A Genuine Tough Guy? Check out Jesus

I grew up in Detroit and almost every guy I know from there likes to pretend that makes him something of a tough guy. “Detroit: where the weak are killed and eaten.” It’s a bumper sticker I’ve seen in Florida where I live now. I’ve never seen it in Detroit.
Despite what you may have heard, there are many well-to-do areas in metro Detroit—just as there are in places like Philly and Chicago. I actually did grow up in a pretty tough blue-collar neighborhood. Learning to fight was part of the maturation process for young males, even if you were a church-going Christian.
But the dangers of my neighborhood were nothing like those Jesus faced. In his day if you didn’t have status, if you weren’t in with the in-crowd—meaning the Romans—you had no rights. The occupiers could pretty much do whatever they wanted to you.
Jesus talks about it near the end of his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel and offers a formula for how a genuine tough guy who is also a man of peace stands up to abusers. Because the Romans didn’t want to encourage actual revolt, they put a limit on how they pushed around the locals. A soldier could grab any citizen and force him to carry his burden for a mile. No “thank you” or compensation required. It was a humiliation and showed the Jews who was boss. Jesus explained how to get even: When the mile is up, you say, “hey man, that was nothing—a walk in the park. I got another mile in me easy.” You’ve just killed two birds with one stone: first, you’ve told the oppressor “you can’t hurt me,” and second, you’ve saved some other poor soul from being the next victim.
In the same chapter Jesus says if someone, again meaning a Roman soldier or maybe a collaborator, strikes you on the right cheek, let him give you a shot to the left cheek too. The point here was that since most people are right-handed, a smack to the right cheek would be a back-hand—which is how someone would show they saw you as a weak underling—another humiliation. In saying give him the left cheek too, Jesus is saying stand up to the abuser in a non-violent way by saying “go ahead dude, smack me with a forehand—I’m as good as you and not a bit afraid or humiliated.”
Sometimes I get the impression every American male is trying to prove he’s a tough guy from Detroit, Philly, Chicago or the Bronx. It’s how we end up in unnecessary wars, or justify turning our backs on the weak. You want to see a real tough guy? Check out Jesus.