Wrath Versus Peacemakers

 Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:38-48:

One of my favorite movie characters comes from the movie Inside Out and it’s the character of Anger, voiced by the inestimable Lewis Black. For those unfamiliar with the movie, most of it takes place inside the head of a 12-year-old girl, and features the emotions of joy, sadness, disgust, fear and anger as they sort of battle for their spots in how Riley lives her life. And so anger plays a role as one of her natural emotions, and really has some of the best lines in the whole film, including after Riley and her mother receive pizza with broccoli on it, saying “Congratulations San Francisco, you ruined pizza. First the Hawaiians and now you.” Although I actually like Hawaiian pizza. But, as it turns out that even though Joy is trying to deny sadness a place in Riley’s life, she can’t because sadness belongs, just like anger belongs as a primary emotion. 

And so as we think about anger, we have to understand that there is a natural place for anger in our lives, it’s just a matter of what that place is, and why we are angry. After all, we are even told that God “is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” So God gets angry, and when God is angry it’s normally because of injustice or violation of the commandment to love. We even see Jesus getting angry, thinking of him turning over the tables of the money changers is probably the most prominent of them, but would anyone describe Jesus as being an angry person? No, just as when we talked about gluttony we said that while that was an accusation made of him, it would not be how we would describe him.

And so the church has argued back and forth over the years about anger, and its place, or even if we should get angry at all. And so to answer that question directly, yes, it’s okay to be angry, but like with everything we’ve talked about so far, it’s a matter of why we are getting angry and how we are expressing that anger. Anger over injustice is certainly justified, because we can see that anger has brought about some of the most important changes in the history of the world. But one of the problems with anger is that it can lead to us considering our anger righteous, and when we are righteous in our anger, or that we feel fully justified in our anger, it can lead us to unrighteous behavior from which we cannot be talked back.

That’s why a few verses earlier in chapter 5 of Matthew as part of the antithesis, Jesus compares anger to murder because, like we talked about last week when looking at lust, our thoughts and feelings lead to our words and our words lead to action. And so Jesus gives warning about the dangers of anger, that it can be a great servant, but it’s a terrible master, and all too often that’s what happens to us, is that we are not in control of our anger but our anger controls us, and that’s when it can pass from just mere anger to instead becoming the deadly sin of wrath. Wrath, like the other deadly sins, is the negative extension of some healthy emotion running out of control. 

The Hebrew word most often translated as wrath derives from the verb “to snort.” So imagine an angry, bull pawing the ground and snorting and preparing to charge, and we begin to get a picture of the meaning. It can also be fury or burning anger, or in more colloquial terms it’s when we blow our tops. And as I said, we feel anger because of something that has happened to us, or something we think we deserved that didn’t happen, and then we feel justified in our response. We feel justified in our anger, and we the say that immoral actions we end up taking as a result of our anger are actually moral, and then we are unwilling to repent for our actions because we feel justified. Forgiveness and anger don’t go together.

And what’s the worst part is that when we strike out in anger at someone else, then they feel justified in striking back, and the cycle of violence and retribution continues. Hate begets more hate, and violence begets more violence. That’s what the original law of and eye for an eye was supposed to do was to check unrestrained retribution and violence. Technically known as Lex Talionis, it said that retribution or restitution as most of the rabbinic writings we have on this make it a financial compensation not literally an eye for an eye, could only be equal to the original injury. It was set up to stop the spiraling of retribution, sort of like what was seen in the Hatfield and McCoy feud, where things just keep getting worse and worse, and the violence escalates until someone has the wherewithal, the heart to say stop.

 That’s what this was originally to do, but by Jesus time it could be seen as this is what has to happen. That retribution is justified and has to be taken, which was the perversion of the rule, or worse, as Jeff Young says, “What makes retribution dangerous is that victims seldom stop thinking of themselves as victims and are unlikely to exercise self-control even when the gun is finally in their hands.” And so it might not stop at an eye-for-an-eye. And so Jesus says, “You have heard it said,” and then quotes from three different places in the Hebrew Bible, but I say to you “Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.”

That changes things radically, because now there is not retribution, but instead the offer to potentially be hurt even more. And yet, that’s not really what is happening here, because as is usually the case, Jesus has a deeper and more meaningful purpose in what he is saying.  If you remember when we talked about the beatitude for blessed are the meek, I said that meekness was not about being milquetoast to the world, but instead that the word meant power under control, like a strong wind in a sail or a wild animal that has been tamed. Something similar is happening here. 

The Greek word used for peacemaker literally means those who do peace. And this is also more than being a pacifist, which often has the connotation of being passive. This is an active, engaged, maybe even, for lack of a better word, an aggressive peacemaking; it’s seeing the world and reacting to the world through God’s eyes. Because when we act as peacemakers, we are acting the way that God acts, that’s why Jesus says “blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” As Jesus says in the gospel of John, the Son of God does what the father does; if we are going to be called children of God then we need to be doing what God does, and that is to be peacemakers.

And so when Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, he is not saying be a doormat and let people walk all over you and do whatever they want to to you. He is not saying that you have to take whatever abuse someone gives you. While we normally talk about the fight or flight response, and the idea that we have to choose one or the other, Jesus is saying that there is a third way. There is a way that says we are not going to escalate the violence or seek retaliation, nor are we going to let the perpetrator do whatever they want, but instead we are going to respond in love, and by responding in love we are also going to make the wrongness and the violence of the situation perfectly clear. And so pay close attention to what Jesus says, he does not say if someone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other cheek as well. Instead, he says “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”

Now since the majority of people are right handed, if we are to strike someone on the cheek, what cheek is going to be hit? It’s the left cheek. So to be hit on the right cheek means that the person striking you has backhanded you. In the ancient world that was a sign of disrespect, an act done either to someone who was lower on the social scale, or an act to say that they were lower on the social scale. So to turn and offer them the left cheek, if the person is going to strike them they are going to have to do it as an equal, or more likely not strike again at all. Continuing in the passage, if you are sued and they ask for your coat, which was the inner garment, give them your cloak as well. Now the cloak, the outer garment could not be taken by the courts, but what Jesus is saying in giving them the outer garment when they have taken the inner garment, you will be left standing before them, and everyone else in court, in the nude. When someone exerts their power over you so to embarrass you and you take it to the logical extension, who ends up looking foolish? The person trying to take your inner garment. Turn the tables on them. When you cannot force people to treat you justly, you can expose the injustice of the situation.  By Roman law, soldiers could require citizens to carry items, like a cross, thinking of Simon of Cyrene at the crucifixion, or the soldier’s equipment for one mile. But if you take it beyond that, then they will be running after you to get you to stop because now they risk prosecution. 

Jesus is saying, expose the system for what it is, expose people for who they are, expose the injustices that are taking place and when you do that, when you do it without violence, then those who are trying to do violence to you will lose. That’s why Gandhi and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were successful; the civil rights movement turned in America when the majority white population saw unarmed people being attacked by police dogs and beaten with clubs and moved with fire hoses and not fighting back, but instead staying there, and even moving towards the fight. This form of peacemaking is active and engaged not to allow the violence to continue, but to call out the violence for what it truly is and to shame those who are perpetrating it.

And then, of course, Jesus takes it even deeper, and makes it even harder, because not only are we to turn the other cheek, and we should take that literally, and not seek retribution, but instead to forgive, but we are also then called to love our enemies. Discipleship is not supposed to be a mile wide but an inch deep, true discipleship is to be an inch wide but a mile deep. And so we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, which we’ll get into even more detail next week as we conclude. And as I’ve said before we are not to pray that our enemies will see the errors of their ways, or to see how wrong they are, but instead simply to pray for God’s blessings for them. 

GK Chesterton once said that Christian ideal has not been tried and found lacking, instead it’s been found difficult and left untried. That’s why we’ve been praying Jesus statement that the road to destruction is wide and easy, but the road to life is narrow and hard. It’s hard not to let our anger, or even worse or wrath, control us or to even rear its head. It’s hard to tame that part of our nature, to make it meek, but that’s what we are called to do. All of us have the wolf and the sheep inside of us, and we decide which is going to get feed and which is going to control. Or to put a scriptural spin on it, all of us have a lion and a lamb in us, and the vision of the peaceable kingdom is of the lion and the lamb lying together. I think that’s what it means to be a peacemaker, is that it starts with us, or being a peacemaker within ourselves, so that we can then be a peacemaker in the world.

According to historians Will and Ariel Durant, in the last 3,425 years of recorded history there have only been 268 years in which there has not been a war taking place somewhere.  That’s just 8%. That has led some people to conclude that war and violence are therefore a natural part of who we are, of our existence. But that’s the trap we find ourselves in is that we think that the way things are is how they are supposed to be or how they have to be. But, what Jesus tells us, what Jesus shows us, what Jesus calls us to in participating in the Kingdom of God, is not to accept the world as it is, but instead to work for the world as God wants it to be. And when we think it’s impossible, that the chances of success are too small, or we just want to give in to our desire to strike back, let’s remember the words of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who said “God well knew how ready our unbelief would be to cry out ‘This is impossible!’ and therefore stakes upon it all the power, truth and faithfulness of God, to whom all things are possible.” 

We are not called to be peacemakers, what Jesus says is that those who follow God, those who are children of God, those who work for the kingdom of God already are peacemakers. That is what distinguishes us from the world, it is what makes us who we are, as hard and as difficult as it might be, that is who we are. Hate and retaliation do not bring peace, all they bring is more hate and retaliation, we see it every day. No politician is ever going to stake their candidacy, to make their platform, peace and forgiveness, but that is exactly what Jesus did and said, and he was willing to lay down his life for it, because without forgiveness there cannot be genuine peace, and what the prophets also tell us that without justice, without God’s justice there also cannot be peace. So I say to you, turn the other cheek, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, for blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.