Tag Archives: God

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Turning the Other Cheek Turns Emotions Into Justice

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I’ve always kind of struggled with the concept of turning the other cheek and all that.

Our God is one of justice, right?

The Lord works righteousness
And justice for all the oppressed (Psalm 103:6)

So why then are we not allowed to help with that whole justice thing?

A lot of people try to explain this away by saying that we don’t really know what justice is – that only God can judge. I don’t know about that. I know that rape, murder, and slavery are wrong. That’s a judgment. I think I am capable of judging. And we forget that turning the other cheek has to do with someone slapping you. Slapping is pretty wrong, I think. I know that I don’t like it when someone slaps me.

I’m in a Psychology of Gender class this quarter. In that class, we are learning about pro-feminist men right now. Pro-feminist men are men who actively support feminist women to push gender equality. I think pro-feminist men are pretty awesome. Feminist women are pretty awesome, too. It takes a lot of courage to stand up against oppression. But I’ve been thinking a lot about pro-feminist men. I’ve been thinking about how they don’t really have a lot to gain from gender equality. Men are on top. In fact, a lot of men fear that gender equality would mean loss of status for themselves. Pro-feminist men have to believe that gender equality is intrinsically more important than having a wife who stays at home or who is submissive.

There are studies out there that show that the shackles of oppression begin to fall off when members of the oppressor group begin to speak out for the oppressed. Sexism is most successfully combated when men correct their friends when they make a sexist joke or when men refuse to take a job that they have obtained based on sexist hiring practices.

Like most things Jesus taught, the turn the other cheek policy shows a keen insight into human nature. It’s easy to be angry when you have been attacked. It’s easy to clamor for justice, then. But mostly, that’s just emotion. When a friend makes fun of me, I am not mad because my friend has violated the intrinsically moral rule that making fun of people is wrong. I am mad because I was the subject of the ridicule. And if I say anything, it is easy for my friends to say that I am making a mountain out of a molehill. But what if I never got mad when people made fun of me? What if, instead, I made fun of myself?

Then, when someone was making fun of another friend, I could say something. Because people would say “Hey, Spencer is usually so chill about joking around. We must really be out of line if he’s not okay with this joke.”

That’s what turning the other cheek does. It creates a world in which people know that your emotions are not tied to your sense of justice.

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God is Gestaltian

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There’s a psychological school, theory, or effect (depending on who you talk to) known as Gestalt psychology. Gestalt is a German term meaning “essence or shape of an entity’s complete form.” Pretty heavy stuff.

The basic Gestalt effect is best summarized by the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There are a lot of different pictures and optical illusions that demonstrate the Gestalt effect. But here’s a relatively good one:

Instead of just seeing three Pacmen and three acute angles when looking at this picture, most people see a white triangle overlapping a black-outlined triangle and three black circles. That’s good ol’ Gestalt working hard.

The Gestalt effect, as a concept that was talked about, originated in the late 19th century. Until then, most people thought that if you studied a thing’s parts, you were studying that thing.

To the modern mind, ingrained with Gestaltian thinking, the idea that people didn’t consider the Gestalt effect seems absurd. I was pondering this absurdity when I remembered the words of Jesus in Matthew 18:20:

 For where two or three come together in my name, there I am with them.

And there it is. The truth of the Gestalt effect right there in the Bible. One person plus one person does not equal two people. It equals two people and God and a dynamic relationship.

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Breaking Statistics

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I have a confession to make. I tend to put a lot of stock in statistics. I think it started in high school when I started applying to colleges. I had never really thought much about statistics before. They had never come up before. But college admissions statistics hit hard.

Some of the places I applied had admission numbers lower than 10%. That felt almost impossible. And then when you factored in the fact that those schools are trying to get a balanced entering class from all over the nation, those numbers decrease. And I bought it. I bought every decimal point and every fraction.

Because here’s the thing about statistics: once you start believing them (even for a second), you start seeing yourself in the other part of the statistic. In my case, I began to see myself in the 90% that didn’t get into the universities I wanted. This was because there are a lot of really talented, awesome, intelligent people out there. And it seemed ludicrous to suggest that I could ever be in the top 10% of them. And maybe because of that line of thinking, or, more likely, because the world sometimes does the whole statistic thing the way you expect it to, I didn’t get in to any of those statistically-challenging universities.

And so now I put a lot of stock in statistics.

My friend was talking to me the other day about this problem he had with something that Jesus once said. It comes in Matthew 22:14. He says, “For many are invited but few are chosen.” I understand that there is a whole discussion we can have here, depending on our individual theologies, about what this verse means. A lot of people have interpreted it a lot of different ways. But when I was explaining to my friend why I didn’t find this verse problematic, I realized something. This verse is about statistics.

Statistics are about how things are or have been. They don’t control the future. And so when Jesus says that many are invited but few are chosen, maybe he’s not saying that he’s picked those people already. Maybe he’s just saying that it’s tough. It’s tough to apply to prestigious colleges. It’s tough to graduate from high school if you are kid growing up in the inner city. It’s tough to follow God. And that’s all that we should believe of the statistics. Because knowing something is tough motivates us. But trying to divide the world into 10% and 90% gets complicated and stupid.