Either/or. It’s a binary choice. In or out. On or off. Yes or no. Not a lot of extra wiggle room.

I remember being down in Mexico once when my grandparent’s neighbor came to the house with a machete, cursing my grandfather. I don’t remember the source of the guy’s irritation—maybe one of my grandfather’s dogs had killed one of his chickens or pigs—or knowing this guy, maybe one of my grandfather’s dogs didn’t bow appropriately in the presence of one of the guy’s chickens or pigs. I really don’t remember, only that he was vexed enough to swing a machete around my grandfather.

Now, I’m not a violent man, but you don’t get to threaten my family with a machete without me getting my econo-size box ‘o dander up. I said, “Grandpa, do you want me to take care of this guy?”

What I was going to do to a man flailing away with a machete wasn’t immediately clear to me. But I was, as we used to say in the mountains, fixin’ to find out.

My grandfather, a marine not necessarily opposed to violence, gave me one of those impatient grandfather-side-eyes and said, “Let me handle this.”

I figured that one of two things would happen: either my grandfather would beat this man senseless (or maybe I’d have to), or he’d cave in just to keep the peace. It didn’t occur to me that there were other options—but since they would have included some kind of bodily/legal harm to befall my grandfather or me—I didn’t think too much about them.

It didn’t turn out that way. My grandfather raised his hands and said, “Señor, do you really want to kill me?”

The angry neighbor shook his head. But, of course, that didn’t take care of the matter of his chicken or pig or whatever it was.

“Well, if killing me’s not at the top of your to-do list, perhaps we can figure out some way to fix this together. I’d rather have you as my neighbor than my enemy. I’m willing to buy you a new chicken to save us both a lot of heartache. Because if you kill me, you’re going to have a lot bigger problems than a dead animal—and me, I won’t have any problems anymore, but all the abandoned children I’m raising certainly will.”

The angry neighbor put the machete down, and my grandpa put his arm around the guy and walked him back to his house.

This or that. As I said, no other option occurred to me. Thankfully, my grandpa had already thought it through and found one.

Generally, that’s how we’ve been taught to treat Jesus’ odd lesson from the Gospel today: You can be strong and violent or weak and passive—your choice.

And because we know that Jesus couldn’t possibly mean that we should be passive, could never choose the negative side of the binary, commentators have spilled a lot of ink trying to get Jesus not to say what he said.

“Well, you know. Jesus didn’t literally mean “turn the other cheek. He meant, you know, be nice ... well, pretty nice.”

“But Jesus didn’t mean,” as one commentator suggested, “for us to let someone hit us twice without trying to defend ourselves against bodily harm. Only a nut teaches something like that.”

See how it works? You can be violent and strong, or you can be non-violent and a nut. Your choice. Even some of God’s smartest people will tell you that, in reality, there’s not even really a choice at all. You’ve got to fight back.

But what if the world isn’t made up entirely of either/or-s, split down the middle, drawing a line between good and evil, strong and weak, violent and nonviolent?

What if there’s another way? What if Jesus is pointing to the radical nature of God’s unfolding reign and setting down the ground rules for those who want to participate in it?

In today’s Gospel, Jesus does something radical. He talks about violence and retaliation. That he doesn’t insist that his followers become ancient Judean versions of Batman, confronting evil and beating it down, should surprise no one who knows much about him. Unlike other messiahs, he’s not a leader for whom retribution is the primary motivation.

On the other hand, Jesus doesn’t insist that his followers become a doormat to anyone with a surly attitude and the power to enforce it either. Unlike popular conceptions of Jesus’ ethics, he isn’t laying the groundwork for what Nietzsche called “slave morality”—the denial of true goodness and nobility by making a virtue of necessity in insisting that weakness and humility are instead excellent and noble things.