By The Rev. J.C. Austin
What is the relatively insignificant hill that you are most willing to die on? It’s a question that bubbles up on social media from time to time, which is a little ironic, given just how much of social media is taken up on a daily basis by people fighting to the death with each other over pointless hills in language, culture, relationships, and so on.
But it is both entertaining and enlightening to see some of the 
most popular answers. There are the style guide nerds who line up to battle to the death over whether the Oxford comma should be consigned to the ash heap of history, or is actually the only thing keeping our communication from descending into the guttural howls of chimpanzees.
There are the fire-and-brimstone street prophets who consign every sinner to the flames of perdition that tries to get on an elevator without first letting the people on the elevator get out. And there are the film aficionados who go more rounds than old-time bare-knuckle boxers over whether that door that Rose was floating on at the end of Titanic had room for Jack.
But perhaps the greatest of all the unimportant hills that one might choose is the definition of the word “literally.” There are people who are otherwise perfectly stable that I have seen engage this subject with such outrage and energy that I thought their heads might literally explode. (A couple of you are having trouble even with me dancing near the edge of a figurative use of “literally” right there; I can see your eyes twitching from here.)
Now as a person who is semi-obsessed with semantics and believes that words and their usage have extraordinary power, I can understand how that one might be hard to take. After all, the word “literally” literally means “in a literal sense or manner; with exact equivalence; in a completely accurate way.”[i]
So to use the word “literally” figuratively can sound crazy if you take it seriously: “ugh, it was so cold yesterday I literally froze to death before I could get my car unlocked.” Obviously, if you’re still alive and mobile enough to tell the story, you didn’t literally freeze to death. So why are you saying you did?
Well, contrary to what most of the literal “literally” crowd seem to believe, the figurative crowd doesn’t do it because they don’t know any better. It’s not like “literally” is some obscure word that nobody really knows the definition of. On the contrary, that’s why it’s a good word to use figuratively; it’s just hyperbole, a rhetorical exaggeration to make a point. I mean, just imagine how cold it would have had to have been to make you freeze to death before you could get your car unlocked! If it felt so cold that it made you think about that, it must have been pretty darn cold.
But neither the storyteller nor the listener here literally thought that she was literally at risk of freezing to death before she could unlock her car, nor were they confused about the literal meaning of the word “literally.” The impossibility of the exaggeration is the whole point of saying it in the first place.
And, in fact, the figurative use of the word “literally” is not some recent phenomenon of our linguistically degenerate age, as some seem to believe, especially when Merriam-Webster added a second meaning to its dictionary entry a few years that said, “used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement that is not literally true or possible.” But that’s not actually new; you can find examples of it going back centuries, including by authors like Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Our passage from Luke today, though, is one of the great equalizers on the whole question of the literal vs. figurative use of the word literally. There are whole streams of Christianity that pride themselves on reading the Bible literally, and who excoriate those who dare to say that Scripture often has multiple layers of meaning: literal, figurative, metaphorical, rhetorical, and so on.
The thing is though, they’re not being completely honest, with themselves or with anyone else. Oh, they think they are, but at some point their commitment to absolute literalism breaks down. To cite just one example, most Christian Biblical literalists agree on at least nine of the Ten Commandments, but would consider the one about keeping the Sabbath day holy nonbinding, despite the fact that it contains no loopholes in regards to keeping covenantal faithfulness to God’s Law and God’s will.
When it comes to the New Testament, though, this passage contains perhaps the greatest collection of shoals on which the ships of Biblical literalism founder. In fact, Jesus comes right out of the gate with it. “I say to you that listen,” he begins, because he knows that some of the crowd may have already tuned him out.
This passage makes up part of the Sermon on the Plain, which is Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus has just gotten through saying a bunch of crazy stuff like “blessed are you who are poor or hungry or weeping or persecuted because of me,” and “woe to you who are rich or satisfied or laughing or spoken well of by others.” For those that are still with him, though, he takes up a few notches.
“Love your enemies,” he begins, and if anything, it goes downhill from there: “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you,” he says. “if anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also….If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?…If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?….But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.”
As crazy as all this sounds to us, it would have sounded even crazier to a first century audience. In this passage, Jesus is doing nothing less than upending and tossing out the entire set of assumptions and systems and practices that governed both economic and social life in the Ancient Near East. The ethic of reciprocity was one of the foundational elements of Near Eastern culture, and it governed nearly every personal relationship in free society.
To give something to someone, from a gift to a slap, meant that you could and should expect them to reciprocate with something equivalent, and that you had the right and expectation to do so if they gave something to you. The art was doing so with someone who was within a few layers of your social status, up or down. If you gave a gift or did a favor for someone a few degrees higher than you, and they accepted and eventually reciprocated, your own social standing would go up a notch or two.
If they refused, then it meant you had overreached, and your own standing would go down a few ticks. And you obviously wouldn’t and couldn’t show anything to an enemy other than rejection and opposition and conflict, or you were tacitly accepting their power and dominance over you, like a wolf that rolls over and shows its belly to the Alpha wolf of the pack as a sign of submission. In such a world, there was no clear distinction between social and economic interactions, because they were all governed by the same dynamics of reciprocity.
It is not as if our world is free of dynamics of reciprocity; certainly there are many transactional relationships, whether business or personal, that operate under the edict of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” But it was so much more extreme in the Ancient Near East than anything in our experience that it’s difficult to fully wrap our minds around it.
The closest I can come to it is an episode of the British TV show Black Mirror, which has a different story in every episode that is usually some kind of dystopian take on the impact of technology on human life set in the near future. In the episode entitled “Nosedive,” society has adopted a social network that allows you to rate any kind of interaction you have with another person on a scale of 1 to 5 stars.
Those people who have accumulated a high personal rating have access to the best of everything, from monetary loans to restaurant reservations and even things like medical procedures. The main character is a woman named Lacie who needs to raise her rating from 4.2 to 4.5 to get a discount on the expensive apartment she wants, but she can’t seem to get her rating higher no matter how nice she is to everyone she meets.
Lacie hires a rating consultant who tells her she needs to get positive ratings from people with a very high score, and so she seeks out a childhood friend with a 4.8 score and manipulates her into giving her five stars for posting a picture online of a ragdoll they made together as children. But then a few chance mishaps and mistakes knock her rating back down again, and her life quickly begins spinning out of control as her plummeting score closes door after door on her even as she desperately tries to set things right.
If that was how our world actually worked, we’d be close to understanding the way the ethic of reciprocity functioned during the time of Jesus’ ministry, and thus close to understanding just how radical what he’s saying here really is.
Those in the crowd who managed to listen all the way through would have been looking at each other in wonder and confusion and discomfort, probably before he even finished, and said to one another, “is he serious? He can’t literally mean any of this, right? He doesn’t mean we literally literally need to love our enemies, does he? To give and lend to others, expecting nothing in return? To turn the other cheek when someone backhands us on the first one?”
Though given how that last one has been used to coerce the acceptance of abuse, it’s important to say that in first century culture, turning the other cheek would have been an assertion of one’s honor and dignity and value, but without resorting to the expected violent defense of it. It’s actually the opposite of submitting to violence, because doing so would then challenge the honor of the slapper who thought they could treat you like a slave.
The equivalent today would not be submitting to abuse, but walking out and filing charges rather than pulling a gun. Even so, though, these teachings of Jesus ask a whole lot of us now, and was asking almost everything in the first century. Certainly many if not most Christians throughout the ages, including the most literal of literalists, have responded to these teachings with some version of, “no, he’s speaking figuratively, even though it sounds like he’s saying we should literally do these things.
But speaking literally literally here would be crazy, impractical, maybe even impossible. No, he’s just trying to inspire us to be a little bit kinder, a little bit more generous, a little bit more loving as we go about our normal lives. He’s just speaking in an exaggerated way to emphasize what he’s saying.”
The thing is, there is zero reason to think that Jesus meant anything other than we are literally literally to live this way as his followers, other than the fact that we just really don’t want to do it. Nothing about the text, nothing about the setting, nothing about the teachings themselves, nothing about Jesus himself, suggests that there’s anything figurative here at all.
In fact, what Jesus is pretty clearly saying is the opposite of figurative: I’m not interested in making this world a little bit kinder, a little more generous, a little bit more loving; I want to completely transform the whole thing, so that people treat each other not based on what they think they can get in return, not even just based on how they themselves want to be treated, but on how God treats us: “be merciful,” Jesus says, summing up that whole section; “be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”
And there is the good news in this challenging passage today. Because Jesus is not calling us to measure up to these extraordinarily high, even seemingly impossible, standards. Jesus is inviting us to measure down from the way God treats us; for us to reflect God’s love and mercy in and through our lives with everyone we meet, to align ourselves with and utilized the standards of measurement in the realm of God: not what we can get away with, not what we’re obligated to, not what we deserve or expect, but the overflowing abundance of God, like a grain merchant who fills up the container, presses it down and shakes it together to cram in even more, until it overflows the container and spills into our lap, running down across the floor.
That is how Jesus calls us to live our lives of faith and discipleship as we follow him. And if and when we do so, however imperfectly, but literally, we find that we have far more to give and share than we ever imagined, and that the joy and reward is always in the giving, and the sharing, and the loving; literally, literally always.
[i] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally