencing what it was like in first century living under Roman occupation. Israel was a state with a foreign government in oppression over them. Think Nazi control of Poland. That's what it was like for them living in a police state. And therefore a soldier in the Roman army had a right to go to any person and say, you have to carry this load for me, and up to one mile—1,000 paces, and it was a Roman mile, about half of what our mile is today. But they could demand under any circumstances, doesn't matter what you're doing or who you are: you have to carry this load for me.

Jesus' call here then is to that Roman soldier to say, you forced me to go one mile, I'm choosing to go another mile. I'm choosing to go over and above what you've called of me, and I'm asserting my rights as a person. I'm showing you, look, I'm electing to do this. By doing so, it's causing the Roman soldier to actually get in trouble. He's not allowed to demand for you to carry a load two miles. The person is forced to be a pack mule, and Jesus is saying again, by instituting this, by holding this up, He's saying like, I am choosing to show something's wrong and yet by my non-retaliatory self-sacrificial love, I'm gonna show you who I am.

Again, what's notable is what Jesus doesn't say here. He doesn't say, hey, it's wrong to be a soldier. Jesus never actually speaks about that. You think about the Roman centurion where Jesus commends him for his faith and doesn't say, oh, by the way, it's wrong to be a soldier. In Romans 13 it tells us it's the right place for the civil government to bear the sword. Sometimes it's easy to take this passage and kind of like, oh, our government should turn the cheek. It gets really confusing with this, but this is a picture of the people of God standing up in the face of things that are wrong and protesting in a way that calls attention to what's righteous.

Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister, this was the passage that really informed and defined his posture of nonviolent demonstration. He famously said this:

We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We will meet your physical force with soul force. You may bomb our houses and spit on our children and we will still love you.

And that was the power of that movement.

Radical Generosity

Finally, Jesus calls His disciples, kingdom citizens to be generous givers, to be not only open-handed with regard to our rights, but also our stuff, our money, our possessions. Again, somebody wants to borrow from you, someone begs from you and Jesus' answer seems to be like, it's okay to be taken advantage of. It's okay to be wronged.

I don't know about you, but this is really hard for me. I grew up in a family where I'm like, oh, I'm gonna be really careful with my money and things. I'm responsible with my money and things. I don't want anybody to ever take advantage of me. I want to be able to account for every penny. And so it's really hard for me to be generous. I'm like this.

And Jesus is calling, just like with our rights, to be like this. I remember being confronted by this and I've shared this story in this church before. When I was in high school, I went on a mission trip every summer with my youth group to Charleston, and this was before Charleston kind of blew up as the place to go for a bachelorette weekend or an anniversary. The Charleston and Kiawah Islands area was still really undeveloped at the time, and our youth group was doing work with families in that area. Every year there was a man in the community who would have all of us over—he did this every week for youth groups that came in—have us over for a shrimp dinner. A very wealthy, successful shrimp boat operator and owner. He had this big spread for us, a very wealthy, really nice house, really nice garage with a really nice car in it and nice things. Probably the nicest home I'd ever been in at that point in my life.

But what really struck me about his lifestyle was this: here was a man of great means who left his house unlocked and his garage unlocked, and he left his things available. And he had four letters written on the dashboard of his car, etched into his tools in his toolbox. It was all over his house: G-O-D-S. A reminder to himself that this all belongs to Him. Yes, I've been successful. Yes, I've worked hard, but this is all from Him and He has a right to demand it from me at any time and give it to whoever else He wants to. I'm not gonna hold on.

You know, I don't know how you hear all of this, but preaching through this is really heavy. Matt, don't you have a sense as you're listening to, like, what does this law really mean? I'm like, who can really do this? Jesus. That's really the only person I know who could do this, and there's something right to that. As we listen always, we come face to face with the commandments. We come face to face with the law. The law is always meant to drive us to Jesus. It's always meant to point us to Jesus.

Jesus as the Perfect Example

I mean, I want you to think about this. Jesus says:

Do not resist an evil person. If a person slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. When it forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.

Isn't this what we see Jesus walk through? The stages of the cross, walking to the cross. This is what we see Jesus doing in His mocking by the soldiers. He comes and He offers His right cheek and His left cheek and His back and His hands and His feet and His side. We know from His interaction with Satan in the temptation that He could have called a legion of angels to come rescue Him. He doesn't open His mouth like a sheep led to the slaughter.

We see Jesus after the beating being forced to walk a mile and carry the heavy load—the cross. He's dragging this. He stoops. He falls under the weight of it. They have to get somebody to carry it for him. But even on the cross, Jesus is still carrying. He's continuing to carry the sins of the world. He's still continuing to bear my sins and your sins—not just the punishment, but continuing to bear the weight of that upon Him.

At the cross, at the side of the crucifixion, you remember the soldiers are gambling. They've got dice. They're gambling over what? They're not gambling over His cloak. They're gambling over His tunic, His undergarments. They're fighting over who gets this valuable piece of cloth—the last thing that Jesus owns—and Jesus is literally naked on the cross. And yet what does He do? He prays:

Father, forgive them, they don't know what they do.

And He offers to those listening a robe of righteousness. Here, you've taken my tunic. Let me give you a robe as well. And the thief on the cross next to Him hears it and it's like, yeah, I want that.

You know, this is all history for us, right? We read this in the Bible, but I really want to challenge you to think that this is how our Savior is toward us all the time. He regularly receives a backhand from me. I regularly force Him to keep going. I regularly dishonor and shame Him. I regularly push aside His kindness. I regularly squander His gifts.

Think about the ways that we are so worried and anxious. We're so filled with doubt about the Father's care for us. Smack. Think about all the gifts that He gives us, which we're just holding on to for ourselves. This is mine now. Really? I've been so generous with you. Think of all the ways that we cause Him to suffer over and over, continually. This is the heart of Christ toward His people. This is what we see here: Jesus' non-retaliatory, self-sacrificial love.

It's only people who get that—who really get the fullness of what is given to you in the past in Christ and given to you every day in your relationship with Christ—for whom this word comes alive.

You know, there was an Olympic snowboarder in 2018, Chloe Kim, who won the gold on the half pipe, women's half pipe.

And this past year in Tokyo, she defended that gold and I don't know if you watched what happened. I did not watch, I read about this, but her first run coming down in the Olympics, she solidified the gold first thing. Her points and what she did was a 1280, which is three times around, right? And she landed everything so perfectly. Her score was so far ahead of everybody else. She clinched the gold in her first run. So after that, she's got another run to do and she just sort of like, hey, I can do whatever I want to. She attempted a 1260, which is a three and a half times a run. She didn't hit it, but she was free to enjoy herself.

You know, for people who look at Jesus and know Jesus, we could say like the law—He's already won the gold. He's already given us everything we need in Christ. So this whole thing about law—this is not a heavy weight for us. We get to go down the mountain and really try hard things and maybe not nail them, but because it's already all been done for us.

Here's my question for you this morning. You hear this? You think about your life? Do you have an abundance mentality toward life or a scarcity mentality toward life? An abundance mentality looks at your life and you're like, man, I have everything. I've already won the gold. What else is there to do? And so I'm free in a lot of ways with my rights. I can be wronged. I'm free with my stuff. I can be taken advantage of. I'm free to go the extra mile. I'm free to hang in with people that the rest of the world is not. I'm free to give other people another chance.

But a scarcity mindset—which is what our world lives with—says this life is all you have. You better have the best dang life you can put together. You better fight for every ounce, every dollar. You better make it work for you. You have no freedom to give stuff away because you might be taken advantage of. You might not get everything you want.

This world right now, Christians included, are yelling, "My rights, my stuff," all the time. But the Jesus way is something entirely different.

The Story of Dobby

Last illustration: one of our favorite book series as a family are the Harry Potter books, and one of my family's favorite characters is Dobby, the house elf. So Dobby, if you're not familiar with the books, is a servant—a lifelong slave to a wizarding family, abused regularly. That's his lot in life. Miniature, ugly, large ears, but his lot in life is serving the Malfoy family, an evil family in the wizarding world who treat him with cruelty and unkindness.

There's one way that a house elf can be freed in the Harry Potter world, which is when their owner gives them a personal item and that sets the house elf free as a free gift. So at the end of the book Chamber of Secrets, Harry tricks Draco Malfoy into giving Dobby a sock. You remember this, any of y'all? And what happens to Dobby? Suddenly he's free. And yet Dobby doesn't do with his freedom what I do. Dobby, instead of running off and having a ball, he turns and his whole purpose of his life becomes about serving Harry Potter and eventually laying down his life for Harry Potter.

It's one of those moments of transcendence, right, that was handed in our culture. This is such a picture of a Christian—someone who's been set free and is free to serve and free to lay down their life. May God make lots of Dobbies of this church.

Prayer

Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for your word. It's heavy, and yet Lord, the cross is so immense. The freedom we've been given, the salvation that has been handed to us is more than we can really understand. Oh, the deep, deep love of Jesus. Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free. We pray, Father, Lord, that you would work that deep into our hearts—Lord, that this kind of Dobby orientation toward life would mark us as your people. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Let's respond to God's word together in song.