What “Turn The Other Cheek” Really Means

A closer look at an often misunderstood Bible passage.

The first time I came across the Biblical passage where Jesus instructs his followers to turn the other cheek in response to being struck by someone (Matthew 5:39) I’ll admit I was perplexed. Was Jesus advising his followers to take abuse? Was the Gospel advising Christians against sticking up for themselves, and instead serving as doormats?

A closer look at the historical and cultural context of Jesus’ guidance on turning the other cheek suggests that passively accepting poor or disrespectful treatment is not at all what Jesus was suggesting. Below, a more thorough examination and clarification of what turn the other cheek really means.

Different Gospels.

In Matthew 5:39, about halfway through his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus advises his followers, “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Matthew’s detail of the right¹ rather than the left cheek is important here, as theologian and activist Walter Wink points out in his book Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way. Equally important are the cultural norms of Jesus’s audience, whom scholars² have presumed to be mostly Palestinian Jews³ and possibly some Gentiles. These norms included prohibitions against using the left hand⁴, an association of the left hand with impurity and unholiness^5,6, and an association of the right hand with superiority and righteousness⁷. 

Given these associations (not to mention the predominance of right-handedness in the first century, just like today) Wink points out that the vast majority of Jesus’s audience would likely be using their right-hand to strike another person. He then calls our attention to the modern bias many of us may have when reading this passage to assume that such a strike is an open-handed slap or a full-on punch. Consider, though, how a slap or a punch with one’s right hand would end up on a victim’s left cheek. (Mime it out yourselves if you must—though please don’t actually hit someone in trying to understand this.) For someone’s right hand to strike the right side of someone else’s face the striker’s hand would need to be coming from the left side of their own body (e.g., raised across their own body). From this positioning it wouldn’t be the open palm or fist that would hit the victim’s right cheek but the back of the striker’s right hand. (Again, mime it out for yourselves to better understand. Still with the same caveat as above.)

We see in the Bava Kamma—one of several Talmudic texts written around 500 AD addressing civil concerns such as torts and damages, and thought to reflect the social and political norms of previous centuries—that using the back of the hand was considered more degrading⁸ than a slap with the palm. This is evidenced by the fact that backhanding someone incurred a stiffer financial penalty (400 dinars) than did striking another person with an open palm (which incurred a penalty of 200 dinars). Rather than being deployed in a violent brawl or instance of relentless abuse, backhanded strikes were generally seen as a means of insulting another person, or putting someone “in his or her ‘place,’” Wink argues⁹. 

The fines for such an aggressive insult corresponded with the victim’s level of honor: the higher the status of the victim, the greater the degree of humiliation a victim was thought to suffer¹⁰ and thus the stiffer the penalties became for the assailant. Likewise, the lower the status of the victim, the lower the fine. Assailants were exempt from fines altogether if the person they struck was considered their subordinate or their property—think: wives vis-a-vis their husbands¹¹, slaves vis-a-vis their masters, and children vis-a-vis their parents, Wink goes on to say.

If a victim were to turn the other cheek in this context, they would be inviting the striker to have another go at humiliating them. Almost as if to say, go ahead, keep trying to insult me. It didn’t work the first time. A provocative challenge, to say the least. One that communicates to the striker that the struck person hasn’t, in fact, been put in some assumed inferior place or degraded. They are not cowering. They are standing firm. Not in the place the assailant has attempted to push them down into, but in their own place. On their own terms.

In giving the assailant the opportunity to strike him once again in the degrading manner that is the backhanded slap, the victim who turns his cheek is also forcing his assailant into a very difficult position. Recall the cultural norms of the times coupled with the meaning of backhanded versus open-handed whacks. If the victim offers his left cheek after being struck on the right, this forces the assailant either to open-handedly slap the victim (which itself would communicate that the victim is of a higher status than the assailant’s initial use of his backhand suggested) or to strike the victim with his left hand (an embarrassing cultural faux-pas that would place the assailant in a position of suffering his own humiliation). “Even if he orders the [subordinate] flogged,” Wink argues¹², “the point has been irrevocably made. The oppressor has been forced, against his will, to regard this subordinate as an equal human being. The powerful person has been stripped of his power to dehumanize the other.”

There is another element of Jesus’s guidance here that I believe Christians can find inspiration in. Jesus is instructing his followers neither to react to a wrong by mimicking it (responding to aggression or humiliation with the same aggressive or humiliating act) nor to cower in a fear that conveys acceptance of a wrong behavior and its implied inequitable power dynamics (submission to humiliation or aggression). Instead, Jesus is offering what Wink calls a “third way” of responding (not reacting) to degrading treatment and abuses of power. By turning the other cheek and forcing the assailant into a position in which he himself would be humiliated (as a consequence of his own actions), the assailant experiences a shame comparable to that of the victim. This creates a possibility for (though by no means a guarantee of) empathy in the assailant—a seeing through the eyes or from the vantage point of the victim. By turning the other cheek, a victim is laying the grounds for a learning or teaching moment, wherein the potential exists for a form of conversion to occur in the assailant—a change of heart or a recognition of the wrongness of his actions, brought about by seeing and experiencing his behavior from a different point of view (that of the victim). This, in fact, was the means by which St. Peregrine is believed to have been converted: When a priest came to St. Peregrine’s hometown of Forli, Italy, in the 13th century to implore its inhabitants to return to God, St. Peregrine (then just Peregrine Laziosi) spoke out against the priest and slapped him across the face. When this priest turned his other cheek in response, St. Peregrine was himself struck—with the realization of what he had done. Moments after this event (after Peregrine had walked away) he experienced a Holy vision of a cross raised above his head, which galvanized him to seek out the priest he had slapped and beg for forgiveness. This launched his conversion to Catholicism and enrollment in a Servite monastery in Siena.

What a beautiful illustration of the Christian way. The teaching or modeling way. The non-reactive way. The loving way. Truly, Jesus is illustrating in Matthew 5:39 how it is we can love even our enemies¹³: by creating for them an opportunity to change their ways (via revealing to them a perspective they typically ignore). 

Footnotes

_{1. Matthew is more detailed in identifying exactly which cheek is in question here, unlike Luke who recalls the same speech without discerning between right or left: “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also” (Luke 6: 29).} 

_{2. Han, S., & Mitch, C. (Eds). Ignatius Catholic study Bible. Ignatius Press. (p. 4).}

^{3. The sermon is organized to mirror (and thus update and revise) the five books of Law (the Torah) given to the Jews via God’s revelation to Moses at Mount Sinai….Turn the other cheek is embedded in a teaching on retaliation: This teaching begins with a nod to the laws set forth in Deuteronomy 19:21, which outlines the punishment for false witness, and Exodus 21:23, which clarifies the punishment in response to causing injury to a pregnant woman above and beyond a miscarriage}.

^{4. Gillihan, Y. M. (2009). Posture or gesture? A note on לשח/לשוח in the Qumran penal codes. Revue de Qumrân, 24(2), 291-296.}

^{5.  Mishnah Zevachim 2:1: “If he collected the blood with his left hand, he disqualified the blood for offering.”}

^{Shabbat 88b: “To those who are right-handed in their approach to Torah, and engage in its study with strength, good will, and sanctity, Torah is a drug of life, and to those who are left-handed in their approach to Torah, it is a drug of death.”}

^{6. Wink references the Dead Sea Scrolls.}

^{7. Jacobs, J., & Eisenstein, J.D. (2021). Right and left. The Jewish Encyclopedia, 419-420.}

^{8. Mishnah Bava Kamma 8.6: ”If he slapped another on the cheek, he must give him two hundred dinars. If he slapped him on the cheek with the back of his hand, which is more degrading than a slap with the palm, he must give him four hundred dinars.”}

^{9.  Wink, W. (2003). Jesus and nonviolence. 1517 Media (p. 14).}

^{10. Mishnah Bava Kamma 8.6:: “This is the principle of assessing payment for humiliation caused to another: It is all evaluated in accordance with the honor of the one who was humiliated, as the Gemara will explain.”} 

^{11. Graetz, Naomi. (1999). Wifebeating in Jewish tradition. Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.}

^{12.  Wink, W. (2003). Jesus and nonviolence. 1517 Media (p. 16).}

^{13.  Which He instructs us to do in Matthew 5:44}

Copyright The Converted Catholic September 3, 2022