I don’t know about you, but for me it takes a lot of prayer and strength to ‘offer no resistance.” My natural reaction to hurtful incidents is to become angry and retaliate. It’s usually in the course of everyday living, with good people who are close to me, that I suffer some kind of hurt. When I’m hurt by someone, they’re typically not evil people. He says, “…offer no resistance to one who is evil…” Jesus teaches that we should step beyond our rights….in Love. Once again Jesus is challenging us to refrain from retaliation when we are wronged. The footnote in the New American Bible reads, “Jesus forbids even this proportionate retaliation.” In other words, the punishment should not exceed the injury done.īut Jesus, who ‘came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it,” (Matthew 5:17) challenges the notion of any type of retaliation at all. If someone caused you to lose your left eye, you could remove their left eye, but not the right, and not both eyes. If someone caused you to lose one tooth, you had the right to take away one tooth from them, but not two. This law gave people the right to retaliate, but prevented them from inflicting excessive injury on someone as they retaliated.

This law seems harsh, but it was actually designed to moderate vengeance. The same injury that one gives another shall be inflicted in return.” Known as ‘lex talionis’ or ‘the law of tit for tat,’ this law can be found in the Old Testament book of Leviticus 24:19 & 20 “Anyone who inflicts a permanent injury on his or her neighbor shall receive the same in return fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. In Matthew 5:38-39, Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.“

“You’ve heard it said….but I say to you” was a common teaching phrase used by Rabbis to make a point. In last week’s blog post, I mentioned a common teaching method used by itinerant Rabbis in Jesus’ time.

Eye for an eye tooth for a tooth bible