Jesus-shaped pacifism is still aggressive—it’s just differently aggressive. It’s a unique way of acting that challenges difficult situations by flipping the script. Jesus proposes several ideas to provoke the imagination in such directions:
If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek for them to slap and see what happens. Will they actually slap you again? Will they suddenly come to terms with themselves? Will anyone watching really choose the aggressor’s side after that?
If someone sues you for your shirt, give them your cloak too. Will they feel sickened by your offer? Will they still be able to take joy in their winnings? Will they start to realize that they have become petty enough to try to take your shirt in the first place?
If a soldier demeans you by using their legal rights to force you to carry their belongings for a mile, offer to walk an extra mile. Will they start to sweat at your kindness? Will all of the insults they made and expectations they set over the last mile start to feel gross to them? Will they even want you to do another mile? And if they don’t, then why did they make you do the first mile?
Jesus gives these examples to inspire us to choose a new Spirit-led way of responding to difficulty. They are not precise commands of what to do if you find yourself in these exact situations, for there is often more than one Jesus-like reaction in every situation. The problem is that we never experiment enough to learn this lesson, for we are more prone to choose the body’s way of fight, flight, freeze, or flop.
Jesus calls us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. These jarring examples that invite us to do jarring things are his classic examples of what this wise innocence looks like.
What is your normal reaction to the difficult situation you’ve been facing that never seems to go away? What might it look like to choose the backward ways of Jesus, where even persecution on a cross turns into resurrection on a throne?
Jamin Bradley 
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