Yesterday we were talking about cheating off of somebody else's test, and let me tell you somebody who definitely cheated off of somebody else's paper. Victor Hugo, the guy who gets all the credit for writing Les Miserables, because it's one of the best novels of the 19th century. It really is. It's awfully good. Have you ever read that thing? I'll tell you what, that one and The Count of Monte Cristo are the two that I powered all the way through, and I loved the whole thing. But here's what I mean about him with his plagiarizing. He totally ripped off stuff from Jesus at the beginning of his story when Jean Valjean, played by Wolverine, goes and he stays seeking refuge with a priest overnight, and then he decides to steal all the priest's stuff. So he grabs all of his silver and everything, and he's gonna run out of there and he gets caught. And now he's gonna be arrested and put away for his entire life. And the gendarmes come up and they're like, hey, priest, this guy was stealing your stuff. And the priest is like, What? He wasn't stealing it. He also forgot all of these other things he was supposed to take with him. And in doing so, he bought Valjean his freedom by giving him forgiveness right there on the spot. And it's it's funny because it's like exactly what Jesus said to do. It's almost as though Victor Hugo had read the Bible, thought about it, took notes, and then tried to conceive of a scenario that would correspond to this gem from Matthew chapter 5, starting in verse 38. You've heard that it was said, eye for an eye and tooth for tooth, but I tell you, don't resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. And that's exactly what the priest did. And of course the result is that this gesture of grace, this refusal to be drawn into a conflict, this insistence on imitating these very radical values of Jesus, all the way to the letter of the law, which we'll talk more about as we work further into it, this changes Jean Valjean's life and sets a trajectory that echoes into the lives of tons of other people and into the future because of who Valjean becomes. And even if you're brand new to the Bible or religion or Christianity, this is still one of the passages you've heard of because that phrase, turn the other cheek, has become part of the vernacular in every culture. Everybody knows this one. But what does a passage like this actually mean? Because again, remember, Jesus is developing a point here, but it seems like he's also giving very specific instruction about what to do and how to live, and it's very hard. How could you live like this? How would it work? Wouldn't people just come to view you as being like a vending machine for free stuff? Well, maybe. Some people have taken it that literally. But let's just try to break the thing down and consider it. We'll go first directly as to what it's saying in this passage, and then second, we'll consider it in light of the bigger context. So you have heard that it was said eye for eye and tooth for tooth. This again is a little bit of plagiarism, but this time it goes the other way. The Bible is borrowing from existing laws. This turn of a phrase, eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, probably predates Hammurabi, who wrote down his code in Babylon in the 19th century BC. So that's very, very old, much older than the Old Testament law, which at the very oldest would date to the 1400s BC. So this has been floating around for quite a while, but probably Hammurabi was drawing on stuff that had already been out there before him. And when we say Babylon here, don't picture, by the way, Nebuchadnezzar. That's the Neo-Babylonian Empire. And that's like 1300 years later. It just happens to be on the same plot of ground between the Tigris and the Euphrates River. So this is the ancient, ancient Babylonian Empire. And Hammurabi, who was, I think, the fifth king of this incarnation of Babylon, and Hammurabi and his ancestors, they weren't the original holders of this space either. This area had actually been occupied by all kinds of little micro-kingdoms that sometimes get lumped together into a larger society that we call Sumer. Maybe you've heard of that. The kingdom of Elam was in this area, and the kingdom of Ur predates this first expression of the Babylonian Empire that we're talking about in the 19th century under Babylon. You might remember the name Ur because that is the land from which Abram hailed, Ur of the Chaldeans. And there was a guy there named Ur Namu, who probably actually at about the time of Abram wrote out another code of laws. I don't think we have all of that one or even most of that one anymore. But it looks like Hammurabi was not reinventing the wheel. It looks like he was drawing on laws that were already regionally accepted and just putting that together in like one big batch law. Well, it's anachronistic to call it this, but a codex, almost like what Justinian did in the 5th century A.D. with all of the existing Roman law that was floating around, some of it starting to conflict. So Hammurabi's law is a codification, a gathering, an ordering, a unifying of all of these different laws that existed in Babylonian culture, some of which had dripped and leaked over into what we would call Hebrew or Israelite descendant of Abraham culture as well. So you get this overlap on the concept of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And here's how it actually goes in law 196 in Hammurabi's code. It says, if a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye. If one break a man's bone, they shall break his bone. If one destroy the eye of a free man or break the bone of a free man, he shall pay one gold mina. If one destroy the eye of a man's slave or break a bone of a man's slave, he shall pay one half his price. I'm not going to argue about whether slavery was moral in the ancient Babylonian Empire or not. This is just the rules that they had. And obviously the Bible picks up on this, and Jesus is drawing on a tradition that everyone who read the Old Testament when it was written would have known was also drawing on a tradition from a secular source that everybody just agreed this is a good rule. Well, why did they agree that this was a good rule? Is it because revenge is a good idea? No, if you look closely at this, what you see is that this is designed to keep stuff from going stinking crazy when people overexact revenge from somebody else. You hurt me $10 worth, I'm gonna hurt you $10,000 worth. I'm that mad. Well, you can't do that. That never ends. That sends society and a community spiraling into this feud-like living where ultimately one clan is just gonna have to kill the other clan because there's no settling something like this. Societies figured this out very early in the game, and so they set rules so that punishment, or rather propitiation, would be proportionate. Man, that's a lot of peas and asians and ishin's, but it would be proportionate so that the whole thing wouldn't wreck society and you could quickly move past these kind of grievances. But what happens then is over time, people start to read it the same way you and I read it. Oh, you punch me, I punch you. Oh yeah? You hurt my feelings in a relationship. Oh, get ready, sucker. Hell hath no fury, like a Matt Whitman scorned. You are going to bleed socially for what you did to me. And what happens so often in church, out of church, in friendships, in social circles, at work, on ball clubs, is that we have this mentality where these rules of decency and goodness apply as long as everybody's nice. But as soon as somebody violates that, it's on. When the reality is those rules are there precisely for when somebody violates that. It's to keep it from going berserk. And even somebody as old and dead as Hammurabi understood that. Well, Jesus' original audience, much like I think his right now audience with us, maybe got confused on the concept a little bit and felt like I am entitled to hurt people when they hurt me. If it's on, I get to be fully on as well, and we're gonna exchange punches until everybody feels a little bit better. But I tell you, don't resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. What? Jesus is attacking one of the rules that everybody from all societies has agreed on for all of recorded history. What are you doing, dude? And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand them your coat as well. So the idea would be if they want your shirt, that's a cheap thing. Your coat would be your most expensive garment. What? If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Remember that whole thing about the quartering act in the American Revolution where there's this idea that uh the government could make you house British troops who were there to oppress you and occupy you. Well, this is actually a very old tradition where at any point the government or a local governor could make citizens provide supplies, shelter for an occupying soldier. In this case, I think the tradition or the the rule of law was that anybody of a certain rank could make you carry their military gear for a certain distance. And so the phrase, go the extra mile, I believe, I didn't research any of this, but if I remember right, I believe, is in reference to the actual legal mandate that you had to carry a soldier's stuff for one mile. And so Jesus teaching that rather than begrudging that for the whole mile, cursing your luck for standing where that soldier happened to look, instead you make this a pleasant thing and you go even further and you make that person scratch their head in confusion as to why anybody would do stuff like that. Give it to the one who asks you, and don't turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. So what I see shaping up here, and we're gonna have to cut this in half because the time's not gonna allow. What I see shaping up here is something that on its surface looks utterly impossible. How could you do this? Like I said earlier, wouldn't the word get out that you're just a vending machine and all people have to do is come and be mean to you, and then you're obligated to give them your stuff? But also, you gotta admit this is kind of beautiful. Like what a strange backwards, upside down way of looking at the world, and then it sure makes you think about things. And well, what is Jesus going for with all of this? I am going to let you baste in that tension for a whole night, and then we're gonna come back tomorrow. We're gonna think it through some more. Hit and pause there. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.