Shawna Gordon

I. Introduction

“You have heard it said,” Jesus tells his friends, “to love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I tell you do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other also.” This passage in Matthew 5:38-44 has been used time and time again to support nonviolence as a response toward your enemy, after all, isn’t that what Jesus would have done? It is what Jesus said to do – loving your enemy is to give them more of your body for them to hurt. But what does this say to the oppressed? What does this say to me, a queer, Black woman? How much more of my body do I have to give to my enemy to show them that I love them, even when they despise my existence? As a Quaker, I try to choose nonviolence more often than not. It is a beautiful thing to resist using my hands or sharp words to respond to someone else who has also been created by the Divine. However, as I have leaned into my identities as a powerful queer, Black woman that is a Quaker, pacifism isn’t always loving because it isn’t always loving to me. Therefore, throughout this exegesis of Matthew 5:38-44, I will argue that Jesus’ words to love my enemies does not only mean to choose pacifism but to love my enemies is to love myself enough to resist by any means necessary.

II. Definitions & Method

Throughout this exploration, I will be using my own hermeneutics and social location to guide and support my argument but I first want to provide definitions in order to create some sort of structure of how I am interpreting this text and why I am interpreting it the way that I am. First, my own personal hermeneutic is that the Bible is a book of stories that a community discovers liberation, freedom, intimacy, love, grace, and forgiveness as they know their God. Secondly, my definition of queer that is the lens that I will be using is that queer is not limited to simply identity, but it is also a posture, and more importantly an act of resistance. I do believe that it is a unique function of queer people to see things in a queer way, which is to say, to take on a particular posture or act in a certain way that sees things from a different vantage point. As a queer person myself, I don’t know of any other way to exist than to see things through a lens of resistance, subversion, and from a different vantage point than has been normalized. It is because of that that it is a gift for me to see this particular text being read and interpreted in this way – this way of reading can be empowering to oppressed folks, and can function as a way of hope towards taking on the posture of not only what it means to love your enemy, but what does love look like. Therefore, the method of this exegesis will be investigating the cultural context of this passage being written, the backdrop that it exists in front, and then moving towards the passage as it relates to the larger section, namely the book of Matthew, its genre, and function. Finally, this paper will move towards the relevancy of today as it related to my original thesis. I will conclude this exploration with also naming the risk that comes with taking on this passage with this interpretation.

III. The World Within the Text: In Relation to Entirety of Passage & Book

In true Jesus fashion, Matthew 5:38-44 is part of a bigger picture to which Jesus is hanging a new commandment on the old commandments. “You have heard it said”, Jesus says, opening up six examples of righteous and holy living, reminding the people of laws from Leviticus and Deuteronomy. This particular passage is part of Jesus’ sermon on the mount, teaching those in the crowd as well as his disciples, his words are instructing the collective; this particular community. Within Matthew 5, Jesus opens up with the Beatitudes and continues to hang new commandments on the old ones bringing to life the embodiment of the God with us. The laws being fulfilled by Jesus seem idealistic, and in some ways is, but Stanley Hauerwas suggests, “Indeed one could argue that the demands of the sermon are profoundly immoral, demanding as they seem to do what we do not resist on who is evil. Yet if these radical ideals are abandoned, we abandon Jesus. [...] The sayings of the Sermon on the Mount are the interpretations of Jesus’s life, and that same life is the necessary condition for the interpretation of the sermon.”[i] Though I don’t entirely agree with Hauerwas is arguing here, I do think it is important to name the function of what is trying to be done in this section – proving to the people that this is indeed the Son of God with these things that can only be done with and through the Son of God. Leading up to the passage in question, Jesus rattles off six antithetical examples of, “you have heard it said” and expands on something that feel unattainable or unimaginable to the people he is speaking to. Are these teachings universal for 21st century folks? Would Jesus’s words be different if he spoke them to us today? What would only be possible with and through Christ?

Jesus’s words, “you have heard it said, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, referencing the law embedded within this culture found in Exodus 21:23-25, Leviticus 22:19-20, and Deuteronomy 19:21, to which these laws reflected how justice was distributed in ancient Israel. Compensation for injury, harm, or death was to do what has been done to the victim, settling the score and evening the playing field, so to speak. Karen C. Sapio suggests, “By Jesus’ time, may rabbis had recommended that such injuries should be compensated financially rather than physically. This would have been the prevailing practice in first-century Palestine.”[ii] Even from the periods of ancient Israel law codes and first-century Palestine, distribution of justice reformed to be applicable for its society; outdated practices of mutilation evolved to financial compensation; the laws adapting to its particular time and location. Sapio continues, “The first three examples of nonresistance portray situation in which the evil is perpetrated by one greater with power over one with lesser power. [...] Jesus’ command to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (v.44) should not be interpreted as a negation of Jewish law or practice, but as Jesus’ call to his disciples to transcend this righteousness with an even higher righteousness.”[iii] The word for evil used in this section is ambiguous but scholars suggest it to be militant, or abstract evil – systematical evil, perhaps? Regardless, there is dynamic that is at work in this section – someone or something that has more power over someone else is exercising and abusing their power, and yet Jesus’ command to ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ calls for the abused and oppressed to transcend their oppression to choose to not retaliate. This is the kind of rhetoric I am all too familiar with: the minoritized often called upon to take the “high road” choosing to do what our oppressors could not.

IV. The World Beyond the Text

In 2014, Michael Brown was murdered Ferguson, Missouri. In response, a number of Black thinkers and theologians responded through the Syndicate. Nyle Fort was one of the contributors, crafting Strange Fruit, Revolutionary Violence, and a Love on Fire, a relatively short but powerful piece that has changed the texture of my theology. He writes, “Violence has never been a “question” for black people living in America. It is a constant reality. Black theology does not ask whether violence is right or wrong, good or evil, Christian or unchristian. It asks how are blacks to responded to institutionalized violence already at work in our lives.”[iv] While Fort is speaking directly to Black folks in America, the gift of my intersecting identities is that it feels like Fort is talking to all parts of me and with people like me. It had never occurred to me the ways in which institutionalized violence is already at work in my lives and what has been presented to me, and to people like me, is to respond with only non-violence. I think of Audre Lorde’s revolutionary words in Sister Outsider, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”[v] I have only ever been taught to be nonviolent; to respond with love in ways that can feel passive. When someone bullies me for my skin or my hair, I was told to ignore them for “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” But they did – those words hurt me, to the point where I hated myself; hating the color of my skin, hating the way my hair curled, hating the way I was built, eventually growing to hate that I liked girls, or that I was a girl. I hated myself because I was taught to hate myself. But Nyle Fort turns this on its head as he says,

Presenting nonviolence as the only way possible Christian response to racial terror is not only unreasonable, but unrighteousness. It denies black humanity. It asks blacks to be superhuman while treating us as subhuman. It wants us to love white people telling us to hate ourselves. [...] Love is the force that destroys the distance that institutionalized violence creates between us. It tears down the walls of white supremacy. It forces white people to recognize black humanity. It enables black people to see our beauty and salvage our dignity. Love is power. Christian love is the black power to say No to white supremacist terror, even if saying No to racial terror means saying Yes to revolutionary violence.[vi]

Revolutionary violence, queer resistance both as an identity and as an action, is a movement that dismantles what has been built by exclusive theologies that are embedded with white supremacist, homophobic, and patriarchal teachings. This kind of interpretation of the text changes the ways the churches function, no longer as passive, preaching to turn the other cheek, but standing in the way of the minoritized forced to give more of their body to their oppressor. This kind of interpretation of the text would empower the church to stand in the gaps for their people in the name of love.

V. The Risk?  

This kind of interpretation of the text is empowering, giving a more dynamic view of this passage but it certainly isn’t for everyone. Even as I worked through this project, I found myself going back and forth, feeling like there was a missing piece to me arguing that violence is loving, because I don’t think violence always is. I think violence can be evil and uncalled for because there is something Divine about choosing what is harder, which is to not retaliate violence with violence. I certainly don’t think that violence will solve problems of homophobia or racism because I want to believe that Heaven living looks like loving others without hurting others. I don’t ever want to choose violence first – I don’t want my resistance to only exist through physical force or violent words because that is exhausting. It is exhausting to be on the defensive, ready to strike back if struck but the alternative feels unattainable and theoretical; the alternative being living in a world where I wouldn’t have to retaliate, where I could simply exist and it would be wonderful. The alternative being that I could live in a world where my white supremacist neighbors didn’t talk about stringing up my ancestors, waiting for the day to do the same to me. I could live in a world where I could hold my partner’s hand in public without being fearful that someone would attack us, or say degrading things about us. I could live in a world where I could walk home at night without clutching my keys in hand, hyperaware of my surroundings. This world feels like a dream, and unfortunately my reality feels nowhere close. I don’t want my resistance to exist only though physical force and some days I’m unsettled in the thought of taking up arms means to love myself, but today, I feel tired of loving my neighbor in this pacifistic way, concerned with how to love my white supremacist neighbor or the homophobic stranger because, to be honest, I forgot to ask if I loved myself.

VI. Conclusion

Jesus’ commandment in Matthew 5:38-44 takes old laws one step further, in ways that feel unimaginable to do without Christ. His words feel inconsistent, conservative even, asking those who have been harmed to give more of their body for those with more power than them to hurt. But are his words even for us? And if they are, then is nonviolence truly the only way to transcend righteous living? If the function of this passage, and Matthew 5 as a whole, is to take further old commandments to love your neighbor as you love yourself, would a modern interpretation of this text from my social location be to love myself enough to fight for myself? Without a doubt. But, it is the kind of resistance that can only be done with and through Christ. It can feel risky to read this text in this way but I wonder if it only feels risky because I haven’t ever been taught anything else? It only feels risky to put down my master’s tools, and pick up something I’ve never been encouraged to feel before: love for myself. Perhaps, my theology, coexisting with all the parts of me that inform my world can be summed up with this: do no harm, but take no shit. To be queer is to resist, to fight back, and to love my neighbor as I love myself – and what a gift it is to love myself like this.

Notes

[i] Hauerwas, Stanley. 2006. Matthew. Grand Rapids, Mich: Brazos Press., p61.

[ii] Jarvis, Cynthia A. and E. Elizabeth Johnson. 2015. Feasting on the Gospels. First ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, p111.

[iii] Ibid., 115.

[iv] Fort, Nyle. "Ferguson and Theology." Syndicate. Accessed April 29, 2019. https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/ferguson-and-theology/.

[v] Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press., p 112.

[vi] Fort, Nyle. "Ferguson and Theology." Syndicate. Accessed April 29, 2019. https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/ferguson-and-theology/.