Hold on Lord! I am confused. “Offer no resistance to one who is evil?” Isn’t combatting evil in the world one of the things we are called to do?
My first inclination when confronting evil, especially that directed at me, is to respond with righteous wrath. It is like when I was a boy and one of my brothers would do me “bad,” it was time to do them “bad” in return. I don’t know how many times I heard from my mother and father, “two wrongs don’t make a right!”
I think this is essentially what Jesus is saying to us today. When we respond to evil/bad with evil/bad, we are just perpetuating the all too often escalating cycle of evil/bad. In doing so, we become instruments of evil rather than of God’s love. Jesus asks us to “kill” the evil/bad with kindness and love. This is exactly what Jesus did on the Cross.
—David McNulty works in the Operations office for the Midwest Jesuits.