You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. – Jesus
One differs with Jesus at one’s peril. Based on his remains, Jesus was the best preacher ever: acute, precise, concise, profound – and some writer! Many sermons aspire to literature, but few come close. That’s because a sermon responds to the “facts on the ground,” in military parlance, and those facts are in permanent flux. Today’s tactics are seldom applicable to tomorrow’s war. A preacher, too, is obliged to peddle dogma, which is necessarily littered with hooey. Few preachers are free to tell you what they think; they tell you what you should think, according to the rules of their sect. A religion is a story, and its storytellers must swear up and down, cross their hearts and hope to die, their story is true, even when they know it isn’t. Puppy Henry, a fact-based pragmatist, advocates removing the dog from dogma – the very word upsets him.
Jesus, as the inventor of his religion, didn’t have to parrot forbears. Yeh, he was a Jew, but a Jew of a new sort, different from the Pharisees. He wasn’t a Christian because they hadn’t been invented yet and his crucifixion was a precondition. As Martin Luther meant to reform orthodox Christianity, not launch a new religion, so Jesus wanted to revise Judaism to his liking. Founders are freer than followers to speak their minds.
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is the Mount Everest of homilies. As an occasional preacher myself (who? Me?), I reread it regularly with discreditable envy. Jesus, Shakespeare and Lincoln top my best-preachers-ever list (with Dr. Johnson and Thoreau in hot pursuit). John Donne and Emerson, eat your heart out!
Jesus was aces, but he wasn’t inerrant, as Christians are supposed to suppose. He was the temporal leader of a puny sect that had no power or influence. He had to play the hand he was dealt. He couldn’t force his vision of righteousness onto the incumbent Pharisees, much less their Roman overlords, so he did what any effective field commander must, he made lemonade out of lemons, turning his weakness into strength. Pay your taxes, he sensibly advised his band of brothers, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” because you can’t fish for souls while rotting in jail. Roger that. He said not to sweat injustice and misfortunes here below, because God will adjust everyone’s outcome in eternity. Another brilliant idea under the circumstances, if hard to swallow.
Turning the other cheek is the protest of the impotent. If you’re impotent, go for it. But if you’ve got the power to repair things in the here-and-now, to permit your enemy to wallop you – and wallop you again – is immoral, not just. One ought not, faced with a Hitler or Trump, turn the other cheek, if you’ve any chance of stopping them. “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth,” said Jesus on another occasion (he was delectably inconsistent); “I came not to send peace, but a sword.”
In our present war for human freedom and decency – quite the barnburner – I’ve no intention of turning the other cheek. I mean to whack and whack and whack, till one of us lies lifeless on the field.