Our long-time friend, Ken Butigan, has written an outstanding summary of some of the brilliant nonviolence work of Walter Wink.
Walter Wink’s explanation of the “Third Way” of Jesus. Illustrating “turn the other cheek”, “offer your coat as well”, and “go the second mile” with lively demonstrations (in 5 parts).
Part 1
Wow. [Laughter]
This morning I want to talk about, as she said, nonviolence for the violent. I chose this title because we all have violence within us. To recognize our inner violence is one of the hardest things we must do. If we are to become nonviolent.
I once tried to eradicate violence from my heart. When I took a long look at all the violence and rage within me I found I had a tremendous amount of work to do. If we can’t deal with our own personal violence, how can we expect to deal with the violence of nations?
Let’s turn then to what Jesus has to say about nonviolence. He says this, “you heard it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you, do not resist one who is an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. And if anyone sues you for your outer garment give your undergarment as well. And if one of the occupation troops forces you to carry his pack one mile, carry it for two.
Many otherwise developed Christians simply dismiss Jesus’ teachings about nonviolent resistance out of hand as impractical idealism. And with good reason.
Turn the other cheek has come to imply a doormat like quality that has made the Christian way seem cowardly and complicit in the face of injustice. Is this not evil? It seems to break the back of all opposition to evil and counsel submission. Going the second mile has become a platitude. Meaning nothing else than extend yourself. And encourages collaboration with the oppressor.
Jesus’ teaching, viewed this way is impractical masochistic, and even suicidal. An invitation to bullies and spouse batterers to wipe up the floor with their supine Christian victims. Jesus never displayed that kind of passivity. Whatever the source of the misunderstanding, such distortions are clearly neither in Jesus or his teaching. The normal or natural reaction to being slapped, sued, or forced to carry a soldier’s pack was irritation, outrage, or violence.
The structure of violence is quite simple. Do unto others as they have done unto you. [Murmured laughter.]
Consequently, we always mirror our opponent and become the very thing that we hate. Jesus offers a third way. One which marks a historic mutation in human development. The revolt against the principle of natural selection. With Jesus a way emerges by which evil can be opposed without being mirrored and engaged without capitulation. Jesus councils resistance but without violence.
The Greek word translated “resist” in Matthew 5 is “antistenai”. [Walter writes the word on a whiteboard and translates “anti” as “against” and “stenai” as “stand.”]
What the translators have overlooked is that antistenai is most often used in the Greek version of the Old Testament as a technical term for warfare. It describes the way opposing armies would march toward each other until their ranks collided in a cacophony of steel against steel. Disemboweling each other until one of the lines broke and fled. This was called “taking a stand.” This is not the tame little word being used. This is the real word: war.
Ephesians 6 uses precisely this imagery as well. Put on the whole armor of God so that you may be able to withstand, antistenai, on that evil day and having done everything to stand firm, stenai. In short, antistenai means more here than simply to resist the evil. It means to resist violently. To revolt, to rebel, to engage in an armed insurrection as was Barabbas, same word used.
So when Jesus says “do not antistenai one who is evil,” he is telling us not to resist evil with violence.
King James of England was profoundly disturbed during the Protestant Reformation that Presbyterians from Geneva were smuggling copies of the Geneva Bible into England. It’s all the Presbyterain’s fault. [laughter.] He condemned them. The marginal note says “seditious, dangerous, and traitorous for endorsing the right to overthrow a tyrant.” The King was not amused. Therefore he authorized a new translation. The authorized version King James Bible was written with part of its intention to prevent insurrection.
He authorized a new translation that would make clear that there were only two alternatives: flight and fight. And if Jesus says do not resist one that is evil it sounds like he’s saying don’t fight, flight. I hope that’s clear.
[Woman’s voice] It is.
[Walter] I worked on that all morning.
[Laughter.]
Thus, Jesus is made to authorized monarchical absolutism. Submission to the powers that be the king insists is the will of God. And most translators have meekly followed this path until this very day. Jesus is not telling us to submit to evil, but to refuse to oppose it on its own terms. He is urging us to transcend both passivity and violence by finding a third way. One that is assertive and yet, nonviolent. The three examples that follow confirm this reading.
Part 2
If anyone strikes you on the right cheek turn the other also. And I need to help us to come forward now. [Two men walk to the front of the room.] Hal you be here and Keith you be here and I’ll stand by. You can be the hitter, and you can be the hit-ee. [Laughter.]
Let’s have a right hook, no, no, no, that’s not right. [Laughter.] What’s wrong with that blow [inaudible.]
[Man’s voice] You’re hitting him on his left cheek. Jesus says “right cheek” very explicitly.
[Hal raises his left arm and holds it next to Keith’s face.]
What’s wrong with that? It’s his right cheek. Wrong arm. You can’t use the left arm for any public action. It was used for unclean acts. We were noticing a great big tent in England and I said what’s going on here? and somebody way in the back said “it’s for wiping your arse.”
Now how with your right hand can you hit his right cheek.
[Hal demonstrates hitting Keith’s right cheek with his right hand and ends up with the back of his hand against Keith’s cheek.]
That’s the only way possible to blow. The backhand, and the backhand is not for injuring people, it’s for humiliating people, degrading. Masters backhand their slaves, husbands wives, parents children, Romans Jews, it’s always one down isn’t it. So it’s inserting a person back in the social role he plays as an inferior. The whole point was to force someone who was out of line to get back in line.
Notice Jesus’ audience here. If anyone strikes you, the kind of people Jesus was talking to, slaves, these are people who are 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.”
Okay, get a little closer here. Backhand him. Alright, and Keith, now you turn the other cheek. Just a second now, what are you gonna do? [Laughter.]
[Hal] I have nothing to do now. I don’t know what to do.
[Walter] His nose is in the way isn’t it? And anyway, it’s like telling a joke twice. If it didn’t work the first time, it won’t work the second time either. The left cheek now offers a perfect target for a blow of the 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 this little slave beaten, but he can intimidate him no longer.
By turning the cheek then, the inferior party is saying “I’m not inferior to you. I’m a human being. I refuse to be humiliated any longer. I am your equal. I’m a child of God. I won’t take it anymore.”
Such defiance is no way to avoid trouble. Meek acquiescence is what the master wants. Such cheeky behavior. [Lots of laughter.] Such cheeky behavior could result in a flogging or worse, even killing, 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, Jesus was already depicted as 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’s been stripped of his power to dehumanize the other. As Gandhi taught, the first principle of non-violent action is that of non-compliance with everything humility.
How different this is from the usual view that this passage teaches us to turn the other cheek so our batterer can simple clobber us again. How often that interpretation has been fed to battered wives and children, and it was never what Jesus intended in the least. To such victims he advises “stand up for yourselves! Take control of your responses! Don’t answer the oppressor in kind, but find a new third way that is neither cowardly submission, nor violent reprisal.
Jesus’ second example of assertive nonviolence is set in a court of law. A creditor has taken a poor man to court over an unpaid loan. Only the poorest of the poor were subjected to such treatment. Deuteronomy 24 provided that a creditor could take as collateral for a loan a poor man’s long outer robe but it had to be returned each evening so that that poor person would have something in which to sleep.
Jesus is not advising people to add to their disadvantage by renouncing justice all together as so many commentators have suggested. He is telling impoverished debtors who have nothing left but the clothes on their backs to use the system against itself. Indebtedness was a plague in first century Palestine. Jesus’ parables are full of debtors struggling to salvage their lives. Heavy debt was not, however, a natural calamity that had overtaken the incompetent. It was the direct consequence of Roman Imperial policy.
Caesars taxed the wealthy heavily to find their wars and bankrolls the bureaucracy. The rich naturally sought non-liquid investments to hide their wealth. Land was best, but it was ancestrally owned, passed down over generations. And no peasant would voluntarily relinquish it. However, exorbitant interest of twenty five to two hundred and fifty percent could be used to drive land-owners even deeper into debt. And debt, coupled with the high taxation required to pay Roman Tribute created the economic privilege to pry Galilean peasants loose from their land.
This sounds kind of familiar. [Laughter.] By the time of Jesus we see this process already far advanced. Large estates, owned by absentee landlords, managed by stewards, and worked by tenant farmers, day laborers, and slaves. Many of whom had formerly been landowners. It’s no accident that the very first action of Jewish revolutionaries in 66 AD when the Roman War began was to burn the temple treasury where the record of debts was kept. Their own temple.
Part 3
It is into this situation that Jesus speaks. As before, his hearers are the poor. If anyone would sue you. They share a rankling hatred for a system that subjects them to humiliation by stripping them of their lands, their goods, and finally even their outer garments. Why then does Jesus counsel them to give up their undergarments as well? This would mean stripping off all their clothing and marching out of court stark naked. They didn’t have jockey underwear folks. There was two items of clothing: the outer and the inner. But nakedness was taboo in Judaism and shame fell less on the naked party rather than on the person viewing or causing the nakedness.
Remember the story of Noah. Noah was naked and drunk and the son looked upon his father’s nakedness and the son was cursed. The son, not the father. By stripping, the debtor has then brought shame on the creditor. There stands the creditor covered in shame. The poor debtor’s outer garment in one hand, the inner garment in the other. The tables have suddenly been turned on the creditor.
The debtor had no hope of winning the case. The law was entirely in the creditor’s favor. But the poor man has transcended this attempt to humiliate. He has risen above shame. At the same time he has registered a stunning protest against the system that has created his debt. He has said in effect, “you want my robe? Here! Take everything! Now you’ve got all that I have except my body. Is that what you’ll take next?” Imagine the debtor leaving court naked. His friends and neighbors aghast, inquire “what happened?” He explains. They join his growing procession which now resembles a victory parade.
This is guerilla theater folks. The entire system by which debtors are oppressed has been publically unmasked. The creditor is revealed to be not a legitimate moneylender but a party to the reduction of an entire social class to landlessness and destitution. This unmasking is not simply punitive however. Since it offers the creditor a chance to see perhaps what his practices cause and to repent.
The powers that be literally stand on their dignity. Nothing deflates them more effectively than death lampooning. By refusing to be awed by their power, the powerless are emboldened to seek the initiative. Even when structural change is not immediately possible. This message, far from counseling an unattainable otherworldly perfection is a practical strategic measure for empowering the oppressed.
It’s being lived out all over the world today. By previously powerless people ready to take their history into their own hands even if it costs them their lives. – Tom Fox.
Shortly before the fall of political apartheid in South Africa police descended on a squatters camp that they had long wanted to demolish. They gave a few women there, five minutes to gather their possessions. And then the bulldozers would level the shacks. The women, apparently sensing the residual puritanical streak in rural africanus stripped naked before the bulldozers. The police turned and fled. [Laughter.] Last I heard that camp still stands. [Laughter continues.] Bu the difference is, they’re now getting electricity and water. [Ohh.]
Could I have the help of two more volunteers? Anne and Brian.
[Anne] Say I pay you back in three months but nothing ever happens and now I’m getting a little tired of this and I need my money. And really, when are you gonna pay?
[Brian] Well, what she said is true, but I’ve been sick and my wife, she just had another baby, and the flocks just run amok and I’m working as hard as I can. I just can’t give another ounce.
[Walter] Have you paid her anything at all?
[Brian] I have nothing to pay her.
[Walter says something inaudible] this morning?
[Brian removes his coat]: I mean, I can give her this, but it gets cold at night. And if I give this I won’t have much but…
[Walter] But the law requires this, you have to give her every morning and she gives it back every night.
[Anne] So you just come to my house you know, at 9pm and I’ll give it back. And then you’ll bring it back to me at 9am the next morning.
[Brian hands his coat to Anne]
[Everyone speaks at once. Brian protests, Anne claims that it’s fair, Walter says it’s a loan.]
[Brian] If you’re gonna take the jacket you might as well take this too. [Brian removes his button-up shirt.]
[Walter] No, no, no. That’s not required.
[Brian] Well I know it’s not required but you might as well take this with you and I’ll walk. I won’t walk, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll um.
[Brian removes his shoe and hands that to Anne as well]
[Laughter]
[Everyone talks at once.]
[Brian] In fact here. [Gives her his watch] I won’t even know what time to come.
[Brian removes both his belt and his pants.] I won’t need these either.
[Walter holds up his hands] Cut!
[Anne quickly gives Brian back his clothes.]
[Applause and laughter]
[Video skips]
[Walter] You can imagine the people in the crowd responding the way you’ve been responding. This is funny. Jesus’ teaching on nonviolence provides a hint of how to take on the entire system by unmasking it’s essential cruelty and burlesquing gets pretentious to justice. Those who listen will no longer be treated as sponges to be squeezed dry by the rich. They can accept the laws as they stand, push them to absurdity, and reveal them for what they are. They can strip naked, walk out before their fellows and leave the creditors and the whole economic edifice that they represent, stark naked.
Part 4
Jesus’s third example: If any one of the occupations troops forces you to carry his bag for one mile, carry it two. This example is drawn from the relatively enlightened practice of limiting to a single mile the amount of forced or oppressed labor that Roman soldiers could levy on subject people. The Angaria. The angaria said that soldiers had the right to force civilians to carry their pack, but they had to re-assume it after one mile.
Such compulsory service was a constant feature in Palestine from Persian to late Roman times. Whoever was found on the street could be coerced into service as was Simon of Cyrene who was forced to carry Jesus’s cross. That was the angaria. Armies had to be moved with dispatch. Ranking [unintelligible] bought slaves or donkeys to carry their packs of sixty to eighty-five pounds, not including weapons. The majority of the rank and file however had to depend on impressed civilians. Entire villages sometimes fled in order to avoid being forced to carry soldier’s baggage.
What we’ve overlooked in this passage is the fact that carrying the pack a second mile is an infraction of military code. With few exceptions, minor infractions were left to the disciplinary control of the centurion, head of 100 men. He might fine the offending soldier, or flog him, or put him on a ration of barley instead of wheat, or make him camp outside the fortifications, or force him to stand all day before the general’s tent holding a cloud of dirt in his hands. Or if the offender was a buddy, issue a mild reprimand. But the point is that, that the soldier does not know what will happen.
It’s in this context of Roman military occupation that Jesus speaks. He does not counsel revolt. One does not befriend the soldier, draw him aside, and drive a knife into his ribs. Jesus was surely aware of the futility of armed insurrection against Roman Imperial might. He certainly did nothing to encourage those whose hatred of Rome would soon explode into violence.
But why carry the soldier’s pack a second mile? Does this not go to the opposite extreme by aiding and abetting the enemy? Not at all. The question here, as in the two previous instances is how the oppressed can recover the initiative and assert their human dignity in a situation that cannot for the time being be changed. The rules are Caesar’s, but how one responds to the rules is God’s. And Caesar has no power over that.
Imagine then, the soldier’s surprise when at the next mile marker, he reluctantly reaches to assume his pack and the civilian says, “Oh no. Let me carry it another mile.” Why would he want to do that? What’s he up to? Normally soldiers have to coerce people to carry their packs, but this dude does so cheerfully and will not stop. This is a provocation, is he insulting the Legionare’s strength? Being kind? Trying to get him disciplined for seeming to violate the rules of impressment? Will the civilian file a complaint? Create trouble?
Let’s roleplay this one.
[Woman] Peasant!
[Walter] Just a second, let me get my other partner here. Yes. This is the centurion, okay. [To the woman] You’re the soldier, and I’m the peasant okay? Roll cameras.
[Soldier] Peasant!
[Walter] Yes?
[Soldier] Carry my bag! One mile!
[Walter] No, I’ve got to get back to the field to…
[Soldier interrupting] No! You are commanded to do it right now.
[Walter] Aww. Oh God.
[Laughter]
[Walter] Woah, this is heavy, what in the world?
[Walter and Soldier talk over each other. Uninteligible.]
[Soldier] Okay, the mile is up.
[Walter] The mile? Oh no, that’s too short.
[Laughter]
[Walter] Have you heard about Jesus?
[Soldier] No Sir.
[Walter] [Unintelligible] …And love for your enemy. [Unintelligible]
[Soldier] No!
[Walter] [Unintelligible] It would be interesting to have a world where people loved their enemies. And forgave them and learned to love them don’t you think?
[Soldier] No.
[Laughter]
[Walter] [Unintelligible] Uh, is this the first mile marker?
[Soldier] Yes Sir. I’ll have my bag back.
[Walter] Oh no. I’ll take it.
[Soldier] No I need my bag back!
[Walter] No, no, no.
[Soldier] I need my bag back!
[Laughter]
[Soldier] I need my bag back!
[Walter] Nooooo.
[Soldier] I need my bag back.
[Walter] Nooooo.
[Soldier] Give that bag back to me! Sir! My bag!
[Walter] Oh excuse me sir. [To second woman] Are you the centurion?
[Centurion] I am. Certainly.
[Walter] This is my second mile, Boss.
[Laughter]
[Centurion to Soldier] You let this peasant carry you pack for two miles!?
[Walter] Yeah. Here.
[Soldier] It was a mistake.
[Centurion] A mistake! You know what the rules are here. We are not here to make these peasants…
[Walter, interrupting] Well you know, it’s all my fault really. I started talking to him about Jesus and I got carried away, yeah.
[Laughter]
[Centurion] You go back to the fields. I don’t want to hear about Jesus.
[Laughter]
[Centurion] Go back to your grapes or whatever.
[Laughter]
[Centurion to Soldier] You’re gonna have to come around oh seven o’clock and we’ll discuss what your punishment’s going to be.
[Video cuts]
[Walter] From a situation of servile impressment, the oppressed have once more seized the initiative. They’ve taken back the power of choice. They have thrown the soldier off balance by depriving him of the predictability of his victim’s response. He has never dealt with such a problem before. Now he must make a decision for which nothing in his previous experience has prepared him.
If he has enjoyed feeling superior to the vanquished, he will not enjoy it today. Imagine a Roman infantry man pleading with a Jew to give him back his bag.
[Laughter]
“Oh give me back my pack!” The humor of this scene must have escaped us, but it can scarcely have been lost on Jesus’s hearers, who must have been delighted at the prospect of discomforting their oppressors. Jesus does not encourage Jews to walk the second mile in order to build up merit in heaven or to be pious, or to kill the soldier with kindness. Rather he is helping an oppressed people to find a way to protest and neutralize and onerous practice despised throughout the empire.
He is not giving a non political message of spiritual world transcendence. No, he is formulating a worldly spirituality in which the people at the bottom of society who are under the thumb of an Imperial power can learn to recover their humanity.
[Music]
[Walter] I hear cells.
[Laughter]
[Woman’s voice] I’m really sorry.
[Walter] One could easily use Jesus’s advice vindictively. That is why we must not separate it from the command to love enemies that is integrally connected with it in Matthew and Luke. But love it not averse to taking the law and using its oppressive momentum to throw the soldier into a region of uncertainty and anxiety that he has never before known.
Part 5
These three examples then amplify what Jesus means in his thesis statement. Don’t react violently against the one who is evil. Instead of two options ingrained in us by millions of years of threats from the environment and other people, flight or fight, Jesus offers a third way. This new way marks a historic mutation in human development. The revolt against the principle of natural selection. With Jesus a way emerges by which evil can be opposed without being mirrored.
[Video cuts]
It’s too bad that Jesus did not provide twenty or thirty further role plays, [Laughter], since we do not tend naturally to this response. But you know Gene Sharp who is one of the great writers in the area of non-violence has 198 non-violent types of action. Under which there are many, many, many listings. To those whose life-long passion has been to cringe before their masters, Jesus offers a way to liberate themselves from [sounds like serval] actions and a [serval?] mentality. And he asserts that they can do this before there is a revolution.
There’s no need to wait until Rome is defeated, slaves are free, peasants have land. They can begin to behave with dignity and recover humanity now. Even under the unchanged conditions of the old order. Jesus’ sense of divine immediacy has social implications. The reign of God is already breaking into the world. And it comes not as an imposition from on high but as the leaven slowly causing the dough to rise as in Jesus’ parable of the leaven.
Jesus’ teaching on non-violence is thus integral to his proclamation of the dawning of the reign of God. Here indeed was a way to resist the powers that be without being made over into their likeness. Jesus did not endorse armed revolution. It is not hard to see why. In the conditions of first century Palestine, violent revolution against the Romans proved catastrophic. But it did lay the foundations for a social revolution. And a social resolution becomes political when it reaches a threshold, a critical threshold, of acceptance.
This in fact did happen to the Roman Empire as the Christian church overcame it from below, and was in turn overcome by the Roman Empire from above, in the form of Constantine the first “Christian” emperor. Nor were peasants and slaves in a position to transform the economic system by frontal assault. But they could begin to act from an already recovered dignity and freedom. They could create within the shell of the old society, the foundations of God’s domination-free order. They could begin living as if the reign of God was already arriving.
This is not pie in the sky idealism. It was literally enacted in Poland when in 1980 the labor union solidarity was organized in defiance of the communist regime. After a year and a half, solidarity was declared illegal and martial law was imposed. Solidarity had appeared to have disappeared all together. But in fact, it had gone underground. With its own universities and secondary schools being held in private homes. Poetry readings, concerts, in fact all the elements of a dynamic society.
When the communist brewers foolishly called a snap election to endorse their rule, solidarity suddenly reappeared and won all 98 contested seats in Parliament. They had not been destroyed. Rather they had built, by nonviolent means, a democratic shell within the shell of the old decrepit rule.
To an oppressed people, Jesus is saying, “do not continue to acquiesce in your oppression by the powers. But do not react violently to them either. Rather find that third way. A way that is neither submission nor assault. Neither flight nor fight. A way that can secure your human dignity and begin to change the power equation even now, before the revolution.
Turn your cheek. Thus indicating to the one who backhands you that his attempts to shame you into servility have failed. Strip naked and parade out of court. Thus taking the momentum of the law and the whole debt economy and flipping them Aikido-like in the burlesque of legality. Walk a second mile. Surprising the occupation troops by placing them in jeopardy with their superiors.
In short, take the law and push it to the point of absurdity. These of course are not rules to be followed legalistically. But examples to spark an infinite variety of creative responses in new and changing circumstances. They break the cycle of humiliation with humor and even ridicule. Exposing the injustice of the system. They recover for the poor a modicum of initiative that can force the oppressors to see them in a new light.
Jesus is not advocating non-violence merely as a technique for outwitting the enemy. But as a just means of opposing the enemy in a way that holds open the possibility of the enemy’s becoming just also. If possible, we want both sides to win. This is necessary since we will usually have to live with our opponents after the conflict is over. As in South Africa. We are summoned to pray for our enemy’s transformation and respond to ill treatment with love
The logic of Jesus’ examples in Matthew goes beyond both inaction and overreaction to a new response, fired in the crucible of love, that promises to liberate the oppressed from evil, even as it frees the oppressor from sin. Do not react violently to evil. Do not counter evil in kind. Do not let evil dictate the terms of your opposition. Do not let violence lead you to mirror your opponent. Don’t become the very thing you hate.
This forms the revolutionary principle that Jesus articulates as the basis for nonviolently engaging the powers. Jesus abhors both passivity and violence. He articulates out of the history of his own people’s struggles, a way by which the oppressor can be resisted without being emulated. And the enemy neutralized without being destroyed. Those who live by Jesus’ words point us to a new way of confronting evil. Whose potential for personal and social transformation we are only beginning to grasp today.
[The screen fades to black as the speech ends.]
For more information and resources:
Beyond Just War and Pacifism: Jesus’ Nonviolent Way
Nonviolence for the Violent, transcript of a talk given in Louisville, Kentucky, June 13, 2001 (Archived)
Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence
Walter Wink’s website (Archived)
Peace Coalition (Web address appears at the end of the final video)