Matt Mings on A Little Cheek Turning
The David Crowder* Band does an awesome rendition of one of my favorite hymns, “Come, Thou Fount.” This version builds and swells with a steady rock beat throughout. The words come through crystal clear. I’ve been listening to this song repeatedly these days and one line recently caught my imagination: “Let Thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee.” The reason the line has elicited so much thought for me has to do with how I’ve been analyzing all that currently fetters the lives of people (myself included) in this affluent American society. I examine my own belongings and find so much that I don’t really need. We have lots of extra “stuff” in our attic. From technology to a pantry full of food it seems we are fettered with so much that it’s hard to live an authentically Christian life … much less even remember what our focal concerns should be.
In the midst of all this ruminating comes the line from the hymn: the only fetter that I should allow myself to be bound by is God’s goodness. Instantly, the simplicity and profoundness of the Christian’s focal concerns consumes me. We are to simply love God and love our neighbors.
When Scripture is read through this lens, many confusing dictums, stories, letters, and passages become clearer. A day after mid-term elections while America is still engaged in military conflict on another continent, Christ’s instruction to turn the other cheek has been a cause for me to analyze my positions. I have considered myself a Christian pacifist. As the ethicist Stanley Hauerwas has said, I too am too violent a person to not be a pacifist. It’s a choice of angry necessity. And that Christ should call us to turn the other cheek when we are struck is just icing on the philosophical cake. But what if this instruction is looked at through the focal concerns of loving God and loving people? Might the meaning and implied practice become clearer?
All this pondering has hit reality lately as my young son (almost two years old) has been testing the boundaries of parental authority … and the boundaries of my patience. He has the occasional habit of hitting mommy or daddy … hard, because he’s strong for his age! In the middle of wrestling with daddy or exerting play, I can understand this. He’s a boy after all and boys are violent; we like to hit things and tear stuff down. But when he’s told that such an action is naughty and the heat of the moment has passed, he then deliberately chooses to hit. It’s at this moment I hear the words of Christ: “if your brother (son) hits you, turn the other cheek.” Surely, the plain sense of this command is not isolated. It can’t mean that I’m to allow my son to hit me at random without consequences. Can it? I then remember Christ’s greatest commands (the focal concerns for Christians): love God and love others. If I love God I will train up my child with an understanding of authority figures, consequences for actions, obedience, and … love. If I love my son, I will shape him to embrace actions and practices that display a love of God and love of people. Hitting people is not love. But allowing my son to hit at random without consequences also is not love. Love requires discipline. And so, my son suffers the consequences of disobedience: the hand that hit is the hand that is smacked. Then I hold my son and tell him I love him and reiterate to him that hitting somebody hurts that person, and it hurts God to see him act that way. Then I kiss his hand and we hug. I have certainly not turned the other cheek. But I have put love of God and love of my son into concrete action.
So often parts of scripture are proclaimed out of context. The very scripture I’ve been discussing is used to support pacifism and yet it holds thin when applied to the parent-child relationship. What then about war? It seems that Christ is suggesting that whenever the relevant factors in the “cheek hitting” are injury to myself (my church, my nation, etc.) and retaliation against the injurer, then I am not to give into the anger of retaliation and heap violence on top of violence. The great command is not “do to others as they have done to you,” but rather “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Seems like there is a great deal of patience, repentance, and forgiveness wrapped up in that kind of love. And for the Christian, the turned cheek, though humiliating, is necessitated by the love of God and love of neighbor. God’s goodness, like a fetter, must bind our hearts with this love. How then shall we live?
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