The verdict has been handed down: Acquitted on all charges. The response, for the most part, is what we would expect. To the ammosexual, this was a resounding shot across the bow to all those who oppose them. To others, it was a gross miscarriage of justice and the potential for white vigilantes to march with their automatic weapons in protests across the country. For people of color and their allies, it’s a terrifying conception of what may be to come when they stand up to oppression.
Everywhere I look I see anger and horror from one group, and glee and giddiness from another. Tensions are high. People are verbally attacking each other, unfriending each other, getting into screaming matches. It’s yet another dangerous step forward for the white ammosexual who is simply desperate go out and kill somebody, even if they have to leave their home state and go to another state to do so.
Since most of the people who support Rittenhouse claim to be followers of Jesus (though unquestionably extremists), one has to wonder what Jesus might say. What advice would he would give us? How would he recommend we handle our fear, frustration, and downright anger? So once again I turn to Jesus’ manifesto: The Sermon on the Mount.
The challenge with Jesus, especially in these modern times, is there are so many varying opinions about who he was and what he stood for. To some, he’s a pacifist who refused to get involved in politics, or if he did, he chose the path of nonviolence/nonresistance over all else. (Then there’s the whole “Jesus didn’t exist” debate. I do not debate whether or not Jesus existed. I take the ‘null’ hypothesis. He did or he didn’t. But there are over a billion people on earth who claim to be his followers, and this is significant.) Others see him as a radical, a messiah-wannabe caught up in delusions of grandeur. And to others, he is God/the Son of God/the Messiah who died for our sins.
I call the Sermon on the Mount Jesus’ manifesto regardless of who wrote it. Here, more than any other place in the Gospels, the sermon seems to lay out most clearly what Jesus thought—about life the universe and everything—who he thought he was, and what he ‘believed’ about God, the Romans, the leaders of Israel, religion, oppression, and the politics of the day.
The sermon begins in Matthew 5, in which Jesus teaches his disciples from the side of a mountain, alongside a multitude of onlookers. He starts out with a blessing, for those who suffer, those who mourn, those who are oppressed…
Now many will say, “so what, I don’t believe in God.” That’s not the point of this article.
Jesus looked into the universe, through the lens of Judaism, and saw something profound. Something he called not just a father, but ‘daddy’ (Abba). He saw something in the world that cared about the poor, that cared about the suffering of the oppressed, and that was, even at that time, actively supporting ‘the least of these.’ In this sense, what I find as the striking question: “What did Jesus see, and how did he see it?” “Can I see it?”
Let’s be clear. According to his biographers, he put in the work. He fasted, he spent hours, sometimes entire nights in prayer, and he followed Judaic law—which his disciples wouldn’t be required to do until after he had been killed.
As his sermon continues, he talks about salt and light, the fulfillment of Jewish law, murder, adultery, divorce, oaths, revenge, love for your neighbor. And he filters it through the lens of the loving father that he devoted his life to getting to know. And it’s in here that his words can help us cope with with our frustrations.
Jesus lived in a time of oppression. Rome, or as we might call it: Wall Street—the oligarchs, the billionaires, had an ironclad grip on the children of God (us). Rome used the wealthy leaders of Israel, the Sanhedrin (in our day, Congress), to maintain order and guarantee the people didn’t rise up. We all know that Caiaphas (Mitch McConnell), bought his way into the priesthood and was considered illegitimate by most of the Jewish citizenry. Herod (today’s Evangelical preachers like Franklin Graham), and later his son Antipas (Jerry Falwell Jr.) would control Judea with an iron fist making sure there was no insurrection against the power of Rome. Zealots (White Evangelicals) would inveigh against their enemies, desperate to start a war. And ALL of them used the taxes and tithes of the poor to enrich themselves (tithes were mandatory among the Jews). They abused the poor, they created a system where poor land owners had to borrow money to keep their farms, but the interest was set just high enough they could not repay it, and then had to borrow more, until finally they could no longer keep up the payments. At which point their land was repossessed by the lenders and the former land owners were kept on as slaves—tilling what used to be their land in order to increase the wealth of those above them.
This was the word Jesus lived in, and he was not blind to that. In fact, it’s at the heart of all of his teachings.
So what we read in his manifesto are the words of a pragmatist. He’s giving advice to his audience on how to survive this craziness. Not only survive, but thrive. Somewhere in his ideology, he saw a “God,” a father that was at work creating “A Kingdom of Heaven,” not just in Heaven, but right here on Earth. And in Jesus’ philosophy, we the people, the poor and oppressed, make up that Kingdom. What’s more, we do it by working together. The more we work together in acts of compassion, the greater that Kingdom will be, and the more power it will wield upon the earth. I do not think he meant that we had to get along, or even agree, only that we come together to empower the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
It's in Matthew 5 that we read what at first looks like his pacifist views:
You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
However, in the context of what he continues to say throughout the sermon, and his parables and other teachings, there was much more to his recommendations than that. As a Jewish teacher, he understood the Levitical law of Eye for an Eye:
Anyone who injures their neighbor is to be injured in the same manner: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The one who has inflicted the injury must suffer the same injury. Whoever kills an animal must make restitution, but whoever kills a human being is to be put to death.
While this looks cruel to us (and it is), it was also a moratorium on how far revenge could go. In other words, if someone pushed me so that I broke my arm, I couldn’t run in and kill them or their family. Nor could I try and destroy them financially. I must limit my revenge to exactly what they did to me. And in the desert, just as in the wild west, where even the slightest provocation was cause for a shootout, this law was meant to tamp down that instinct.
Jesus reiterated that rule in order to make a bigger point:
But I tell you, do not resist an evil person.
One way to look at this advice is to say, “Don’t seek revenge.” As we’ve seen through countless stories—books and movies, revenge takes up a lot of energy and very often ends up destroying us long before we ever accomplish our goal. I do not think Jesus is telling us to just stand there and ‘take it.’ I think he’s saying, ‘continue on doing what you know to be right.’ That evil person will probably do everything in their power to stop you (which is the very nature of evil) and if you focus your energy on them, it’s highly likely that you be sidetracked from the task at hand.
If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.
Another way to look at this is that retaliation way to look at this is to say Jesus was telling us ‘not to retaliate… but also, not to run away, nor to simply stand there and take what’s being doled out. This is the opposite of passivism. Turning the other cheek is active, moving forward, making it know you’re committed to what’s right.
The idea of turning the other cheek could be seen as a recommendation to stand up straight yet remain vulnerable. The Kingdom of Heaven propagates itself through our willingness to allow the attitudes of compassion to continue even in the midst of persecution. When we are persecuted for doing good, we continue to do good. It’s going to be painful. Our cheeks are going to hurt. Notice too, that it can be assumed that we just keep going back and forth with each cheek, even when it gets painful. There’s no question that we’re going to face opposition, and that opposition is going to get ugly. It’s going to be painful. It’s going to piss us off. But we do good and stay vulnerable to compassion (to ‘God’), to the desire of the Kingdom of Heaven to bring hope to the earth and those who live here.
And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.
In a way we could say Jesus is asking us to solve matters before they get out of control. It’s very important for us to realize that we hold a certain amount of power to make change around us. That doesn’t mean we will always be able to affect a positive outcome, but it’s a suggestion that we try first. So rather than rush to make death threats, or accusations against others, posting mean tweets, we seek a way to come to terms with each other, to find common ground if such a thing exists. At no point are we asked to surrender our values, only to seek ways to work things out.
If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.
There are so many ways this verse can be interpreted. The most literal would be that Roman soldiers could compel non-Roman citizens to carry their gear, but the rule was they could only compel them to walk one mile. So mile markers were set up all over the main thoroughfares, and the locals could drop that load as soon as they had crossed that mile marker.
Jesus, on the other hand suggested they add an extra mile to their journey.
One way to look at this is to realize what lies ahead. We’ve got one mile that we know we have to walk, but we prepare ourselves to walk that extra mile—to go further than what we think is required of us. This means that we realize that what’s being asked of us by the Kingdom of Heaven is going to require more effort than we would normally think to make (or even want to make). No matter what happens, we continue on, even among those who would try to prevent the Kingdom of Heaven from showing up.
Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
Again, I do not think Jesus is asking us to suspend all reason, but merely to keep ourselves open to compassion and the suffering of those around us. It’s easy to become jaded and to see others as an enemy coming after what we’ve worked so hard to gain. Yet until we consider their need, we may not understand their position. We are generous, with love, compassion, material goods, wherever there is need, we try to help.
Ultimately, I think Jesus is telling us, first and foremost, that there’s something out there that does see our suffering and does care about it (he calls it father/daddy). Whatever that is, it’s relying on us to work together and make that happen. It works through us, not in spite of us. The greatest thing we can do at this point is to try to see what Jesus saw. Whether we believe in God or not, there is a force for good in the universe (at least here on earth) and we can tap into it if we so desire. The fact that Jesus used ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘walk the extra mile’ means he also understood that this wasn’t going to be easy and would not happen without resistance. He also taught us, through his life, that resistance was going to come from all sides: the oligarchs, the fundamentalists, the zealots, and the ignorant (in some cases it’s all of the above). Still, we continue on.
I do not see anywhere in this manifesto where Jesus is asking us to sit back and do nothing. I think he’s asking us to step up in the face of struggle. To acknowledge that it’s gonna hurt. We’re going to suffer. But we have a goal—to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven. A place where the poor are taken care of, where the oppressed are given peace, where those who mourn are comforted, where those who hunger are fed.
Ultimately, the Kingdom of Heaven is far more powerful than anything on earth, but only so much as we are willing to tap into it. And it won’t happen overnight. It’ll take time. Jesus knew that he was hated for his views, and that he could very easily lose his life. Still, the Kingdom of Heaven is eternal even though we are not. So we continue to rally for that which we know is beautiful. We plant a tree that we may never sit under. We create a world that we may never live in. We do it. We express our anger, we struggle with our fears and frustrations, and we keep walking.
The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand—our hand.
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