Jesus said to them, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.”
Sometimes, over the course of my life, I have kicked myself with frustration. I’m in a conflict with someone, and I give away the store. I sell myself down the river. I don’t stick up for myself. I lament my own cowardice. And then, deepening my frustration, I think of a snappy comeback two or three days later, far beyond the moment of confrontation when I could have really zapped my adversary with a great line.
I think of this occasionally when people voice their frustration about weak political resistance during this apocalyptic time. In the Senate primary campaign in the state of Maine, two candidates are taking up familiar positions: an establishment candidate in her late seventies who seems like a safe choice but is hardly inspiring; and a young idealist with the common touch who stirs and inspires many people but has a controversial past, and a controversial tattoo. I read news reports on this and I think, “I’ve never been to Maine, but I’ve seen this play. I know how it ends.”
We could really use a win. And by “we” I don’t mean a particular political party – I really don’t. My parents formed me to belong to one party with the same loyalty my father showed to one car company; but at this point I just want to support someone, anyone who can reduce student debt and reduce atmospheric CO2 and reduce predatory business practices and reduce the toxic madness of social media and reduce voter suppression and reduce the cost of all prescription drugs and reduce the stratospheric housing prices that cause most of our urban problems and reduce the environmental threat of AI and reduce the violence, racism, transphobia, and misogyny in our culture. And then, on day two…
But my hope for a political savior is not all that different from my vain hope to have a quick, witty comeback in a personal argument. It’s an attractive vision: characters portrayed by Martin Sheen and Allison Janney are running the country, and you and I, we’ve got Hollywood moments in our personal lives, rising up with just the right things to say and do, in every situation. We’ve got personal courage and interpersonal skill; we have what it takes to meet the moment; we’ve got this.
We could even point to all the saints as examples of this vision. The saints are great, right? You might know that old hymn with the line, “If you cannot pray like Peter, if you cannot preach like Paul, you can tell the love of Jesus, and say he died for all.” The saints rise in our imaginations as great figures of strength and skill. Dorothy Day was a twentieth-century saint known for her courage. (Okay, Dorothy Day technically isn’t a saint yet, but her cause is being championed in Catholic circles, and she was born in Chicago. I like her odds.) She wasn’t born in a faith tradition, and became an anarchist and social activist in a fully secular context.
But upon her conversion to Roman Catholicism, Dorothy Day quickly made the connection between her secular ideals and Catholic social teaching. She was a co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, which organizes social-service agencies that not only ameliorate suffering for those with food and shelter insecurity, but also advocate for them. The Catholic Worker Movement is known for its nonviolent stance and strong critique of the unequal distribution of wealth.
It would be easy to number Dorothy Day among the mighty saints, the Christian superheroes we’d love to vote for, the champions we need so desperately right now. But though I never met her, I suspect she would be among the many saints who disdained such honors in their lifetimes. This is the great disappointment of the saints: they all went down. Most of the first ones were martyrs, slaughtered for their beliefs. Paul (or someone speaking as Paul would speak) says this in the second letter to Timothy: “As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come.”
The saints are weak. The saints fail. The saints align themselves with the poor and the oppressed, and whenever you do that, you tend to take on the fate of the poor and the oppressed. There is not much worldly glory when you stock our little free pantry, or pull a wagon of hot soup around Uptown. There isn’t much snappy dialogue when you’re knitting hats and socks, or holding the hand of someone in hospice care, or just keeping your mouth shut and making eye contact and truly listening to someone telling you their story. The Catholic Worker Movement doesn’t win pennants, or primaries.
But sainthood – the life of the saints, being a so-called ‘saint’ – carries even harder consequences than the mild humility of social service. There’s a delicate loveliness in being a faithful companion, in sewing warm clothes, in stacking cans and dry goods on a shelf. But Christian saints also enter the fray, and we do so without weapons, without devastating retorts, without winning campaign strategies.
Let’s hear the losing strategy again, the strategy our Savior gives us for political engagement, for battle against the powers and principalities of this world. Here it is:
Jesus said to them, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.”
This can hit us, on first or second hearing, as weak, even pathetic. But a key insight is often lost when we hear these words. When someone says to you, “Turn the other cheek,” they usually misinterpret the teaching as encouraging passive submission. It sounds like we should just be doormats, that we should let the aggressor just take what they like. If the army invades our country or bombs our hospitals, we should just take it, let it happen, give in.
But that is not what Jesus is saying. His first hearers would have caught the subversive resistance in his teaching. In their time and place, any Roman official could strike someone on the face to shame them, but the honor code forbade them to hit the person below them more than once. That crossed a line: two hits amounts to abuse. A Roman official could also demand that a noncitizen give him her coat, but not also her shirt: that’s too much, because now she is naked at nightfall, and the Roman official brings shame upon himself for depriving another human being of basic clothing.
It’s a subtle tactic that might not make much sense in our own cynical and chaotic place and time, but hear the great insight of this instruction: by turning the other cheek, you shame your opponent, whose face is now red because they went too far. To do this, you need a lot of courage. For one thing, it hurts to be struck on the face. It’s cold at night without your coat or even your shirt.
Turning the other cheek is a stance of provocative defiance. There is a good reason the first saints were slaughtered. Their movement posed a real threat. For one thing, they shared all that they had in common, and this is an economic provocation: it disturbs the society of the empire when people see a group operating with such health and solidarity. And their movement posed a real threat by making it clear who the bullies were, empowering more and more people to stand up to them.
All of this might seem too subtle. Won’t the good guy do good things by fighting? But this is a powerful way to fight. This is a strong way to be in conflict, and to be effective in a conflict, even if the positive effect happens long after the death of the saint who steps into the fray with their cheek turned. It takes more courage, not less, to let the adversary score points at your own expense, and rise up as the better person.
The theologian Howard Thurman eloquently writes about the predicament of saints of color, who all too often have no choice but to turn their cheeks to the slap of the oppressor. In Thurman’s vivid description, their “backs are against the wall,” existentially. A person of color is rarely going to identify with the Roman official who can physically hit their inferiors and take their coats. Most of the people in this room, including me, are the aggressor in the story. But Saint Howard Thurman presents a Way of subversive resistance that can be taken up by all of us if not for our own sake, then for the sake of our neighbor whose back is against the wall. As we learn so often in the lives of the saints, this work is costly. There’s a reason it takes great courage.
In his great work, Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman tells a story about his mother, and how she embodied for him the courageous Way of Christian faith. She was a Black woman with a Black son: her back was against the wall. But faith helped her overcome any fear or hatred she may have felt, for herself or for her vulnerable son. Here is his story, a story for all God’s children, for all who want to learn how to turn the other cheek with courage. Thurman writes:
“When I was a very small boy, Halley’s comet visited our solar system. For a long time I did not see the giant in the sky because I was not permitted to remain up after sundown … One night I was awakened by my mother, who told me to dress quickly and come with her out into the backyard to see the comet. I shall never forget it if I live forever. My mother stood with me, her hand resting on my shoulder, while I, in utter, speechless awe, beheld the great spectacle with its fan of light spreading across the heavens. The silence was like that of absolute motion. Finally, after what seemed to me an interminable time interval, I found my speech. With bated breath I said, ‘What will happen to us if that comet falls out of the sky?’
“My mother’s silence was so long that I looked from the comet to her face, and there I beheld something in her countenance that I had seen only once before, when I came into her room and found her in prayer. When she spoke, she said, ‘Nothing will happen to us, Howard; God will take care of us.’
“O simplehearted mother of mine, in one glorious moment you put your heart on the ultimate affirmation of the human spirit! Many things have I seen since that night. Times without number I have learned that life is hard, as hard as crucible steel; but as the years have unfolded, the majestic power of my mother’s glowing words has come back again and again, beating out its rhythmic chant in my own spirit. Here are the faith and the awareness that overcome fear and transform it into the power to strive, to achieve, and not to yield.”
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Preached on the Feast of All Saints (transferred, Year C), November 2, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18
Psalm 149
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31