Return To No Person Evil For Evil
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- Created on Sunday, 10 April 2011 01:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
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We are fast coming on to the Christian holidays of Palm Sunday, of Holy Week, and of Easter, and of the Jewish holiday of Passover. Those new to First Parish may not know that we once shared space with our Jewish brothers and sisters here in Concord, and you might not know that this meetinghouse was filled on the High Holy Days each year with their thriving community. I will never forget the Sunday morning when our worship concluded with their Torah held high coming in that back door, and their community coming down one aisle and circling around the other, leading us all outside, the combined congregations following a Klezmer band, walking up Main Street to Elm, past the Episcopal congregation out on their front lawn to cheer us, to the end of Elm Street and the new magnificent Kerem Shalom. When the Psalmist says, “How good and pleasant for brothers and sisters to dwell together,” I think of a morning like that.
In our own way here each year, we have continued to celebrate some of the Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hannukah, Passover. We do this because many of you have come from Jewish backgrounds, culturally and religiously. Many of you continue to identify as Jewish. You are teaching your children the prayers. So we celebrate these Jewish holidays, too, because, as Unitarian Universalists, we say that we come from a “living tradition [that] draws from many sources,” one of which is, in the words of our Purposes and Principles, the “Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.” And so, when we design our worship calendar for the year, these holidays are written in with all the rest.
I have found myself these past many years taking the ten High Holy Days as my own spiritual discipline, specifically in the seeking of forgiveness from those I might have wronged, righting the world just a bit, bringing to my heart the awareness of suffering, bringing to my voice the seeking of justice. I like the prayer from the prayer book at Kerem Shalom, these words by Rabbi Jack Reimer: “We cannot merely pray to you, O God” he says, for you have given us eyes and hands, intelligence, awareness, the bounty of earth itself… because we must be agents of justice and mercy ourselves. “Pray as if everything depended on God,” someone has written, “and act as if everything depended on you.”
This is precisely the “hedge my bet” kind of prayer that has been a part of my theology all my life. “Do you believe in such-and-such?” someone will ask me. “I allow for the possibility,” I will reply. In the phrases of this Kerem Shalom prayer are found the meaning of our benediction, I think, and our saying it together and our trying to live it are what the prayer intends us to do. Are you like me, finding yourself during the week wondering, how am I doing? Did I “hold on to what is good” just then? Did I honor that person? Here’s a moment when I would gladly return evil for evil. I love the drivers who have bumper stickers for peace on their car who then cut you off in traffic and flip you a gesture or two. And so we come to the “Road Rage” portion of our benediction: “return to no person evil for evil.”
These words have always sounded to me like a reminder to avoid revenge. My first life experience with “evil for evil” was with my oldest brother, twelve years my senior, undoubtedly as surprised as my parents with this new brother, and so I am two or three, and he has entered adolescence, and I am punching him, and he says, if you do that again, I’ll hit you back twice as hard. And I do. And he does. Each time I would hit him, poke him, pinch him, he would poke me, hit me, pinch me, twice as hard. I can remember testing his threat, escalating the punches until I was no longer standing.
There’s nothing profound about this early experience, but neither are most of the moments of potential revenge in our lives. We do get cut off in traffic, we are snubbed or embarrassed at some social events, we do get hurt in big and little ways by those we love the most, and who knows where the spiral of retribution and revenge sometimes begins and who knows where it will end. We get hurt and we want to hurt back.
We are hurt in all kinds of ways that may have nothing to with evil beginnings at all. “Evil” as a noun means something like an injury, means something like an action that stands in the way of goodness. If I return an injury by injuring someone else, I’ve surely headed down a path of self-destruction. I learned this in a foundational way from my brother. I could no longer stand. Evil is a poison. If I can see goodness just over there and my way to it is blocked by a wrong done to me by another, my further wrong will only keep goodness farther away. Stand up to evil, we would say, but do not use evil as one of your weapons.
We’re very close here in the phrase “return to no person evil for evil” to the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” These are hard sayings.
These words of Jesus sound at first like the slogans of a “soft” religion, an invitation to “walk all over me.” But surely these teachings can’t be absolute. We know there is evil in this world that won’t stop with a turned cheek. And if you read the Christian Gospels carefully, Jesus most certainly did NOT get pushed around. What does it mean then to “return to no person evil for evil”? I think it has something to do with the nature of evil itself, which is a poison if ever there was one.
“Return to no person evil for evil.” So what are the alternatives, and then what happens? It’s time for the story of Jacob, there in the Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Genesis. Most of you may know the broad outlines of Jacob’s story: the son of Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob was the twin of Esau, born moments later but second-born nevertheless, a fact important to the story.
As Isaac lay dying, the birthright was intended to go to the elder twin Esau, a tradition of those days in which the first-born becomes the leader of the family and receives a double inheritance. Those who heard this story in ancient times knew well the meaning of birthright. Who knows why mother Rebekah conspired with Jacob to trick Esau but it happened: Jacob puts the hide on his neck and the back of his hands to make the blind Isaac think he was embracing his son Esau. It was a mean trick. It was evil. It was more than one car cutting off another.
We only have time to leap ahead in the story, but there is much more trickery and evil. From the lens of the twenty-first century, this is one big dysfunctional family. So Esau realizes he has been cheated, and vows to kill Jacob. Evil is about to be returned for evil. Mother of the Year Rebekah hears the threat, and Jacob is sent away to her brother Laban inHaran. The story of Jacob unfolds there, with Rachel and Leah, and twenty years pass.
Now Jacob is making his way back to Esau, making his way back perhaps to right this old terrible wrong, and Jacob is enormously fearful that Esau still has murder on his mind. And this fear is confirmed when Jacob learns that Esau is approaching in the company of four hundred men. This is where the story begins with today’s reading from Genesis.
Just before Jacob meets Esau and the four hundred, he has spent the night at Peniel, crossing over the huge gorge at the river. And there in the night he has wrestled with no less than an angel, we are told, a terrible night of something beyond dreams that has left Jacob limping in the early morning light. Who among us would not have terrible dreams knowing that in the morning we will face someone with our murder on his mind? Consider what Jacob has done to Esau, how both their lives have been irrevocably changed by these actions, and that now is the moment to face up to the consequences.
Return to no person evil for evil. Esau approaches. Jacob bows down. And what happens? For the first time, I realize what happens: the totally unexpected happens. Esau doesn’t attack Jacob, he embraces him; he doesn’t hit him, he hugs him; he doesn’t kill him, he kisses him. And then they cry together, two grown men! No one would have predicted this outcome. In fact, up until now, the storyteller has never put Esau in a good light at all. It would have surprised no one if Esau had done damage to Jacob, taken his possessions, killed his wives and children. Who knows what Esau might have had on his mind?
But this part of the story ends with a hug and a kiss and some tears. It is a transforming moment, and I think this is what happens when we are able to enter our own unexpected moments and return to no person evil for evil. There is no question Esau did the magnanimous thing here. We would have said, at the very least, Esau could have just gone on with his life, just done nothing. No evil. Nothing. Just stayed away.
Esau could have fulfilled the admonition to not return evil for evil by simply ranting and raving at Jacob, using therapeutically correct “I” statements. “I am hurt. I am angry. Mom always liked you best.” “Rant and rave, Esau. No one will blame you.” This would not have been an evil thing. In fact, it might have felt great, a catharsis for twenty years’ worth of bitterness. An edgy, but not necessarily evil thing would have been for Esau to take Jacob to court, hire one of those attorneys who advertise on television, one of those attorneys who specialize in personal injury cases. This was a deception after all; mental anguish was suffered. Esau could have sued for double damages, and we would not have blamed him. This would not have been returning evil for evil.
But do you understand what happened instead? Something very unusual happened. Esau simply let it all go. In doing so, I think he preserved his own spirit. He did not let the poison of evil enter his system. Instead he decided to love Jacob, the most disarming action he could possibly have taken. He hugged him. He kissed him. Esau did not return to Jacob evil for evil. He loved him instead. What a moment.