Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount presents a call to generosity of spirit, willingness to go the extra mile, turning the other cheek and showing love over revenge. It is an ideal for radical love, pure love modelled after Christ. The saints live that model. Their lives demonstrate the hidden potential in each of us to be givers more than receivers, up-builders rather than critics, contributors to love in our world.
Return Evil with Good
We are entering deep waters here and yes; this is a very difficult part of the Sermon on the Mount to obey. Jesus commands us to practice radical love over revenge, and that’s hard for us because when we are offended, most of us want revenge. We have a whole genre of movies organized around the themes of justice and revenge. And in these movies, it is usually the hero who is hunting down the bad guys to take revenge on his enemies.
Jesus wants his disciples not to repay evil with evil, but to respond to evil with goodness. The worst instinct in human nature is to respond with malice to goodness, as instanced by the rejection and crucifixion of the one who “went about doing good; for God was with him” (Acts 10:38). The best instinct of human nature is to overcome evil with good. This could be termed the divine impulse, God’s own impulse. It was the main characteristic of Jesus. He overcame the evil that was done to him with good. In the very moment when he was wrongly rejected, he revealed his love most fully. He lived and died to overcome evil with good.
God’s Strength Needed
It is the hardest challenge to remain good in the face of evil, to remain loving in the face of hostility, to be faithful even if one is betrayed and to be peacemakers in a hostile world. We simply could not do it by our own strength alone. We need God’s strength, God’s resources, God’s Spirit – but this strength and grace is promised to us. St Paul calls on us “not to neglect the grace of God you have received.” God is always gracing us and if we rely on his grace, we can keep working towards that ideal of overcoming evil with good.
And then finally: Trust God with the results. Of course, our best example here is Jesus. “When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23).
You can trust God with the results because God is good, God is just, and he will see that justice is done. Ultimate justice belongs to God. As Christians, we are called to radical love over revenge … every single time.
Great Reflection. I especially like your opposites comments – repay good with evil as the worst, and repay evil with good and the greatest good. Of course evil with evil is simply retaliation. One thing that has always bothered me about Our Lord’s example, as you quoted, is how it might apply to an evildoer who attacks me or a loved one, is that we also have a self-defense instinct that is only part of our Human Nature, because God put it there. Hence, if someone threatens my granddaughter, I not only have a right but as a steward of her adolescent age, I believe I have an obligation to protect her. I understand that when the threat is neutralized, if I continue to be aggressive, I am now taking revenge and ‘revenge belongs to the Lord.’ I teach in my Bible class that the self-defense is a privilege we enjoy by law because it of a Judeo-Christian origen. Thoughts.