Beyond Revenge
Beyond Revenge
Matthew 5:38-42
Recently, we moved my daughter, Emma, into her new apartment in Evanston. In my mind, the biggest challenge of moving around the Chicagoland area is not moving boxes and mattresses and lamps. No, the biggest challenge is parking. Most of the time, you need one person to stay with the car in case you need to move it or to protect the contents from being stolen. As someone who has grown used to light traffic and my own garage, navigating urban places grows more challenging with each move.
This is why Emma’s move was going to be great. She had off- street access where we could park and unload the car. How awesome is that! At least, it should have been. When we arrived, there was a U-Haul, unattended, that was parked in the one exact way that you could park to completely block the entrance. Literally, they could not have done a better job of gumming things up. I stood there for a while and no one was going back and forth to the truck. It was just parked.
Thankfully, there was an exit which was not blocked. So, we pulled the car in that way and moved to where we were out of everyone’s way and unloaded the car. No big deal! We assembled a couch and a bed. We unpacked and broke down a ton of boxes and took them to the recycling bin. It was all good. When we were finally done, we were completely exhausted.
We drove back to the exit to leave… and there was an SUV parked in the one, perfect position to block anyone from leaving. Again, of course, there was no one around. The car was just parked. So, we drove around to the entrance and…you guessed it…the U-haul was still there! Understand…in both cases—at the exit and the entrance— there was a ton of room where folks could have pulled to the side and parked. They just chose not to do that.
The good news, though, was that there were people at the U-Haul! I took a deep breath and approached them. I smiled, even though I had my mask on. I said, “Hello!” Then, I asked them, “Hey, we’re just trying to get out and the exit and this entrance are both blocked. Any chance you could just pull to the side?” The man looked at me and shook his head: “No. We’ll be done in about 20 minutes. Then we’ll move.”
I just stood there and thought to myself, “Really?” As my rage stoked, it was just so tempting to blow the situation up, to blast this narcissistic fool, to have the satisfaction of my most righteous indignation. In the heat of the moment, when someone catches you off guard, it is so easy to lose your cool and maybe even lose your soul. It is so tempting to take a hit and then hit right back. It is so tempting to operate out of that primal, “Eye for an eye; tooth for tooth” perspective: “If that’s your best version of a jerk that you can be then you just wait until you see the jerk that I’m about to become!”
Of course, what follows that instant of satisfaction in teeing someone else up is the enduring remorse of living with the haunting question, “Why did I do that?” The problem is that the person who “hit me,” will be gone in a moment but I have to live with the person whom I chose to become. And, if we lose it and lose ourselves, we will have to face the truth of how little it took for our better self to simply disappear: “I worked so hard to become something more, something deeper, something more spiritual and then that self was gone in a snap…”
I didn’t hit back. I’d like to tell you that this was about the intrinsic power of my more noble self. I’m not going to try to sell you that. On the one hand, I was tired and I really didn’t have the energy for a fight. On the other hand, I’ve had enough actual experiences of how unsatisfying it is to get lost in such moments that “hitting back” has lost its luster. In other words, it’s not that some higher ideology won out. It is the pragmatic, lived experience of learning that cheap, fiery confrontations are the emotional equivalent of junk food. The short term payoff will pale next to the nausea which follows. Feeling good for a moment will not stack up to feeling bad about who I am and what I’ve done.
That capacity to feel bad about a choice that I’ve made in the most basic sense is known as “having a conscience.” Yes…there are people who go through life firing away at everyone in their path who seemingly never feel bad. In their most extreme, these people are known as sociopaths or psychopaths. Having a conscience doesn’t make a person weak. Having a conscience is pretty much the only hope we have for civilization. So, most of us stop ourselves and find something else to do with what we feel and maybe even find some other way to try to solve the situation.
Of course, in a lot of settings, the temptation to act out is made even more powerful by anonymity. For a long time in civilization, people lived in relatively small families and tribes and towns. Part of what made listening to your conscience compelling was that you knew that you were going to have to live with this other person who was offending you for a long time to come. In a mobile society where we come into contact with a lot of people whom we are likely to never see again, conscience becomes less compelling: “Who cares if this gets ugly? It’ll be over in a flash.”
This is particularly true in cyberspace. If someone writes something that bothers me, why wouldn’t I fire back? They don’t know me. I don’t know them. We’re never going to actually be held responsible for what we say or do. Fire away! Roast that anonymous person representing the group, “Them!”
All of this is a neat explanation of how we have ended up as divided of a nation as we’ve become. Being a part of an “us” who is diametrically opposed to “them”—i.e.: the bad people—has always appealed to human beings. Add in all the ways that we can never face the consequences of what we’ve done and never have to really associate with people who see things differently than we see them and we have a formula for disaster. We have people who think they are keeping score of who started things, who believe that all that they are doing is “hitting back” after they were “hit.” We have an unending cycle of vengeance.
If we step back, we would see that, although folks might argue that they are just working from an “eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth” perspective, that perspective would actually be aspirational. After all, an “eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth” is about proportional justice. My commitment is that I’m only going to do to you what you did to me. In truth, this was an evolved understanding of justice from the more ancient view that if you harm me then I’m going to harm you 100 times worse. Presumably, an “eye for and eye: tooth for a tooth” perspective was meant to keep the vengeance from escalating. Really, in our world, escalation is what our confrontations are all about.
The reason for this is simple. Like all other addictive behaviors, as we act out over time we develop a tolerance for what we’re doing. The rush of saying something snarky diminishes over time. So, instead of just saying something passive-aggressive, I escalate things in other ways. I become more direct. Lo and behold, the rush is back. Over time, I “feed that beast” and things become rather nuclear. This is what it takes to feel good about who I’m being when who I am being is such an obviously diminished version of who I could be. It takes a lot of volume to drown out a conscience.
The problem, of course, is that Jesus really sets a high bar. It turns out that even an “eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth” perspective isn’t good enough. He has the nerve to expect more than that from us. (How dare he, right?) He actually expects us to overcome our instinctual craving for revenge. (As an aside, this is where court systems come from—the notion that justice has to do with something more than revenge. Therefore, the victims and their families are not the judges and juries. Instead, courts are impartial.)
Look at Jesus’ examples. The first one I’ve talked about before but it is worth reviewing: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Lots of people argue that this is why someone should just be passive and get beaten up. That’s not what Jesus is saying. In his very hierarchical society, there was a whole pecking order of status. If I was higher on that pecking order than you and I was angry at you, I would strike you with the back of my left hand on your right cheek. The left hand was considered unclean (send me an email and I’ll tell you why.) So, as my inferior, when I strike you with my unclean hand, everyone gets to see that you are my inferior. What Jesus is saying is that, after you’ve taken the first hit, turn your other cheek and make him hit you as an equal. Let everyone see that. He’s urging the person not to be a victim but to be defiant—to defy not only the attacker but the pecking order, itself.
Look at the second example. Someone wants to sue you and take your coat. What should you do? You should give them your cloak, too. What does that create? It creates a public spectacle. It leaves you standing there in your undies and leaves everyone staring at the other person who left you in that state. In a society that wasn’t a fan of even partial nudity, this was going to get everyone’s attention. It was likely that the crowds would come to their own conclusion about whose fault it was that you were left in that state.
Now, imagine someone forces you to carry something for a mile for them. Who would have done this in Jesus’ world? The Roman guards would have been the perpetrators here. They would force people into temporary servitude, just to show their power over everyone. What does Jesus say to do? Go the extra mile. Do what they order you to do and then become like the bad itch that they can’t shake. Make sure that everyone sees what’s going on.
Finally, if anyone wants to beg or borrow from you, just hand over what they need. Why? You should do this presumably because there are far more important things in life than money. There’s a lot of societal pressure to use the moment to make a buck. There’s a lot of personal temptation to just say, “No!” Defy those tendencies. Live like there are more important things than cash. Live like there are more important things than being like everyone else.
Do you hear it? Followers of Jesus aren’t meant to be victims. Rather, followers of Jesus are meant to do something different than everyone else. We are meant to find a third path, an alternative to vengeance in all its forms. We are called to discover that just because someone else has “lost it,” that doesn’t mean that we have to lose it, too. We are called to choose differently. We have a conscience. We should make choices that defy the powers that be and awaken the consciences of the people around us.
There’s a self whom we were created to be, regardless of who the people around us are being. Just as importantly, we are meant to see the dignity with which others confront the wrongs being done to them and strive to be their best selves. Those people are our partners in living with real depth. We are meant to support each other as we strive to make this world a better world.