How to Turn the Other Cheek and Still Survive in Today's World

(Thomas Nelson Publishers 1997)

From pages xiii to xviii...

Marching -- Gently -- As To War?

Obviously we Christian people today do not admire (and we refuse to live by) the model of the "gentle Jesus, meek and mild." That's clear. And what metaphor have we chosen instead? You can find the answer to that question by looking on the shelves of any religious bookstore. We have not chosen the Shepherd or even the Parent; overwhelmingly, our chosen model for both men and women is the Warrior. Warriors are not meek and mild.Warriors are brave,loyal, honest, trustworthy, and strong. They stand up for their principles; they defend their country and their home and their loved ones. They stand firm for freedom and truth. You can put your hand in a Warrior's hand and go confidently forward, knowing that you are safe -- because whatever may happen, the Warrior will be able to deal with it.

But look carefully at that word, please! Warrior. What does it mean, to you?

In his book, Tender Warrior, Stu Weber writes that "There is a difference between a warrior and a brute" (1993, 41). No doubt there is; but our culture perceives that difference as primarily a difference of skill. When we speakers of English look at the word warrior, we see war, plus one of the English endings for doer. Our language tells us that a preacher is one who preaches, an actor is one who acts -- and a warrior is one who wars. When we go to any movie with "Warrior" prominently featured in its title, we expect to see a hero who hits and overpowers and maims and, if necessary, kills. That's what Warrior means. We do not expect to see that hero turning the other cheek and returning good for evil. When we say or hear the word, when we read or write it, when we think it, this is how we understand it. Putting spiritual in front of warrior (or warfare) doesn't make it mean something else; our minds don't work that way, where language is concerned. ... And who ever heard of a gentle war? Who ever heard of a war in which the warriors loved their enemies and did their best to be good to them? Who ever sang a hymn about Christian soldiers marching gently and meekly and tenderly off to war?

We live in a world where, despite the fact that the Bible commands us more than twenty times to do things gently, gentleness is despised. ... Every part of our society appears to support these three propositions:

1. Winning is everything.
2. Losing is a disgrace.
3. And we, we Warriors, are obligated to get out there and fight.

This is the heart of our difficulty, and this is where the misery begins -- as we devote ourselves to the ethic of the Warrior and strive to behave like one, while at the same time believing that we are commanded to behave totally unlike a Warrior. If we are honest, we have to admit that our model and metaphor for turning the other cheek is the Coward.

We don't like to say that, but it is the truth. In our minds, we see it like this: The Warrior strikes the cringing Coward across the face, presumably for excellent reasons; the Coward then offers the other cheek in a desperate effort to placate and escape. Our culture -- even the parts looked upon as spiritual -- keeps insisting that we must be the Warrior. The Bible seemingly orders us to be the Coward. Desperately, we keep trying to find some way to meet both demands at the same time.

This way lies a kind of religious schizophrenia, a sort of gridlock of the spirit and mind. We cannot be both Warrior and Coward at the same time. ... When we human beings find ourselves in a situation like this, facing the unfaceable, we tend to choose one course of action and stick to it doggedly, no matter how badly things go. We are like a person digging a well and finding no water, who goes on endlessly making the same dry hole deeper and deeper instead of digging somewhere else.

We are making two basic errors here over and over again, errors not of faith but of language, that condemn us to this gridlock:

1. We have misunderstood the instruction to turn the other cheek, and we keep trying to make that misunderstanding fit, somehow, into our spiritual lives.
2. We have chosen the word warrior to name our model and metaphor for the spiritual life, in spite of the fact that the meaning we understand that word to have is totally in conflict with our understanding of the command to turn the other cheek.

It's not surprising that this doesn't work. ...

Our reaction....has been, "It can't be true that I have to turn the other cheek when someone strikes me; that's ridiculous. But because the words were spoken by Jesus, I have to pretend that I believe those words and will obey them."

This strategy is familiar to all of us because we learned it as small children. We've had lots of practice at it, and we have an accurate name for it: We call it "paying lip service." Remember? Your parents had told you solemnly, over and over, that you must not lie. But when your neighbor came visiting with a new baby and asked you, "Isn't she beautiful?" your mother and father lied and said yes, right in front of you! And when you said -- truthfully -- "She's not beautiful, she's UGly!" you were punished for your honesty. From incidents like this, you learned that you were expected to pretend that lying is forbidden and to pretend that you would always obey that rule, but that in the real world things are handled differently. And you did your best, given those difficult circumstances.

We have been dealing with "turn the other cheek" in exactly the same way. We've been assuming that turning the other cheek is another such example because somewhere in our distant past we decided that it delivers this message:

"OW! That hurt! But it's safe to hit me again, because I'm a coward and I'm so scared of you! Here, I'll even turn my other cheek toward you so it's more convenient for you to hit me!"

I suggest to you that that was a mistake and that turning the other cheek is intended to deliver this very different message:

"Please notice -- I am not afraid of you at all."

This is no cowardly message! On the contrary, it's strong and serene and confident and unafraid. We have been misunderstanding, all along, in spite of the fact that we trust God not to be perverse, and in spite of the fact that nowhere is there any evidence that Jesus was a coward. The misunderstanding has become so embedded in our culture and our minds, by habit and repetition, that it has hidden the true meaning from us all along.

***

(And from pages xix to xx...)

To turn the other cheek to the one who strikes us with the message that "I am not afraid of you at all," we have to mean it. We can't just pretend. We have to have the serenity and the confidence and the courage that make the message true. We have to know that no matter what happens, we do have the resources and skills necessary to deal with it -- so that we have no reason to be afraid. Otherwise, we won't be able to follow through.

That is what this book is about...to show you how you can have -- not pretend to have, but really have -- those resources and skills.

Copyright © 2000 Suzette Haden Elgin