Tuesday, August 27, 2019 – Canton, Ohio
“The response to violence is not more violence. The response to violence is forgiveness, mercy, love, compassion. That, and that only, is an equal and opposite force.”
Bishop John Michael
Newton’s Third Law of Motion states: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In any interaction, there are two equal and opposing forces at work. A jet engine does not push a jet forward; it pushes air backward, and air pushes the jet forward. A vacuum cleaner does not pick up dirt; it moves air, creating enough of a vacuum so that the air that rushes in to fill the vacuum brings dirt with it. Your Dyson or Hoover are totally useless in outer space: there is no air to move, so no dirt gets picked up. And so it is with our lives, especially our lives of faith.
Our development as human beings follows a path from passivity to agency from the very beginning. We did not give birth to ourselves, but the action of our mothers’ bodies propelled us into the world. We begin our lives completely dependent on others, but we develop into persons who can act on our own, even becoming people on whom others can depend: parents, teachers, employees, leaders, and so forth. Our development into dependable people is largely a function of our reflection upon the forces that act upon us, and the choices we make in reaction to those forces.
Sometimes we make bad choices. A bad choice is one that does not take us where we want to go or enable us to do what we intend to do. For instance, I have a small handheld Oreck vacuum cleaner that has openings on both ends. If I put the hose in the wrong end and turn it on, I wind up blowing air (and dirt) all over the room. I have done this myself (more than once), but, oh, I thought I had put the hose in the right opening! My objective was to pick up dirt, but my choice did not accomplish that. Once I looked at the vacuum cleaner again and thought about it some more, I realized my mistake and put the hose in the right opening, but by then I had an even bigger mess to clean up.
In becoming active agents in our lives, much of what we are doing is actually reacting to the forces that bear upon us: I am hungry, so I choose to eat. If, in response to my hunger, I choose to go dancing, I am not going to affect my hunger, except probably to intensify it. I am applying a force that is not the opposite to the force that is acting on me. I have made a bad choice, and the bad choice was the result of thinking that dancing would satisfy my hunger. I was wrong about that.
So I re-think the issue, and I realize that oh! It’s not dancing I must do, but eating! If I want to satisfy my hunger, I must think about it again and discover what truly will do the job. The Latin word for this process is repensare, to weigh something over a second or third time. It is from this that we get our English word “repent.”
Sin is making a bad choice. It is choosing something in response to a force acting upon us that is not “equal and opposite,” but something else entirely. Sin is the mistake of choosing something that will not accomplish our objective. Repentance is the act of looking at the situation a second time, finding within that situation what the actual equal and opposite force would be. It is the act of re-thinking that enables me to see what it is that I really ought to do to reach my goal.
In the moral universe, Newton’s Third Law also applies, but you have to examine a situation carefully in order to make good choices. If someone hits me, I may hit back, but that would be a bad choice. Why? Because this only escalates the violence, even to the point, perhaps, of someone getting killed. As Gandhi is reported to have said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” The response to violence is not more violence. The response to violence is forgiveness, mercy, love, compassion. That, and that only, is an equal and opposite force.
So when Jesus says, “When someone strikes you on (your) right cheek, turn the other one to him as well” (Matthew 5:39), he is only letting us know what will really work. Jesus is only being practical, teaching what is the most effective response to that situation.
And Jesus, we say, is God. Don’t you think God would know what really works?