A Radical Willingness To Listen

Today’s gospel reading is, perhaps, one of the most powerful and most ignored passages (at the very least most misunderstood passages) from our Christian tradition. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has emerged from the wilderness – facing his personal and collective demons – and “climbs a hill” and then delivers his “sermon on the mount.” In this sermon he offers us the beatitudes (which we spoke about last week), and today’s passage comes from a section where he is saying a series of “you have heard it said…but I say” statements. Not unlike Moses – who went up on a mountain and brought down God’s law- Jesus ascends a mountain of sorts and brings down a new teaching.

One of the most famous proponents of this passage from Matthew 5 (vs 38-42) was Martin Luther King, Jr. who built most of his understanding of nonviolent resistance around this passage. King, however, evolved into this view over time and was deeply influenced by some of his close advisors like Vincent Harding and Bayard Rustin. Moreover, it was really the work of M.K. Gandhi (who, in turn was influenced by Tolstoy and Thoreau) who helped King get clarity on what Jesus was really calling Christians to.

People have spent lifetimes studying and reflecting upon this one passage, and so I do not pretend that I’ll say what needs to be said about it in one blog post. But the idea and practice of “nonviolent resistance” to evil is one which deserves continued and sustained attention, in part, because it has been so easily sidelined by mainstream Christian practice and because we live in a world that seems to only know one response to violence, namely, more violence.

Nonviolent resistance.

Don’t hit back.

The willingness to accept suffering.

What comes up in you when you hear phrases like these?

It is hard to know exactly what informed Jesus’ teaching all those years ago, but it was likely shaped both by what he saw happening in the world around him as well as a deep commitment to love everyone and everything – even the people who hurt him. It seems that somehow, Jesus saw that at the heart of all violence was some form of separation, and that restoration could never come from further violence. Furthermore, Jesus refused to even hate those who harmed him because he knew that it was in hatred that violence finds its home.

King was clear that his articulation of “nonviolent resistance” and “revolutionary love” were “not for cowards.” He knew that this path required deep heart (courage) and constant training because it runs so counter to almost everything we are taught – including in most churches! And yet he – like Jesus – saw it as the ONLY way to get us closer to the beloved community that was at the heart of God’s vision for the world. This naturally led to how he organized his approach to civil rights but also why he necessarily opposed militarism, poverty and racism. All of these are forms of violence.

Stanley Hauerwas, who wrote a magnificent piece on Kingian nonviolence and why it is so important, says that, at its core, the commitment to love even in the face of violence draws its “strength from a willingness to listen. For the willingness to listen is the necessary condition for the organization necessary for a new community to come into existence. A people must exist whose unwillingness to resort to violence creates imaginative and creative modes of resistance to injustice.”

A willingness to listen.

This is not something we see much of in today’s world.

A commitment to the nonviolent love spoken of in Matthew 5 requires much of us- including a radical willingness to hear out even those who would harm us – let alone those who would disagree or hold a different opinion. It asks us not to immediately jump to judgment, name call, demean or speak ill of. 

There is much in the teaching of Jesus and King that I aspire to and only hope I can live into more fully. Today’s teaching is one of those – of loving one’s enemy and doing good to those who would harm us. So much comes up in me when I engage a passage like this and it often starts with, “but what about…” Maybe the same is true for you.

For today, let’s just hold all of this in our hearts and let God speak to us of God’s dream. Let’s reflect on alternatives to violence and what those might require of us and from us (personally and collectively). And let us remember the words of Maya Angelou who so presciently said, “Hate has caused a lot of problems in the world but it has solved none yet.”