The Powers That Be

I’m currently reading Walter Wink’s The Powers That Be. This book is absolutely blowing my mind. It is so intriguing how he is taking the text and reading it with a social/political lens as well as the spiritual. You’ll probably see me posting a whole lot of stuff of his over the next month. So just know that’s where it’s coming from. Yesterday I read his interpretation of “Turn The Other Cheek”. And I think its one of the best readings of that text that I’ve ever come across. So much so that I’m going to type out the 2 pages and then have you guys tell me what you think.

Turn The Other Cheek

“If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Matt. 5:39b). You are probably imagining a blow with the right fist. But such a blow would fall on the left cheek. To hit the right cheek with a fist would require the left hand. But the left hand could be used only for unclean tasks; at Qumran, a Jewish religious community of Jesus’ day, to gesture with the left hand meant exclusion from the meeting and penance for ten days. To grasp this you must physically try it: how woul dyou hit the other’s right cheek with your right hand? If you have tried it, you will know: the only feasible blow is a backhand.

The backhand was not a blow to injure, but to insult, humiliate, degrade. It was not administered to an equal, but to an inferior. Masters backhanded slaves; husbands, wives; parentes, children; Romans, Jews. The whole point of the blow was to force someone who was out of line back into place.

Notice Jesus’ audience: “If anyone strikes you.” These are people used to being thus degraded. He is saying to them, “Refuse to accept this kind of treatment anymore. If they backhand you, turn the other cheek.” By turning the other cheek, the servant makes it impossible for the master to use the backhand again: his nose is in the way. And anyway, it’s like telling a joke twice; if it didn’t work the first time, it simply won’t work. The left cheek now offers a perfect target for a blow with the right fist.; but only equals fought with fists, as we know from Jewish sources, and the last thing the master wishes to do is to establish this underling’s equality. This act of defiance renders the master incapable of asserting his dominance in this relationship. He can have the slave beaten, but he can no longer cow him.

By turning the other cheek, then, the “inferior” is saying, “I’m a human being, just like you. I refuse to be humilated any longer. I am your equal. I am a child of God. I won’t take it anymore.”

Such defiance is no way to avoid trouble. Meek acquiscence is what the master wants. Such “cheeky” behavior may call down a flogging, or worse. But the point has been made. The Powers That Be have lost their power to make people submit. And when large numbers begin behaving thus (and Jesus was addressing a crowd), you have a social revolution on your hands.

In that world of honor and shaming, the “superior” has been rendered impotent to instill shame in a subordinate. He has been stripped of his power to dehumanize the other. As Gandhi taught, “The first principle of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.”

How different this is from the usual view that this passage teaches us to turn the other cheek so our batterer can simply clobber us again! How often that misinterpretation has been fed to battered wives and children. And it was never what Jessu intended in the least. To such victims he advises, “Stand up for yourselves, defy your masters, assert your humanity; but don’t reward the oppressor in kind. Find a new, third way that is neither cowardly submission nor violent reprisal.”

[tags]Walter Wink, The Powers That Be[/tags]