You know about turning the other cheek. But did you know Jesus names the right cheek, and that a blow there was a special kind of insult?
39 But I tell you, don’t resist him who is evil; but whoever strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also.
Matthew 5:39, World English Bible
The story around it
Notice one small word: right. Matthew’s Greek has it, “whoever strikes you on your right cheek”. Luke’s version has only “the cheek”.
Almost everyone used the right hand, and a right hand reaches another person’s right cheek with its back. That made it an insult more than an attack. Jewish law, written down some generations later in the Mishnah, doubled the fine: two hundred dinars for a slap, four hundred for a blow with the back of the hand.
Why not the left hand? The writer Walter Wink said it was kept for unclean tasks and never used in public. One old rule points that way: the community at Qumran, of the Dead Sea Scrolls, gave a member ten days of penance for drawing out his left hand to gesture with it. That is evidence from one strict community. The rest is Wink’s reading.
He saw something daring here. A backhand put a slave in his place. Turn the other cheek and the backhand no longer works: only the fist is left, and fists, Wink said, were for equals. Without a word the one who was struck has said: I am a human being, as you are.
Wink read the next two scenes the same way. The law of Moses made a lender return a poor man’s pledged garment by sunset, for he had nothing else to sleep in. Hand over the other garment too, and the debtor stands naked. The shame, Wink said, falls on the one who looks, as when Noah lay uncovered and two of his sons walked in backwards so as not to see.
The verb compels comes back in Matthew when soldiers made Simon of Cyrene carry the cross. Wink adds that a soldier could demand only one mile, so a second mile broke military rules. That is his suggestion: we found no ancient law that sets such a limit, and other scholars doubt it.
Not every scholar reads these scenes as protest. Some hear a simpler command, not to repay in kind. On either reading this is not weakness. A blow, a lawsuit or a soldier can take much from you, but not the way you answer. That stays yours unless you give it up.
One reading of the evidence. Scholars differ, and the sources are listed below.
What others have said
But the New Testament produced a different impression, especially the Sermon on the Mount which went straight to my heart.
Mohandas Gandhi, Hindu leader of India’s independence movement, in his autobiography. Source
The moment
Word had spread. Jesus had been going through Galilee healing “every disease and every sickness among the people”, and by now crowds were following him from as far as Jerusalem and the far side of the Jordan. They were not the powerful. They were the sick, their families and the people who had carried them there. Matthew says that when Jesus looked at crowds like this he saw people “harassed and scattered, like sheep without a shepherd”.
He went up the hillside and sat down, and his disciples gathered close. Many readers have felt the echo: long before, Moses had gone up a mountain and come down with God’s law. Now a teacher sits on a mountain and says, again and again, “But I tell you”.
What stands around it
The rule Jesus quotes, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”, was not cruelty. In the law of Moses it told judges to make the penalty fit the harm (Exodus 21:23-25). It was justice with a measure.
Jesus does not call it wrong. He asks for something no court can order. He gives four small scenes from ordinary life: a blow to the cheek, a lawsuit over a coat, being forced to go a mile, someone asking for a loan. Each time the answer gives more than was taken. And then he says the hardest thing of all: “love your enemies”.
Two of those scenes echo other pages of the Bible. The law of Moses let a lender take a garment as a pledge, but not keep it overnight: “you shall restore it to him before the sun goes down, for that is his only covering, it is his garment for his skin. What would he sleep in?” Deuteronomy says it again: “If he is a poor man, you shall not sleep with his pledge.”
The verb for being forced to go a mile was a word for being pressed into service, and Matthew uses it again on the way to the cross. As the soldiers led Jesus out, they found a man of Cyrene named Simon, “and they compelled him to go with them, that he might carry his cross.”
What happened next
Jesus did not leave this teaching on the hillside. On the night of his arrest one of his disciples, Peter in John’s account, drew a sword and cut off a servant’s ear. Jesus told him, “Put your sword back into its place, for all those who take the sword will die by the sword.”
Then the blows came to him. Before the council “they spat in his face and beat him with their fists, and some slapped him”, and mocked him to guess who had hit him. He did not strike back. He did not call it right either. In John’s account, when an officer slapped him for his answer, Jesus asked, “if well, why do you beat me?” And on the cross, Luke records, he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”
And the man compelled to carry his cross? Mark calls Simon of Cyrene “the father of Alexander and Rufus”, as if his first readers knew those sons. The Bible says nothing more about Simon himself.
Stephen, the first of Jesus’ followers whose death Acts tells, answered the way his Lord had. As the stones struck him, he knelt and cried out, “Lord, don’t hold this sin against them!” A young man named Saul stood by, and Acts says he was “consenting to his death.” Years later that same man, now the apostle Paul, wrote to the believers in Rome: “Repay no one evil for evil.”
How people have read it
Few sentences have been argued over as much as this one.
Some have taken it with complete literalness: a follower of Jesus may never answer force with force, for any reason.
Walter Wink heard the opposite of passivity: a way for people without power to stand up without striking back.
Many churches have taught a third reading. Jesus, they say, forbids personal revenge, while protecting other people and the work of courts and governments are a separate question.
And some scholars warn against turning the saying into a rule book at all. They read it as wisdom for the heart, to be applied with judgment.
What all these readings share is the thing Jesus plainly forbids: paying a person back in the coin they used on you.
Who has argued over it
In 1884, in a book called What I Believe, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy described the day this verse opened up for him: I understood that Jesus meant neither more nor less than what he said. Do not meet evil with force. Those words became the key to the rest of Jesus’ teaching for him, and later he wrote a whole book about them, The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Russia banned it, and it was first printed in Germany in 1894.
A young Indian lawyer in South Africa read that book. Mohandas Gandhi was a Hindu, not a Christian, yet he wrote: Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You overwhelmed me. It left an abiding impression on me. The two men wrote to each other until Tolstoy died in 1910, and Gandhi went on to lead campaigns of resistance without violence.
In 1950 a seminary student named Martin Luther King Jr. heard a talk about Gandhi’s life. Five years later, as a Baptist pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, he put Gandhi’s method into practice during the bus boycott. Threats came against his life, and in the end he decided against armed bodyguards. Looking back in 1960, he wrote that Christ gave the movement its spirit and Gandhi gave it its method.
Not everyone was persuaded. In Detroit in November 1963, while Black churches in the South were being bombed, Malcolm X asked how anyone could stay nonviolent under that. He told his audience: You don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution.
So one verse runs through a Russian novelist, a Hindu lawyer, a Baptist preacher and a Muslim minister. Some heard in it the bravest kind of strength. Others heard a call to accept what should never be accepted. The argument is still going on.
Background from outside the Bible. The sources are listed below.
What the context adds
Jesus forbids hitting back. That much is plain. The small word right suggests he has more than injury in view, and so do the lawsuit over a coat and the forced mile: he is speaking to people who know what it is to be shamed, sued and pressed into service. He does not tell them the shame is deserved. He shows them a way to keep their dignity without taking anyone else’s.
He also knew what this teaching would cost. Later he warned that following him would divide even families: “A man’s foes will be those of his own household.”
What it means for you
Someone has probably hurt you in a way that still stings: a cutting remark in front of others, a deal that cheated you, a demand you could not refuse. Everything in you wants to pay it back in the same coin. Jesus asks you not to.
That is not the same as pretending it never happened. When an officer struck Jesus, he asked why. You may name a wrong plainly. Nor does this passage ask you to stay where you are being harmed. Jesus himself told his disciples, “when they persecute you in this city, flee into the next”. Getting away from a blow is not paying it back.
What Jesus asks goes further than holding back. A few verses later he says, “pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you”. So start there. Bring the person who hurt you to God by name, even if today all you can honestly pray is that God would help you want their good. On the cross Jesus prayed for the men who put him there, and Stephen prayed for the men throwing stones.
If you do not share this faith, the passage still holds something true: a blow returned usually invites another, and someone has to be the one who stops.
Other verses that say it too
If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat. If he is thirsty, give him water to drink;
Proverbs 25:21. Long before Jesus, Proverbs asked for more than holding back: “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat.” Kindness to an enemy is older than the Sermon on the Mount.
I gave my back to those who beat me, and my cheeks to those who plucked off the hair. I didn’t hide my face from shame and spitting. For the Lord GOD will help me. Therefore I have not been confounded. Therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I won’t be disappointed.
Isaiah 50:6-7. Isaiah’s servant gives “my cheeks to those who plucked off the hair” and still says, “I have set my face like a flint”. He takes the shame without returning it, and without losing himself.
Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Romans 12:21. Paul does not stop at holding back a blow: “Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” It is the same turn Jesus makes, from not paying back to giving more.
When he was cursed, he didn’t curse back. When he suffered, he didn’t threaten, but committed himself to him who judges righteously.
1 Peter 2:23. A letter in Peter’s name, from the disciple who once drew a sword, points to Jesus at his trial: “When he was cursed, he didn’t curse back.”
Why we say this
Bible passages this page rests on, in the World English Bible:
Written with the help of an AI model. Scripture quotations are checked against the World English Bible. Approved by HisFullGlory. Not reviewed by a theological reader.
