Monday: Meeting aWrong with aWrong
WEEK 33
MONDAY
MEETING A WRONG WITH A WRONG
Matthew 5:38-41
The highest watermark of spiritual religion in the pre-Christian stage is the Psalms. Yet the spirit of resentment and bitterness creeps into them:
LORD, remember what the Edomites did on Jerusalem’s dark day . . .
a blessing on the one who pays you back the very deed you did to us!
A blessing on the one who seizes your children
and smashes them against the rock! (Ps 137:7-9)
The prevailing attitude in that ancient world was tit for tat—you do this and I do that—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Life was on the legal level.
This spirit of revenge is seen when the disciples asked Jesus if they should call down fire from heaven on the Samaritan village that refused to allow them to enter because “he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem.” The Samaritans were wrong in their fierce prejudice against anyone going to Jerusalem. That was race prejudice pure and simple. But the disciples were also wrong in answering a wrong with a wrong. They tried to soften that wrong and give it a religious flavor by saying it would be from heaven, therefore with a divine sanction upon it. And they quoted a sanction from the prophets, “as [Elijah] did” (Luke 9:51-54 KJV). So this spirit of tit for tat was still in religion up until the coming of the Holy Spirit. There it died out in the fires of a burning love for everybody—even enemies.
Outside this circle of cleansing fire, where Christianity was faint in its effects, we see that same spirit creeping in. In the birth stories about Jesus was one that said a boy ran into the boy Jesus and knocked him down, and Jesus said, “Thou shalt fall and never rise again.” And the boy fell dead.* That is so palpably false to the spirit of Jesus that it would be like introducing a cancer into healthy tissue. Before the Old Testament, revenge was unlimited. If a man knocked out your eye, you would get two if you could. The Old Testament limited the revenge—one eye for one eye. Jesus abolished revenge; evil was to be overcome with good.
O Lord, I thank you that I am being taken hold of by a Love that knows no revenge or even resentment, but would overcome hate by love, the world by a cross. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Resentments are banished from not only my acts but my very thoughts.
* See The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (c. 185 CE), 4:1.