Resisting Evil

I drove over to the court house in Bad Axe Tuesday morning. I had received a subpoena to testify against the peeping tom we had a couple months ago. I didn’t know what I would say, or what I’d be asked. I didn’t even know he was there until the police knocked on the door near midnight and told me our neighbors had caught him looking in our family room window. Thank goodness everyone was asleep but me. I dragged myself out of bed early and drove the half hour to Bad Axe. I went in to discover the man had plead guilty the day before, no plea deal, just plead guilty. The prosecutor’s office had tried to get a hold of us, but since the phone is in the church’s name, we’re hard to find.

The prosecutor shook my hand, thanking me for making the trip out there for nothing, and said, “If it wasn’t for people like you, cases like this wouldn’t happen. I really mean that.”

Now I assume that he meant that with out people taking the legal process seriously people wouldn’t just plead guilty. But I could be wrong. Perhaps if it wasn’t for people like me there wouldn’t be peeping toms. That either means I am pretty darn attractive, or some how otherwise inviting evil.

So having traveled all the way out there, and afraid I’d fall asleep on the way home, I went over to the little coffeehouse in bad axe and had some Kenya AA while I read Tolstoy’s “My Religion”.

Tolstoy tells that one of his great revelations was in Matthew 5:39 “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” He had never seen “resist not evil,” there before. His culture and ours highly values resisting evil.

Tolstoy even suggests that as Christians we ought not sit in judgment in courts and tribunals as I was supposed to do that morning. I’m still trying to process the tension between this principle and the stream of social justice. Foster writes about how Jesus embodied the social justice tradition.

Yes, says Jesus, the messianic kingdom of perpetual Jubilee is indeed coming, but in a way that no one would have guessed. People, especially the Zealots, had been looking for military conquest. But Jesus flatly rejects the Zealot option and shows instead another kingdom and another power-the kingdom of love and the power of divine community.

So we aren’t to resist evil, but rather we are to overcome it with a new kingdom. This is what Willard calls the divine conspiracy, and it does not come through legislation, force, opposition or power but through love, vulnerability and righteousness.