DEALING WITH HOSTILITY
a sermon based on Matthew 5:38-42
by Dr. David Rogne

A few years ago Nori Carlson of Sacramento opened a business she calls Revenge Unlimited.  Her reason for being in business, she says, is to help you treat others as they have treated you--kind of a revision of the Golden Rule.  For a fee of $35 to $50 she delivers wilted flowers wrapped in dirty newspaper, deflated balloons and year-old party favors to someone you want to put down.  She delivers cheap wine and a personalized "revenge-O-gram" poem intended to shame the recipient.  "There are people who deliver flowers for Mother's Day or Valentines Day to show love or romance or respect or acknowledgement," she says, "but we are selling revenge.  We're about getting even."

The world being what it is, Ms. Carlson probably does quite well, because human nature resonates to revenge.  When people are hostile toward us, it feels appropriate or satisfying to be hostile in return.  But Jesus proposed a different way of dealing with hostility, and it is his way that I would like to have us consider this morning.

The first thing we need to do is to acknowledge that people are hostile toward us for various reasons.  Sometimes it's because of our actions.  I was driving in a new community looking for a street that intersected from the left, so I was staying in the left lane.  A young fellow in a pick-up truck with over sized tires came roaring up behind me, anxious to zoom on ahead.  When I didn't get over, he switched to the right-hand lane, but that person wasn't going any faster than I was.  He came back behind me, then passed me using a lane from the opposing traffic, screaming and raising his finger all the while.  He was so angry that he pulled over and waited for me to get along side him so he could give me some more of what was on his mind.  He would have been interested in an adult toy I read about called the Revenger.  The Revenger offers frustrated drivers a way to vent their feelings whenever another driver offends them.  At the flip of a switch it blasts the sound of a grenade launcher, machine gun, and death ray at the offending party.  The president of the company says that demand for the product has been overwhelming.  Things we do make people hostile toward us.

Sometimes it isn't even something negative that we have done that makes someone hostile.  Ross Minkler tells a parable that makes that point.  Once upon a time there were two brothers.  As it happened, the younger brother was always successful in whatever he tried to do.  Apparently, all the family good luck had come to him, because the older brother was always a failure.  If the older brother bought a car, it turned out to be a "lemon."  If the younger brother bought a car, it turned out to be a classic, worth many times what he had paid for it.  Stocks were the same way.  The older brother's purchases always decreased in value, and the younger brother's portfolio always skyrocketed.  It was that way with everything.  One day the older brother complained to God about the unfairness of it all.  "Surely," he said, "there must be a time in my life when I will be able to get some good things."  As he prayed, an angel entered his room, saying, "Your prayers have been heard.  You will get whatever you wish."  "Wonderful," said the brother, "but what is the catch to all this?"  "There are no 'catches,' as you call them," said the angel.  "There is one condition.  Whatever you get, your brother will receive twice as much.  You will have one hour to consider what you want to ask for."  "I don't need an hour," the brother said.  "I don't need five minutes.  I know what I want now--I want to lose sight in one eye."  There is hostility at its extreme, emanating, of course, from jealousy.

Sometimes the hostility we experience has nothing to do with the situation in which it is being expressed.  In his book, Ask Me To Dance, Bruce Larson tells of an incident between himself and his wife.  "Recently, my wife and I were at a conference," he writes.  "We were getting dressed for the morning meeting.  She was in the bathroom fixing her hair, and I was in the bedroom.  I switched on the television, and all I could find were some early morning cartoons.  I am inordinately fond of cartoons, and so I began to watch them while I was dressing.  After a few minutes, Hazel said, 'Do you have to watch cartoons?'  'Well, there's nothing else on,' I replied.  'Besides, what's wrong with cartoons?'  Then she began to tell me what's wrong with cartoons, and I began to defend cartoons, and so went our creative morning until we realized that what was going on had nothing to do with cartoons at all.  The emotional relationship at that point was a carry-over from something that had happened the night before, too painful to talk about.  It all came out over cartoons."

There are times when the hostility has not been aroused by us at all.  It is as though mail is being delivered to the wrong address.  We are the recipient, but it should have been directed to someone else.  I suspect that that was the case with the driver of the pick-up who was so disgusted with me.

No matter what we do, some hostility is going to come our way.  A third-grade Sunday School teacher was making the point with her class that God was omnipotent--that He was able to do anything.  She asked the class, "Is there anything that you can think of that God can't do?"  There was silence.  Then one little boy held up his hand.  Somewhat frustrated that the point had been lost on this little boy, she asked, "Well, just what is it that God can't do?"  "Well," replied the boy, "He can't please everybody!"  If even God can't please everybody, it's obvious that we are going to receive our share of hostility.

The second thing I want to say is that when people are hostile toward us, our natural inclination is to retaliate.  We do it in all kinds of ways.  We are tempted to give back in kind.  One fellow tells of having a neighbor who is a bully.  One day the neighbor came up to the fellow with his hand extended.  As the fellow reached to shake hands, the neighbor grabbed him forcefully and threw the man over his shoulder.  "That's Judo," he said.  "Picked it up in Japan."  The fellow who had been thrown around, picked himself up, went into his garage, got something, came back out and cracked his neighbor over the head.  "That's a crowbar," he said.  "Picked it up at Sears."  That's responding in kind, with a little extra.

Sometimes we don't pay back exactly, but we nurture fantasies of revenge.  Some years ago, Abe Lemmons was asked if he was bitter at Texas Athletic Director, Deloss Dobbs, who fired him as the Longhorn's basketball coach.  He replied, "Not at all, but I do plan to buy a glass-bottomed car, so I can watch the look on his face when I run him over."

Moreover, even as hostile emotional mail gets erroneously addressed to us, we are not above forwarding it.  In a study on ethical management, one author heard an office worker use the term "Seagull management."  "What's that?" asked the author.  "A seagull manager," smiled the consultant, "flies in, makes a lot of noise, dumps on everyone, and then flies out.  That often starts a ripple effect."  "A ripple effect?" asked the writer.  "Yes, that's when your boss hears that something has gone wrong--he or she attacks and blames you.  In frustration, you beat up on one of your people, who in turn blames someone on an even lower level, or worse yet, takes it out on a customer."

In one of his classic Saturday Evening Post covers, Norman Rockwell depicted a wonderful example of this ripple effect.  The first frame showed a guy being chewed out by his boss,; the next frame showed him yelling at his wife; the third frame had his wife screaming at their little boy, and the last frame showed the little boy about to kick the cat.  We find ways to retaliate.

Though the inclination to retaliate is natural, it is nevertheless damaging.  It can be physically damaging to the one who is trying to get even.  When James Bond seeks to repay those who are out to get him, he is always successful, because that's the way the writer makes it come out.  But there is no guarantee that a person seeking to retaliate won't get clobbered again.  In a Peanuts comic strip, Woodstock, the little bird, is flying in his wavering style and runs headlong into the window of a house, with a loud "bonk."  Snoopy looks down at the dazed Woodstock, lying on the snow in a heap, and says, "That was a window you just flew into."  Lifting him up, he continues, "See?  It looks like the sky, but it isn't. It's a piece of glass."  In the next frame, Snoopy is explaining to Woodstock, "Birds are always flying into windows . . . you have to be very careful.  There is nothing you can do about it."  Woodstock then kicks the house, and Snoopy can only say, "Kicking the house won't help."  Have you ever struck your head on an object and then hit the object with your hand, only to be doubly hurt?  Dumb, isn't it?

Even if we aren't physically hurt, wanting to retaliate can deprive us of joy.  The comedian Buddy Hackett once confessed, "I've had a few arguments with people, but I never carry a grudge.  You know why?  While you're carrying a grudge, they're out dancing."

Resentment over hostility can poison everything else.  Hart Danks was a struggling songwriter in the 1870s.  He and his wife starved, but struggled together.  Then they hit it big.  Danks wrote a musical tribute to his wife.  It sold and was sung everywhere.  The song was called "Silver Threads Among the Gold."  But the songwriter and his wife quarreled over the new money.  They had a bitter divorce, and the rights to the song were lost in the process.  Danks harbored that loss until his death years later.  He never wrote another successful song, and at his death, they found beside him a faded copy of his popular song on which he had written, "It is hard to grow old alone."  Resentment has a high price.

The third thing I want to point out is that Jesus calls us away from retaliation and resentment to reconciliation.  In the passage that we read this morning, Jesus gives a number of illustrations of how retaliation is to be avoided.  For example, he says that if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Some people interpret this verse to mean that Christians should be pacifists and not be involved in the defense of anything.  My impression is that in this verse and the ones which follow, Jesus is not setting down rules, but illustrating how non-retaliation works.  If we try to make a law out of an illustration and attempt to apply it uncritically to every situation, we shall not only miss the point, but encourage violence, robbery, and anarchy.  I do not think that his words are to be applied in the impersonal context of society's response to a criminal or a nation's response to a foreign aggressor.  Jesus is speaking here of personal relationships in which our individual response is likely to be noticed by other individuals and perhaps have some impact on their conduct.  The issue is not self-defense, but response to an insult.  And the assessment of Jesus is that it is better to disregard an insult than to be eaten up by resentment.

Again, he illustrates his point by saying:  "If anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give him your cloak as well."  In Jewish law a person's coat could be taken as security, but not a person's cloak, for among poor people a cloak would be used as a blanket at night, and since that might be his only protection, it was considered inhuman to take that from him.  Jesus is suggesting that his followers be prepared to go beyond what the law requires when dealing with those who might hassle us.  I am acquainted with a young man whose father died while the young man was a college freshman.  The father had substantial debts, and a lot of people were going to lose a lot of money.  The young man could have said, "That's their problem.  Those are the breaks of doing business."  Instead, he left college, went to work, and settled his father's debts.  Jesus' illustration of surrendering both coat and cloak demonstrates that whatever our legal protection may be, there are still moral obligations to be considered, and we need to do what we can to overcome resentment in ourselves and others, and promote reconciliation.

Jesus again illustrates his point about avoiding retaliation by saying, "If anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile."  It must be remembered that Palestine was an occupied country.  At any time a Jew might be compelled to carry a Roman soldier's pack for a mile.  The law required compliance.  In the face of such circumstances, Jesus was telling his followers, "If someone compels you to be a porter, or a guide for one mile, don't go with bitter and obvious resentment, go two miles with cheerfulness and good grace."

These are not rules that Jesus laid down, they are illustrations of ways his followers might bring reconciliation, rather than resentment and retaliation, out of hostile circumstances.  He is teaching us not to let treatment by others determine our behavior.  Arnold Toynbee points out that when  Mahatma Gandhi was leading the Indian people in their movement to get rid of British rule, whenever his followers began to have strong feelings of hostility towards the British, he would always say:  "Stop until you have gotten over this feeling of hostility.  We won't go on till you have.  It is only when you cease to hate the British that we can afford to go on opposing them."  And he consistently kept the tempers down, so that, in the end, the Indians did get rid of British rule without any lasting hostility between the British and the Indians, thanks to Gandhi's spirit.

Jesus is teaching us to seize the initiative in promoting reconciliation.  Zig Ziglar tells of a small boy on his way home from school who was confronted by three bullies, any one of whom could have beaten him up, and that seemed to be their intention.  The boy wasn't too well qualified to fight, so he did some quick thinking.  He backed up dramatically, drew a line in the dirt with his shoe, looked the leader of the group in the eye, and said, "Now you just step across that line."  The big bully confidently stepped across the line.  The small boy smiled broadly and exclaimed, "Now we're on the same side!"  Ziglar doesn't tell whether it worked, but it was the kind of creative approach to hostility that Jesus would have praised.

If we are ever going to be successful in overcoming resentment and our desire for revenge, we have to learn to forgive.  The American poet, Edward Markham, learned that lesson, but it took him a long time.  In his case, a close friend, who had become his partner in business, ran off with the money.  One whom he had trusted and befriended betrayed him.  Consequently, Markham lost his business.  That left him angry and frustrated.  But Markham wasn't suffering only financially and emotionally.  He was suffering also the loss of his good will and cheerfulness, by which he usually flowed with the hurts of life.  He grew bitter.  Resentfully, he thought about the betrayal and, as he meditated on it day and night, the festering sore grew in size and pain.  He brooded on his insult until he lost all sense of humor about life and became filled with bitter resentment.  It was in that bitter, resentful state that Markham came to his senses and, by God's grace, granted forgiveness to the man who had wronged him--even though he hadn't asked for forgiveness.  Consequently, Edwin Markham wrote the short poem that today speaks volumes about love and forgiveness:

He drew a Circle
that shut me out;
Heretic!  Rebel!
A thing to flout!
But love and I
had the wit to win;
We drew a Circle
that took him in!

This teaching of Jesus that the desire to retaliate must give way to non-resentment and non-retaliation, is hard for us to put into practice.  It is difficult to walk away from an insult without feeling like a wimp.  It does, indeed, go against human nature, but Jesus makes it clear that he is not asking his disciples to respond the way everyone else does.  We need goals that keep us morally stretched.  Though the ideal to which we are called may be beyond our grasp, that does not mean that our goal is to be abandoned.  For we are called to be children of God, and it is better for us to fall short of that goal, while trying, than to succeed at being something less than God intends us to be.