What Does it Mean to 'Turn the Other Cheek'?
Don’t look a moose in the eyes if you like your life. In the animal kingdom, eye contact is often considered a challenge, and a fifteen-hundred-pound bull moose isn’t afraid to charge a challenger.
What if humans took a cue from their animal brethren and looked at eye contact similarly? There might be a future society where people avoid looking at one another to show deference and honor. To look someone directly in the eye would be tantamount to shooting at them.
Then let’s suppose they read a line from a hypothetical memoir I wrote that said:
“Bill came in to shake my hand after the meeting, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He took a seat in the conference room but kept shifting his weight in his chair and staring intently at his pen.”
What would they take that to mean? To us, avoiding eye contact is a sign Bill is hiding something or is unhappy about the meeting’s outcome. His fidgeting in his seat corroborates it. He’s upset or maybe scared. But this whole exchange would seem like the oddest thing to these future folks!
It would be like us reading back on the Spartans and admiring some warrior culture. To think, the author expected eye contact after a meeting! You had to be aggressive to show your seriousness, perhaps? Or maybe the meeting wouldn’t be settled until there was a fight? Is that why Bill was listless after the exchange? Had he been defeated without even trying?
Of course, the only way to understand the text is to understand the cultural and historical context in which it takes place. To really grasp what I was getting at—or rather, what I expected the audience to grasp via the descriptions of Bill’s actions—you’d have to know a thing or two about the implications of avoiding eye contact and fidgeting. Too often, we project our own context back onto a text without realizing it.
So then, to all the future folks here, what does it mean when Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek? In his famous Sermon on the Mount, he says:
38You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' 39But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you. (Matthew 5:38–42 ESV)
A modern reader makes a few mistakes with this passage, often underreading the examples and overreading the command, ‘Do not resist the one who is evil.’ We project our twenty-first-century context back onto the first century, so we fail to appreciate how these examples work. We also overlook the Old Testament context from which this command flows. Only by recovering that context can we see how radical these examples are and how radically we are called to live as we obey this command.
Let’s look at how we might misunderstand the examples first.
We tend to mainly see slapping as venting. It’s low-intensity violence—not really intended to do damage—and in our cultural imagination, it’s usually coming from some scorned woman and landing on a deserving man. So where’s the evil in that? Is the command to turn the other cheek basically saying to overlook petty offenses? There’s some embarrassment involved in getting slapped, so maybe that’s the evil? I’ve been humiliated, so this is also saying I should act stoically and swallow my embarrassment?
Or what about the tunic and cloak? Or going two miles with the person forcing you to go one? Nowadays, where clothes are plentiful, transportation isn’t hard, and individual freedom is valued above all else, we read these two commands as ways of maintaining our agency in an otherwise annoying situation. Someone wants to force me to do something or to give them something? Well, fine, screw them. I’m going to give on my own terms!
Reading these cases in an individualized, trivialized manner, we fail to see the subversive justice and judgment Jesus brings in each example he gives. We overread how the command applies precisely because our readings are so flimsy. We like to think that ‘Do not resist the one who is evil’ means internalizing every injustice and letting the offender off the hook. We think it means there’s virtue in neglecting to stand up to real evil. Only when we pretend evil is so trivial can we believe this is what the command means.
Think for a second about what Jesus doesn’t say (and there are far too many possibilities here to go into them all):
“If someone falsely accuses you, you should just let them.”
Christ indeed kept silent before his accusers, as Isaiah prophesied. He did not defend himself before Pilate or bring a legion of angels against any of his accusers. But he did not deny it when asked if he was the Messiah. He knew what his mission was and that they were determined to kill him. But he made sure they understood the judgment they were bringing on their own heads by doing so.
And what about Paul? He gave arguments in his own defense multiple times over, and in fact, some scholars think the book of Acts was written so Luke could give an argument in his defense, too! Was Paul breaking Jesus’s command? Absolutely not! By speaking up in Jerusalem, he received personal encouragement from Jesus, who was pleased that he testified about him in public (Acts 23:11).
“If evil is present in a community, you should let it be.”
The Biblical witness is clear: we should not let it be. We must address evil when it’s present in our communities. Otherwise, Jesus and the disciples wouldn’t have been able to cast out demons or denounce hypocrisy in public. The apostles wouldn’t have been able to call out demons and profiteers on their journeys in Acts. The church wouldn’t be able to discipline those who sin recalcitrantly. Clearly, Jesus isn’t telling us to let evil reign in our communities.
So what’s going on? Jesus and his disciples appear to be resisting evil! They’re speaking up against accusers, casting out demons, and exposing immorality. They’re not just smiling and nodding and allowing evil to have the final say. Their actions don’t make sense in our modern reading of ‘Do not resist the one who is evil,’ which strongly indicates that we’re not reading the command correctly.
We must recontextualize Jesus’s cases to make sense of these other examples.
Let’s start with getting slapped on the right cheek. A slap in the first century was much like a slap today: it was intended to humiliate the other person but not cause severe damage. Turning the left cheek was a way of swallowing that humiliation and refusing to respond with violence in return. So, even with our modern sensibilities, we still pick up on part of what this case shows. But there’s more than that.
Jesus specifically calls out that we’ve been struck on the right cheek and that we should turn to them the left. Many scholars think getting hit on the right cheek implies the striker was using the back of his right hand. This was a grave insult. You only struck those lesser than you with the back of the hand. Turning the left cheek says to the striker, okay, I won’t hit you back. But if you’ve got more to say, you need to use the inside of your hand, which was reserved for equals. Turning the left cheek becomes an act of defiance; it’s a refusal to accept the degrading, dehumanizing, evil behavior of the striker and a refusal to propagate it.
What about the cloak? To understand this example, we must grasp that folks usually wore two garments: a tunic and a cloak. In Jesus’s example, a person is suing and taking the tunic from another person. This is nasty behavior since often people only had one tunic and one cloak—they didn’t have drawers and drawers of clothes the way we might! So, the person being sued would have no underlayer below their cloak once all was said and done.
Jesus’s command seems odd then: why give up the only piece of clothing you have left? There may be an element of retaining one’s agency and dignity, as a modern reader might guess. But even more than that, handing over the cloak reveals the injustice of the court and of the person bringing the lawsuit. See, it was illegal in the Old Testament to take a person’s cloak from them and not return it by nightfall (Exodus 22:25-27). God says, “That is his only covering” and “In what else shall he sleep? And if he cries to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate”. God cares about justice in the courtroom, but he also cares about mercy.
Taking a man’s only tunic was a sneaky way to get past the letter of this law but not past the spirit of it. God did not want his people to exploit each other. Handing one’s cloak along with the tunic was a way of saying that though the garment was different, the exploitation was the same. It was a symbol to onlookers that the person bringing suit and the court facilitating it were both in violation of the spirit of God’s law. Giving the cloak would be a witness to the irony of lawbreaking in a place designed to uphold the law. It would be a cry to the God who hears and is compassionate; a cry for real justice to be done.
Last, speaking of laws, what about going two miles with the person forcing you to go one? In this case, the ‘one who is evil’ was most likely a Roman soldier. They could legally compel someone to carry their gear for up to a mile. While that would’ve been frustrating in its own right, it would’ve been downright infuriating to the Jews who were being occupied by Rome. They resented having pagan rulers. Being forced to carry the very weapons that were used to subjugate them was a humiliating reminder that they were bugs under the Roman boot.
We know from other places in history that laws like these incite riots and violence. Think of the British Quartering Acts of the 18th century; those were a significant factor in the onset of the American Revolution. Jesus knew Israel desperately wanted a revolution of their own against Rome. But he also knew the French wouldn’t sail in to save the day for them. If they revolted, they would all die.
The solution, then, Jesus teaches, isn’t to kill the Roman soldier who’s compelling you to walk with him. It’s to treat him like a fellow bearer of God’s image and give to him generously. Instead of going just the one mile, why not help him carry his gear for two? It’d make his knees feel a lot better. Rather than acting from an angry compulsion, Jesus’s disciple flips the entire situation around and acts out of his own generosity. There’s some merit to the American intuition that this example lets us retain our agency and dignity. But more than that, it allows us to live out new life, imitating Christ, before the watchful eye of God himself. We aren’t just retaining agency; we are exercising the new freedom that comes with new life.
The rest of the gospel testifies that exercising new life isn’t just for our benefit, and it’s not simply a refusal to propagate evil. It’s an active propagation of good. A Roman centurion standing by the cross was among the first people to recognize Jesus as the son of God. Many more would come to know Jesus through the actions of his disciples. But even if the soldier compelling you to walk a mile continued in his evil, and he didn’t recognize Jesus in your actions, the actions wouldn’t be in vain. Paul, quoting Proverbs, tells us that taking care of one’s enemy heaps burning coals on that enemy’s head (Romans 12:19-21). God sees what’s happening and will avenge whoever chooses to do good. Evil will be stamped out, but new life is eternal.
Taken together, the three cases give an account of how new-life people should deal with evil and injustice. Rather than resist evil with evil, they were to subvert evil with good. This was a profound new way of living but also deeply pragmatic. Jesus knew his disciples would face humiliation from synagogue leaders and other religious figures. He anticipated they would be exploited by the rich and the elite as their talk of a new kingdom drove them to the margins of society. He knew the Romans would kill them all if they revolted—as apostles like Simon the Zealot might have formerly plotted to do. His teaching wasn’t arbitrary; in each case, he walked the disciples through a real scenario they would likely face and taught them how to imitate him in it.
Finally, with first-century context established, let’s return to the command: ‘Do not resist the one who is evil.’
To get to a right reading, the first thing we need to notice about ‘Do not resist the one who is evil’ is that it’s Jesus’s sharpening of the Old Testament command ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ The original command limited the reparations a person could seek for damages, i.e., if they took an eye, you could only take an eye back. You couldn’t take a whole head. But now Jesus was saying his disciples shouldn’t even take an eye!
As he had done multiple times in the Sermon on the Mount, such as expanding ‘Do not murder’ to mean do not even harbor hate in your heart, Jesus was taking the Old Testament command to its true, holy, heavenly end. While God had allowed reciprocal justice for damages before due to hardness of heart (we see a similar argument from Jesus about decrees for divorce), Jesus was teaching his disciples to avoid even that. Now they were Spirit-people, new-life people, with hearts of flesh and not stone (Ezekiel 11:19-20). They no longer needed stopgap commands.
Instead, they were to trust that vengeance, justice, and judgment belong to God. God’s people are sometimes called to administer justice when placed in positions of authority, like being the judge in a community court. Peter and Paul both tell us the authorities are given for our good (1 Peter 2:13-17; Romans 13:1-7). But when we’re not in that place of authority, the challenging command that Jesus gave was that we are not to be the arbiters of vengeance. We cannot take justice into our own hands and expect that we are doing God’s will. He has a vantage point that we do not and an authority that we do not. Our call is not to take an eye when an eye is taken but to witness the taking and testify against the world for its sinfulness.
Jesus’s case studies lay out a new way of living in the world. Rather than returning evil to the evil ones, he has made a way for us to repay evil with good while powerfully refuting that evil. This can force our attackers to acknowledge our human dignity or shame them into backing down. It can change the minds of those involved in court proceedings and expose the hypocrisy of the institution. It could change an enemy’s mind and even make him into a friend—like the centurion whose servant Jesus healed or the centurion and his family Peter went to in Acts. Or, even when there’s no reconciliation, the choice to respond with good is still a testimony and a cry to the God who avenges.
Jesus isn’t asking us to lay down and die. He’s teaching and empowering a new way to live. Through his spirit and his sacrifice, he has made a way for us to heal two eyes when one is hurt. Rather than settle for a tooth, he is teaching us to entirely defang the roaring lion (1 Peter 5:8-9). This power doesn’t come from violent reciprocation. It comes from the mercy of the one who cried to God by receiving violence on our behalf, was raised to life, and is making all things new.
