The Word Of God This Sunday, Offers An Antidote To Today’s Violence
By Fr Dexter Brereton, CSSp
Carnival 2020 finds the world grappling with the rapidly spreading Corona virus, otherwise known as Covid 19, which has left thousands dead in its wake. Here in Trinidad and Tobago for the last several decades our country has faced its own outbreak of a different kind of virus, the virus of violence. The pages of our newspapers are filled, on a regular basis, with horrendous stories of murder- suicides, shootings, stabbings, and acts of grave domestic violence. Not long ago, the nation was shocked to its core as a young man killed himself after beating his eight-year-old daughter to death. The child was a person with a disability. This viral strain is culturally supported and often transmitted from parent to child in whispers: “Don’t take no lash!” “If he cuss you, cuss him back!” “If she calls your name in her mouth scratch out her eyes!”
The Word of God this Sunday offers us an antidote to this viral epidemic, in the teaching of Jesus. He begins, in this extract from Matthew’s gospel, with a reference to the lex talionis, the law of retaliation: “You have learnt how it was said: Eye for eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say this to you: offer the wicked man no resistance.” Though it sounds barbarous by today’s standards, the law of retaliation in its own time and context served a humanitarian purpose. It traced the allowable limits of retaliation to be inflicted by the victim of a wrong. Its literal meaning is “Only one eye, for one eye (not two) , only one tooth for one tooth…”
Jesus questions the cultural assumption embedded in this legal principle, that humans as a general rule should treat other people according to the way that they have been treated by them. Jesus offers us an ethic that is difficult, if not impossible for some to accept on face value: “…But I say this to you: offer the wicked man no resistance…” The question could fairly be asked whether this does not make others view us as a very soft target, a kind of ‘patsy’ as some would say. Would this kind of approach in today’s world not simply invite even more violence and victimization? Would it not simply encourage people to take advantage of us even more?
Yet, at a deeper level, the value of Jesus’ difficult teachings is not to offer simplistic answers for complex issues but to cause us to question our deepest attitudes and values without necessarily giving us easy solutions. Why do so many of us in society spend so much time worrying about other people ‘taking advantage’ of us, victimizing us? What are some of the consequences of this obsession? The gospel reading invites us to read Jesus’ words ‘…you have learnt how it was said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you offer the wicked man no resistance…’ over and over again until we begin to feel a sense of solidarity with Jesus as he laments the state of the world. “Offer the wicked man no resistance…” these are the words of someone who wants to live in a world radically different from this one. We are invited to enter into this strong desire for more peaceful, non-violent ways to treat with conflict. In the end, Jesus’ words may not protect us from violence ourselves, but they can and they will protect our hearts and our spirits as we grapple with a violent world, where love struggles with hate and darkness.
