On vengence and ducks

Today's gospel (Matt 5: 38-42) sees Jesus again in rhetorical mode, like last Friday. In this passage, however, he piles example on example, all of which go towards making one essential point: do not return evil for evil. And yet, while Jesus does not want us to take revenge, there is another lesson hidden in these lines that in a sense goes more deeply into our behaviour. 

Of course, Jesus does not want us to take revenge: revenge is mine, says the Lord. We are often poor ministers of justice; we should leave it to providence to sort out most of our complaints. 

Yet as we read these injunctions in today's gospel, taken from the sermon on the mount, we get a hint of where the urge for revenge comes from. Look carefully at what Jesus asks: offer another cheek when one has received a blow; give away more than is asked of you; go not one mile but two miles out of your way. These are not just injunctions of avoidance; they involve the same kind of self-sabotaging subtlety as is found in the command not to let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, or to conceal your prayers and penance so as not to follow the Pharisees' example. Jesus is not just delivering a guide for living in these words. He is showing us something about our inner life. 

For the truth is that all but the holiest of us are calculators (and even holy people calculate a bit): we calculate the esteem we are owed and the goodness we are willing to pay out. We calculate how much we intend to punish others, or how fast our self-regard requires us to run away from danger. We are merchants of our own lunchtime fame, failing to see that the glory of the humblest thing is as mighty in Gods eyes as the glory of the greatest magnificence; that the rosebud and the giant redwood are in some regards equals. How much divine joy do we miss because we are busy calculating what is owed to us or what we are prepared to pay out?

We seize on some glorious quality granted us by God's gift and want unconsciously to square or cube it by our own self aggrandizement. We are slighted by the failure of others to appreciate us. Nothing seems as normal to us as our own entitlement. And when we become more conscious of the entitlement, we sometimes try to pay for its repression by an exaggerated abasement - which also involves a kind of calculation - as if our toleration of self-imposed bitterness was any less a form of pride than our naïve entanglements with vanity. 

In Jesus' command to give away our coat and tunic and go the extra mile, he gives us a means of disrupting this inner calculation, to turn over the tables of our internal trader and wreck the rule of such a currency exchange in our own hearts. What is worse than evil befalling us? That we should not live our misfortune according to God's lights but only according to our own calculations. This is why we are vengeful. Like greed, vengefulness already reveals an inner will to lay claim to things that are not ours. 

So, we must let go, and become what God intends us to be - we must live God's dream for us -  holding on to the good things of the earth (like coats and tunics) only as lightly as we hold on to the intangibles (our esteem and self-respect). 

And, so in conclusion, like F. W. Harvey, 

'From troubles of the world

I turn to ducks ...

***

When God had finished the stars and whirl of coloured suns
He turned His mind from big things to fashion little ones;
Beautiful tiny things (like daisies) He made, and then
He made the comical ones in case the minds of men
Should stiffen and become
Dull, humourless and glum,
And so forgetful of their Maker be
As to take even themselves - quite seriously.