On Turning the Other Cheek

Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, Epiphany 7, Year C, 2/23/25

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

Love your enemies and turn the other cheek. This is perhaps one of the most difficult teachings of Christ presented to us in all of the Gospel. When I first read these words last week I thought that this is either the worst possible timing for this Gospel lesson to appear, when country, and neighbor, and even household is so bitterly divided, or it is the Gospel we need desperately to hear now more than ever. Love your enemies and turn the other cheek.

What does this even mean and how can we be expected to respond in a way which seems so passive when we encounter flagrant violations of human dignity? How can the same God who repeatedly liberates His people from the Egyptians, the Philistines, and the Babylonians, now appear to tell us to accept the injustices we receive with meekness, and while we’re at it, go ahead and love the person who is slighting you. How does this make sense?

Truthfully, it does not make sense at all. At least not according to any conventional meaning of ‘common sense’. For if Christ came to share common sense with us, a common ethics which the culture of the world already teaches us, well we could all pack our bags and call it a day. But instead of common sense, Jesus is inviting us, asking us, begging us, to see the uncommon sense which will liberate us from a commonplace way of living that traps us in cycles of retribution, violence, and embitterment.

So let’s first take a look at what common ethics Jesus is calling us away from. In first century Roman Palestine the common ethics were a two-tiered ethics of retribution, justice, and hierarchy. If you were a Roman citizen, the rule was an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. If a person of equal standing to you committed a crime against you, that person was to be punished in a way equal to the crime. This is essentially the law and ethics we still operate under today. It’s an ethics of retribution, tit for tat. However, in ancient Rome, not even this baseline ethic of retribution was equally applied – there was an even lower moral standard of treatment for those who were not Roman citizens.

For instance, the law allowed for a Roman citizen to strike a non-citizen on the cheek with legal impunity. And if the non-citizen were to try to reciprocate the blow to the Roman, well then, the punishment would be imprisonment or even death. So it would seem then, that for Jesus and his mostly Jewish disciples who were not Roman citizens, the only two options were to a) try to fight back against the Romans using the same commonplace logic of retribution, which would likely lead to them losing their lives, or b) accept the injustice and move on with the status quo while their hatred for the Romans continued to consume them.

According to common sense, these appeared to be their options, that is, until Jesus presented to them a third and uncommon option. An option which really is an entirely different ethical worldview. One predicated on love and mercy for your oppressor rather than retribution. This is the option to turn the other cheek. Now in spite of how it sounds, loving your enemy and turning the other cheek is actually far from passive acceptance. Christ is not asking us to turn a blind eye to the slight, he is asking us to turn a mirror to it. 

Just imagine for a moment what such an encounter might look like and let’s imagine we’re the ones doing the striking. We strike someone on the cheek and, instead of responding in the way we might expect, with outrage or further violence, they instead, turn and present the other side of their face to be struck.

Even if we were incredibly angry, how might that make us feel? For most of us, it would cause a deep feeling of shame to see our hostility exposed in such a measured way.

Now imagine if the person being struck went a step further and then told us that they loved us, even though they did not approve of the way they were being treated. This is the most uncommon and astounding part. And let me be clear, loving someone in a scriptural sense has nothing to do with rosy feelings of affection. Jesus does not say we must feel fondly for our enemies. Rather, loving an enemy is about seeing them the way that God sees them, as beloved children, even when their anger and hatred is directed towards us. Loving our enemies as God does, does not mean passively approving of what they do, it means being proactively compassionate to their own sources of hurt and anger so that we are better equipped to stop them from destroying us and themselves in the process.

What loving our enemy and turning the other cheek is really about, is turning the mirror of God’s love towards the source of the harm. Because if we’re turning harm back towards harm, we know that only further harm will come. This is not something any of us can easily do alone and so we must call on God’s grace, the grace of a Lord who forgave his persecutors, even on the cross.

And let me be honest with you, the most difficult part about this practice of turning the other cheek, of turning the mirror of God’s love upon violence, is that it does not guarantee that the other party will stop. We know, and God knows, that sometimes the wound is so deep in our enemies, that even seeing the face of Christ reflected to them is not enough to keep them from trying to harm us. Jesus was still crucified.

However, this does not mean that Jesus is calling us to a fruitless practice, because loving and forgiving and praying for our enemies is as much for the benefit of our own souls as it is for the souls of our enemies. Any form of hatred which we allow to infect our hearts will eat us up. And God knows that the only effective way we can safeguard ourselves from hatred is to let our hearts become so filled with love that it pours out onto the cheeks of our enemies even as they strike ours. So if you cannot love someone you hate for their sake, then please, I implore you, to love them for yours. This is the uncommon sense Christ is calling us to.

And if you’re like the many of us struggling with this practice of loving your enemy right now, that’s okay, it simply means you are human. A human who is loved beyond measure by a God of uncommon grace, and you have at least an entire church full of people who are here to support you in receiving that grace – for yourself, and even for your enemy. Amen.