Monday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
Whenever my grandmother would get exacerbated with us she would say in her thick Scots brogue, “I’ll give ye the back-o-me-hand.” Although she never did, as a kid I never appreciated how dire a statement that was.
In today’s reading from II Corinthians, St. Paul suggests that “the back-o-me-hand” was a common experience of the apostles, who endured “afflictions, hardships, constraints, beatings, imprisonments…”
Paul’s letter is evidence that he and the Apostles practiced what Jesus preached in today’s Gospel about retaliation. Their mercy for others let them set aside the old law of “an eye for an eye” replacing it with the law of Christ, “turning the other cheek,” and “going the extra mile.”
“Eye for eye and tooth for tooth” was a fundamental principle of Old Testament civil law. It taught that the punishment must fit the crime. This principle was the basis of ancient laws including the Code of Hammurabi, which was written over 100 years before the Mosaic law, and it is the basis of legal systems today.
It is the same idea found in the expressions “tit for tat” or “quid pro quo.” But to not retaliate takes tremendous faith, courage, and fortitude— counter-cultural to the extreme.
When Jesus refers to being slapped on the right cheek, he is not only referring to being physically assaulted. To be slapped on the right cheek, one would need to use the back of one’s right hand (as most people are right handed), which was universally considered a deep insult.
In retrospect, “Mum” (as we all called her) must have really had it with her grandchildren!
According to rabbinical law, being slapped with the back of the hand was twice more offensive than being slapped with an open hand. Dehumanizing, it was being treated as a nothing, a nobody. At the time that both Matthew & Paul wrote, following Christ often led to degradation and insult of the worst kind. A Christian might have been slapped and shamed by neighbors, family, friends.
For over 200,000 years, since we first left Africa, retribution and retaliation have been “the way to go” for humankind. How has that worked out for us? What does history show? Does Jesus offer both a radical and a better way?
—Timothy J. Cronin