The True Message of "Turn the Other Cheek"

At one point or another during your life, as you struggled with conflict or tried to deal with an abusive situation, you may have been advised by a well-meaning but misinformed friend, “turn the other cheek.” Your friend is of course referring to the oft-cited Biblical text. The precise Biblical passage is in the Gospels, Matthew 5:39:

"If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also."

Actually, your friend offering such advice is not merely misinformed but missing the point entirely. If you are the victim of violence, your friend may even be putting your life in jeopardy with such misguided advice.

Many of us interpret the adage in the Bible to “turn the other cheek” as advice to “suck it up” and passively encourage our abusers to continue on, unabated. But this is absolutely NOT the message that Christ had intended to convey. During Christ’s time, masters would strike slaves (and any others subjugated by the patriarchal, institutional and religious powers of the day) with the back of the right hand (not the fist). The back of the hand was used to exert power, not inflict physical injury. It was corporal punishment to demean the spirit. It was a raw exertion of power to put the slave in his or her “place” by means of humiliation and degradation.

There is an important nuance of how such degradation was administered. Masters used the back of the right hand because to use the left hand would violate cleanliness laws. The left hand could be used for “unclean” tasks only. (You might argue that exerting corporal punishment is “unclean,” but this is not how the masters saw it.) Why didn’t a master just use his fist? Fist-fighting was strictly reserved as a means to fight amongst equals. Thus, a master could never strike a subordinate with his fist. If he did, he would imply a “fight among equals,” which a master would never intend to imply to a slave.

Here’s where Jesus’s advice is startlingly assertive as opposed to passive. By “turning the cheek” to the left side, the slave would be forcing the master to use his left hand or his fist, neither of which he could do without violating the legal framework of the punishment. So in essence, the slave has turned the tables on the master. The slave has said, “go ahead, break the law of the land, sully yourself and your actions.” The slave has successfully emasculated the master. This gentle act of defiance renders the master incapable of asserting his dominance in this scenario. He can beat the slave, but he cannot cow him. The inferior contests the situation by essentially acting in a way that says to the master, “I am a human being, just like you. I have dignity and worth. I refuse to be humiliated. I am a child of God, just like you.”

Clearly, such defiance on the part of the slave is no casual passivity. The slave is acting courageously, challenging his or her abuser in a non-violent way. Jesus’s message was for the oppressed to stand up, defy abusive authority, assert their humanity, but not to “stoop to the level” of the abuser’s violence. This is what we often hear described as Jesus’s “third way,” in which the oppressed “fight” their oppressors with clear-headed non-violence. It requires the oppressed to truly recognize, name, and expose abuses of power. This “third way” is neither cowardly submission nor violent reprisal; it is a beautiful, loving expression of an oppressed peoples’ humanity, and it is the only way we can diffuse the dehumanizing aspects of institutionally entrenched power structures. It is the only way we can transform human relationships to that of equality rather than dominance.

“The first principle of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.” –Gandi