Week 22—Monday Matthew 5:38-42
Week 22—MONDAY
UNLIMITED, LIMITED, NO REVENGE
We continue to look at the Sermon on the Mount as realism. It is the most amazing account of the attempt of Jesus to get people to give up the paralyzing dualisms in their characters and conduct.
He goes on to urge us to stop the dualisms in our speech. You try to be impressive in speech by adding oaths, he said, but the very attempt to be impressive by adding oaths to your statement weakens those statements, for it reveals your own inner insecurity. “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil” (Matt. 5: 37). Here he would purify our speech from the dualism which would need binding oaths to hold it together. Be so one that your speech is one, needing no outer props to make it stand.
Jesus’ next emphasis was upon getting rid of limited revenge—one eye for one eye and one tooth for one tooth—replacing it by no revenge at all (Matt. 5:38-42). Before the Jewish Law came in, revenge was unlimited—if someone knocks out one tooth of yours, knock out as many as you can of that person’s teeth. The Law limited the revenge to its exact equivalent—one eye for one eye. Jesus abolished revenge. For the simple reason that if you act upon revenge you allow the other person to determine your conduct—you react to another’s act. That makes someone else decide what you do. Work out from your own principles regardless of what the other person does, Jesus said. If you are struck on one cheek, then seize the initiative and turn the other cheek. That puts you in control of the situation, on the moral and spiritual offensive. It also disarms the other person—someone strikes you on the cheek, and you strike that person on the heart. The other person doesn’t know what to do with this new and unexpected weapon—the weapon of love. But the weapon must be one weapon not two—now love and now force—which would cancel the effectiveness of love.
O Lord Jesus, we thank you that you came to our world with no other weapon save the weapon of love. You conquered us by love and by love alone. Help us to be single-minded and single-weaponed. In your name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: If I take revenge, I sink to the other person’s level.