An Eye for an Eye

“But I say to you who hear” — and in saying it he is bringing out an old command of the Creator’s: “Speak into the ears of those who will lend them to you.” “Love your enemies, and bless those who hate you, and pray for those who slander you.” The Creator gathered all of this into a single command through his prophet Isaiah: “Say to those who hate you, You are our brothers.” For if the people who are our enemies, who hate us, who speak evil of us and slander us, are to be called our brothers, then he was in effect telling us to bless those who hate us and to pray for those who slander us, when he told us to count them as brothers. [a]

“But Christ plainly teaches a new kind of patience. He actually forbids the reprisals the Creator allowed when he required an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and tells us instead to offer the other cheek to the man who strikes us on one, and to hand over our tunic to the man who takes our cloak.” No doubt these are additions Christ made. But they are entirely of a piece with the Creator’s own teaching. So the question has to be settled right here: does the discipline of patience rest with the Creator?

When he commanded through Zechariah, “Let none of you plot evil against his brother,” he did not name a man’s neighbor as well. But in another passage he says, “Let none of you plot evil in your hearts against his neighbor.” Someone who advised that an injury be forgotten was all the more likely to advise that it be patiently endured. And when he said, “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay,” he was teaching that patience waits quietly for that vengeance to be carried out.

So then: it is beyond belief that the same God should look as though he wanted “a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye” in return for an injury — the God who forbids not only every reprisal but even a vengeful thought, even the remembering of a wrong. Once you see that, it becomes plain in what sense he did require “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” It was not so that an injury could be repeated by way of payback; he had already ruled that out when he ruled out revenge. It was to hold the injury back in the first place — the injury he had forbidden under threat of retaliation in kind. Every man, faced with the prospect of a second injury coming back at him, would keep himself from committing the first. For he knows how much easier it is to hold violence down by the prospect of retaliation than by the promise of some vengeance at an unnamed time. Both provisions were needed, given what men are and how much faith they have: the man who believed in God could expect vengeance from God, while the man with no faith to restrain him could still fear the laws that laid down retaliation.

This was the law’s intention, and it was hard to see. Christ — Lord of the Sabbath, Lord of the law, Lord of all the Father’s arrangements — both uncovered it and put us in possession of it, when he commanded that the other cheek be offered to the man who strikes. He meant to stamp out the repaying of an injury more thoroughly still. The law had tried to head it off by the method of retaliation, and prophecy had certainly hemmed it in already, both by forbidding a man to keep the memory of the wrong and by handing the vengeance for it over to God. So whatever new provision Christ brought in, he brought it in not against the law but in support of it, without weakening the Creator’s rules in the slightest.

Look carefully, then, at the very grounds on which patience is commanded — and commanded to that full and unqualified extent — and you will find that it cannot stand up unless it is the Creator’s command: the Creator, who promises vengeance, who offers himself as the judge in the case. Otherwise, suppose all this enormous weight of patience — not returning blow for blow; offering the other cheek; not only not returning abuse for abuse but returning a blessing instead; and, far from keeping back the tunic, giving up the cloak as well — suppose all that is laid on me by someone who does not mean to back me up. Then he has taught me patience for nothing, because he shows me no reward attached to his command — no return, I mean, on the patience itself. There is a revenge he ought to have let me take, if he did not mean to inflict it himself. And if he would not let me take it, then he should have inflicted it himself, since it serves the interest of discipline that an injury be avenged. Fear of vengeance is what curbs every kind of wrongdoing. But if wrongdoing is given a free run and nothing is held back from it, it will take over. It will put out both a man’s eyes. It will knock out every tooth in his head, safe in the knowledge that nothing will happen to it. And this is precisely what that good and simply benevolent god of yours comes to: doing patience an injury, opening the door to violence, leaving the righteous undefended and the wicked unrestrained.

“Give to everyone who asks you.” To the poor, obviously — or rather to the poor above all, though to the well-off too. But so that nobody should be poor in the first place, you have in Deuteronomy a provision the Creator laid on the man with something to give: “There shall not be a poor man in your hand, so that the Lord your God may bless you with blessings.” In your hand — meaning the giver’s hand, the man thanks to whom this other man was not poor. And there is more. He orders a gift to be given even to the man who does not ask. “Let there not be,” he says, “a poor man in your hand” — in other words, see to it that there is not one, as far as your own will can prevent it. And by that command he settles it in advance, all the more strongly, that men must give to the one who does ask, as the words that follow show: “If there is among you a poor man of your brothers, you shall not turn your heart away, nor shut your hand against your poor brother. You shall open your hand wide to him, and you shall certainly lend him as much as he needs.” Loans are not usually made except to people who ask for them. But on the subject of lending there will be more later.

Now suppose someone wants to argue that the Creator’s commands reached only as far as a man’s brothers, while Christ’s reach everyone who asks, and that this makes Christ’s a new and different command. Then only one rule can be built out of the principles that show the Creator’s law repeated in Christ. For what Christ told us to do toward everyone is not a different thing from what the Creator prescribed toward a man’s brothers. Kindness shown to strangers is the greater kindness, true, but it does not come ahead of the kindness that was owed to one’s neighbors first. For who will be able to love strangers? And since the second step in kindness is toward strangers and the first is toward neighbors, the second step will belong to the one who owns the first as well, more properly than it will belong to someone who never owned a first step at all. So the Creator, following the course of nature, taught kindness to neighbors first, meaning afterwards to command it toward strangers as well. And following the method of his own arrangement, he limited kindness to the Jews first, and afterwards extended it to the whole human race. As long as the hidden plan of his government was kept inside Israel, it was right for him to command that pity be shown only to a man’s brothers. But once Christ had given him “the nations for his inheritance, and the ends of the earth for his possession,” then what Hosea said began to come true: “You are not my people, who were my people; you have not obtained mercy, who once obtained mercy” — meaning the Jewish nation. From that point Christ extended his Father’s law of compassion to everyone, shutting nobody out of his mercy, as he had left nobody out of his invitation. So whatever wider reach his teaching had, he took it all in with the nations he inherited.

“And as you would have men do to you, do the same to them.” This command plainly carries its opposite inside it: and as you would not have men do to you, so you should not do to them. Now if this were the teaching of a new deity, unknown until now and not yet fully announced, who had favored me with no instruction beforehand by which I might first learn what I ought to choose or refuse for myself — and so do to others what I would want done to me, and not do to them what I would not want done to me — then all he would have left me with is whatever my own opinion happened to throw up. He would have tied me to no proper rule of wanting or doing — no rule by which I might do to others what I would like for myself, or hold back from doing to others what I would dislike having done to me. For he has not in fact laid down what I ought to want, or not want, for myself as well as for others. So I shape my behavior by the law of my own will, and it lies in my power not to give another man what I would like given to me — love, obedience, comfort, protection, and blessings of that kind — and, in the same way, to do to another man what I would not want done to me: violence, injury, insult, deception, and evils of that sort. The nations, who have never been taught by God, live by exactly this mismatch between what they want and what they do. Good and evil are each known by nature, certainly; but that does not mean a life is being spent under the discipline of God, which alone teaches men at last what real freedom of will and action is, in faith, as in the fear of God.

So Marcion’s god, revealed though he was in his own special way, could not for all that publish any summary of the command in question — a command that until then had been so cramped, so obscure, so dark, so incapable of any ready interpretation except whatever I chose to give it, because he had provided no earlier way of telling one thing from another. That was not my God’s position. He always and everywhere gave orders that the poor, the orphan and the widow be protected, helped and given relief. So through Isaiah he says: “Share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless into your house; when you see the naked, cover him.” And through Ezekiel he describes the just man this way: “He will give his bread to the hungry, and cover the naked with a garment.” That teaching was already reason enough for me to do to others what I would have them do to me. And when he pronounced, “You shall not murder; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not give false testimony,” he was teaching me to hold back from doing to others what I would not want done to me. And so the command as it is opened out in the Gospel will belong to him alone — the one who drew it up long ago, gave it its sharp point, arranged it to match the judgment of his own teaching, and has now, as it deserved, reduced it to a short formula, because, as another passage foretold, the Lord — that is, Christ — “was to make a shortened word on the earth.”