Give him your left cheek, after all, how else will you throw a right cross?

“But I tell you not to resist an evildoer. On the contrary, whoever slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other to him as well.”
~Matthew 5:39, the Bible [ISV]


Turn the other cheek. That’s simple enough, if someone offends you or does something against you, don’t get mad. Instead offer them your other cheek or in other words. Just let it go. Now, I don’t see anything wrong with this. If someone says an unkind word, don’t sweat it, brush it off and move on. Chances are they are just jealous over you or mad at themselves and have to take it out on someone else. ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’, as they’d say. How about the big stuff? What do you do when someone hurts you deeply, either physically, or mentally? If you were to follow Jesus’ example then you would do nothing. In fact, you would offer up yourself again. A great figure in American history would tend to agree with this holy man. Abraham Lincoln, in a Washington D.C. address said, “I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.”

Strict justice…Justice without the weight of consequence and circumstance. Upon first glance this may seem like the perfect answer. No matter who you are, no matter what happened, if you did ‘A’ then ‘B’ is going to be your punishment. Further inspection says that this black and white approach would be faulty. Take our court system; if you kill a man, then you are going to jail. Ah, wait, unless it was in self-defense. If you kill someone because the alternative is he would kill you, you are justified in your actions. Let’s take this a step further.

Mary is walking home from work one day, which is about 5 blocks away from her apartment. As she walks, she notices a man behind her, seemingly keeping pace with her, neither getting closer nor trailing farther behind. 2 blocks into her journey he makes his move. As they pass a dark alley, he grabs Mary, throws her onto an old mattress in the alley and begins to rip off her clothes. She pleas with him to stop, but it looks like she is going to be one more statistic for rape. Only Mary has a gun, a concealed weapon that she keeps in her purse that is lying beside her. Using all her strength, she pushes the man, knocking him back momentarily. She scrambles for her gun, he gets up and runs toward her just as. Bam. The man drops to the ground, blood oozing from his chest; he has been hit square in the heart. Its over, she killed him in self-defense. No charges. His family has a funeral. But what if she hadn’t had the gun?

If she hadn’t had the gun she would be traumatized and her assailant would be put on trial where he would be either let free to rape again, (yes, this is a proven trait that rapists are almost always serial), or he would get up to 10 years in jail. Mary’s life may never be the same. Now this is turning the other cheek. Not only has he ruined her life, but he may be walking around on the streets free to do this again. In this case it is important to follow Confucius’ advice and “recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness.” Death may be hard on a rapist, but injustice is being committed when he is out of jail in 10 years or more likely 7 for “good” behavior.

I realize the aforementioned example is slightly extreme, but this is what we deal with. People who say ‘turn the other cheek’ cannot be thinking clearly. In various cases, the worst thing imaginable would be to do that. There are circumstances when action needs to be taken against the individuals, be they shoplifters, rapists, murderers or just bullies. To conclude this entry, I would like to quote from one of my personal favorite movies of all time. Called The Order, it stars the late Heath Ledger as Alex, a man who though a series of events becomes the absolver of sins, a way into heaven without going through the church. At the end of the movie, Alex is all alone, having just received these absolving powers, He utters these final lines.

“And now it is I. I have been blessed and cursed... for now I possess the keys to the kingdom of heaven. I will forgive those who deserve freedom. I will damn those who have damned themselves.”

S.T.