The late John Courtney Murray, S.J., once told me that at a convention he attended, a Protestant theologian said to him in a rather worried tone of voice, “I don’t see how we can base a foreign policy on the Sermon on the Mount.” Replied Fr. Murray, “I never thought we could.” He was right, too. One need only read the following passage from the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:38-42) to see that, whatever it is, it is not a prescription for a foreign policy.

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone who would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you.

Even in matters closer to home than foreign policy, these words of Our Lord do not prescribe a set of rules to be followed to the letter. Anyone who has lived or worked in a parish rectory is acquainted with the stream of panhandlers, grifters, and confidence men who come to the door looking for handouts, and know that in order to keep funds to help the really needy, it is often necessary not to give to those who beg and to refuse those who want to borrow. We all know that civilization would collapse if we repealed the criminal law and never resisted evil men. Civilization would be in equal peril if we got rid of the civil law and saved people the trouble of suing us by immediately giving them whatever they wanted and more besides. But if we know that much, we may presume that Christ knew it, too.

We shall make more sense of the Sermon on the Mount if we do not think of it as an early edition of the Code of Canon Law or a proposal that we renounce the rule of law altogether in order to live on love alone. It is, after all, what it is usually called, a sermon. As such, it is an exhortation, not a set of rules. What it exhorts us to do is give up certain very natural human attitudes and replace them with opposite and supernatural ones.

If we look at small children—those cute and lovable little kids—we see in them a number of unlovable attitudes which no one has to teach them. They know instinctively the difference between mine and thine, and while this does not stop them from grabbing what is thine, it makes them loudly possessive of what they regard as “mine.” The urge to retaliate and to return injury for injury is also inborn and strong in them. If someone calls them a name, they have to call him a nastier one. If someone hits them, they have to hit him back. These childish propensities, if left unchecked by oral and religious training, grow and wax stronger in later life, producing antisocial monsters. Even with the best of training, few of us outgrow them entirely.

It is these selfish, possessive, and revengeful traits of our fallen human nature that the Sermon on Mount addresses. It speaks deliberately in exaggerated and hyperbolic language because it aims at bringing about a change of mind and heart and not laying down a fixed code of action. Our Lord does not command us to let people walk over us whenever they want. But we’ll be easier to live with and we’ll contribute more to civilization if our first impulse is to turn the other cheek rather than to let someone have it between the eyes. We may even say that we’ll have a civilization worth defending only if it has people in it who are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount to heart.

Christians, God knows, have often made a travesty of Christian civilization. Our Christian faith carries on an unequal and frequently losing battle with our natural passions. Yet it is well for us that the battle is fought at all.

I recall something I heard from a friend of mine in the Foreign Service when I visited him in the Middle Eastern country in which he was then stationed. It was a remark the Italian ambassador to that country had made to him: “I never realized how much a Christian I am until I came here—these people don’t understand mercy.”

The great tyrants of our century, who slaughtered human beings by the tens of millions, have been emancipated ex-Christians like Stalin and Hitler, who dismissed the Sermon on the Mount as sentimentalism, or pagans turned atheists, like Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot, who possibly never heard of it. Their policies, foreign and domestic, would doubtless have been less “realistic” if they had been tempered by any degree of Christian sentiment. But how much of their kind of realism can the world stand?

Before we reject the Sermon on the Mount as hopelessly unrealistic, we ought to ask ourselves whether we should want to live in a place where everyone was of that opinion. I am thinking of a place where people constantly try to beat each other out, where everyone grabs, where no one lets anyone get ahead of him, where no slight or injury is left without retaliation; where the highest wisdom is, don’t get mad, get even; where the highest form of wit is the one-liner that leaves its victim helpless and humiliated; where, at least in certain circles and in certain parts of town, the life of a man is, in the familiar phrase, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

If you would really like to live in such a place, let me know and I’ll send you a bumper sticker that reads, “I Love New York.” Or, if that seems too harsh a judgment on my native city and its genial population, let me send you a neatly hand-lettered sign that says simply, “Go to Hell.” Hell, you know, is where no one takes the Sermon on the Mount seriously.