Jesus' Third Way (Chapter 5, Wink)
In the first four chapters of Walter Wink’s “The Powers That Be,” we’ve established that there are unseen forces that govern the world, forces the Bible refers to as “principalities and powers,” that these forces have morphed together over time into a complex system of domination held together by the Myth of Redemptive Violence, and that Jesus fought against this system, rejected its methods, and proposed a radical new way that breaks the spiral of violence – a way that doesn’t demand blood. In chapter five, we are introduced to this “third” way.
Before explaining a “third” way, however, I guess we need to identify the other two: (1) the way of violence (the myth of redemptive violence), and (2) nonresistance (pacifism, as commonly understood). The latter, Wink argues, is often presented as what Jesus teaches, a way Wink describes as “impractical, masochistic, and even suicidal.” In this approach, turning the other cheek encourages the doormat metaphor, and going the extra mile has been reduced to going above and beyond the call of duty.
Instead, Jesus’ “third way” is much more radical, and therefore much more interesting.
Wink writes, “Jesus counsels resistance, but without violence… Jesus is not telling us to submit to evil, but to refuse to oppose it on its own terms. We are not to let the opponent dictate the methods of our opposition. He is urging us to transcend both passivity and violence by finding a third way, one that is at once assertive and yet nonviolent.” [Note: if anyone wants Wink’s analysis of the Greek word translated resist in Matthew 5: 39, I’ll be happy to pass it along.]
THE THREE ILLUSTRATIONS FROM JESUS:
#1: TURN THE OTHER CHEEK: Jesus said, “If someone strikes you on the right cheek…” Go ahead and get a volunteer in your office and try this one out. Try to punch him/her on the right cheek with your right hand. Not easy, huh? Not easy because Jesus has a point to make with the right/left emphasis here. Wink mentions that at Qumran (a religious community in the days of Jesus), left-handed gestures were forbidden (punished by exclusion and penance). Thus, Jesus isn’t referring to a fistfight among equals: instead, the strike to the right cheek was a degrading backhand to an inferior (e.g. master to slave, husband to wife, parent to child, Roman to Jew). The point was to keep someone in her/his place. Jesus’ advice, then, is not to “take it” as popularly perceived. Instead, Jesus counsels defiance (and to be sure, trouble to follow) by offering the left cheek as a punching bag. Jesus, in effect, proposes a social revolution.
#2: STRIP NAKED: The second example from Jesus involves legal matters. As a result of Roman imperial policy, debt was a HUGE problem in 1st century Palestine. Heavy taxation led the rich to seek ways to hide their wealth, with the procurement of land being a popular choice. Herod Antipas, in particular, regularly pried the Galilean peasants to whom Jesus spoke from their land by his predatory tactics (read: his own high taxation). [Note: Wink mentions that it was no accident that the first act of Jewish revolutionaries in the year 66 was to burn the temple treasury where the debt records were kept!] This debt problem often left the poor Jewish families in danger of being sued down to their outer robes (see Deuteronomy 24: 10-13). So what does Jesus advise? Give them your outer robe, then give them your underwear, and march out of court naked! Imagine the reaction from Jesus’ audience at this teaching! But also imagine the effect of actually doing this: as Wink writes, “The entire system by which debtors are oppressed has been publicly unmasked…” by “deft lampooning.”
#3: GO THE SECOND MILE: The Roman soldiers could force anyone on the street into service (e.g. Simon of Cyrene and the cross of Jesus), but there were restrictions. They could not force anyone to carry their packs for over one mile. Jesus advises going for two miles. Why? This wasn’t a tactic to express your love and lifelong desire to be a doormat. Instead, the very act was in fact an infraction of military code (with the disciplinary action at the decision of the centurion). Can you imagine the Roman soldier’s reaction when the impressed laborer keeps walking and whistling along? Can you imagine the scene where a Roman soldier is begging the peasant to give his pack back to him? The listeners of Jesus could imagine this, and must have had a rollicking laugh at the very idea. Jesus was not encouraging an act of piety, but an act of revolution where a despicable practice was exposed and neutralized, and people at the bottom of society recovered their very humanity.
A couple of side points need to be made:
(a) These tactics from Jesus could be used vindictively, but are instead to be tempered by a love for the enemy that Jesus will shortly teach as well. The intent is to expose the evil, and in so doing, also redeem the oppressor.
(b) These tactics from Jesus could rarely be repeated. It wouldn’t take long to outlaw nakedness in court or pass a new law to punish those who “carry” packs over one mile. Followers will have to be creative.
But the great news from Jesus in this “third” way is that a social revolution is underfoot. Slow, to be sure, like leaven working through dough or a mustard seed beginning to sprout, but the sign of life is there: where those oppressed by the “powers that be” have begun their liberation.
The world has long been familiar with two ways: fight or flight. Jesus offers a third, however. And those who have “ears to hear” (like Gandhi and Martin Luther King) stand as beacons to a world that continues to need social transformation today.
(NEXT POST: Chapter Six, “Practical Nonviolence”)