Revenge is sweet, they say. I found a new web site this week after it was written up in The Wall Street Journal. Just click on www.revengeunlimited.com and you can devise your strategy for redressing wrongs done to you by ex-lover louses, Judas-kiss friends, bossy bosses, nuisance neighbors, or sour siblings. Some of the more popular items are a box of melted chocolates, a dozen long-stemmed red roses spray-painted black, a bouquet of wilted daisies, itching powder, a dribble cup, pepper gum, and assorted other gems unmentionable in a G-rated sermon. The cruelest of all, I think, is for a balding man— Preparation Z: shrinks your head to fit the hair remaining on it. And what day do you suppose is the most popular and profitable holiday for revenge? Valentine’s Day, naturally.

Now most of these are done in good fun, but the spirit of revenge is rife among us. And part of that spirit is a rightful desire for justice. We don’t want people treated wrongly, especially if those people are "me," don’t you know?! Which is all the more reason why we have a hard time with Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain here in Luke 6. Just listen again to some of the pearls of this cockeyed wisdom: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. … Do not judge, … do not condemn, … forgive.

So, okay. Here’s what I’m thinking: Yeah, Lord, but what about…? I mean, do you know how mean she was to me? Do you realize what he said about me, Lord? Lord, don’t you think he needs to be held accountable for what he’s done? How will he repent and become a good person if I don’t point out his faults to him?

Somehow I think when we think that way we forget who we are talking to. We’re talking to the man who was hanging on a cross with nails through his hands and feet, spit covering his body, blood running down back from the cat-o’-nine-tails’ lashes and from his brow from the crown of thorns. And from that position, with whatever breath left in him, he prayed, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

There was a letter to the editor this week in The Dallas Morning News in response to the story about a young Mormon boy on mission in Dallas who was brutally beaten by thugs. Seventeen-year-old Elder Burke Jensen has made a miraculous recovery, but when asked about his attitude toward his attackers, he said he has only "good thoughts." So Brian Pearson of Arlington wrote: Why should anyone have "good thoughts" about people who’ve attacked you? Does this have to do with that nonsense from the Bible about turning the other cheek when slapped?

Well, yes, Brian, it does. Whether it is nonsense, though, is quite another thing. Are revenge and anger and bitterness and hatred really the only kinds of sense we can make out of bad things that happen to us? Is that the full range of our imagination? If so, what separates us from animals who are programmed to strike back when threatened. We may have fewer genes this week than we thought we had last week, but the few uniquely human genes that separate us from animals still allow us to think before we act.

A few years ago Jeff Patton told me about stumbling onto something tragically macabre while hunting. He came upon the sun-bleached antlers of two bucks. Their bony carcasses lay in the dirt facing one another, having been picked over by other creatures. What had happened was obvious. The two deer had probably fought over a doe—what else? They butted heads and got their horns all tangled up. Try as they might, they remained connected in their aggression until they finally died together.

Isn’t that the way it is with us? We think we’re going to get even and the only even we get is to be equally tied together in a death dance. We go back and forth in a cycle of vengeance, fighting word for word, if not fist to fist, until the last life goes out of us both.

I have a particular weakness for this when it comes to people who leave our church and bad-mouth it. Maybe we didn’t satisfy expectations for their youth, or give them positions fitting their eminent gifts, or sing the hymns they wanted, or have the preacher pay special attention to them. Whatever. Sometimes I do okay, sometimes I take it personally, and sometimes I don’t take it lying down. Unfortunately, I still have to see them at parents’ night at school or in the cereal aisle at the grocery store or in the stands at a football game. I don’t want them to think it’s all fine and dandy with me the way they have behaved. (I am of course perfectly innocent in every case.) I usually pretend not to notice them. If that doesn’t work, I grit my teeth and try to be pleasant.

That’s what strikes me so much about the end of this story of Joseph and his brothers. It says that after forgiving them, he kissed them and wept. Then this line: after that his brothers talked with him. Anybody in your life you avoid or talk about but don’t feel like you can ever talk with? It’s a beautiful picture of reconciliation— Joseph and his brothers, isn’t it? Just talking with each other. Catching up. Asking about Dad, their wives and kids. It’s not small talk when it’s brothers and friends doing the talking.

So how was all that possible? When we pick up the story, Joseph’s brothers have appeared in Egypt looking for relief from the famine back home. It turns out their estranged brother just so happens to be in charge of the food supply. Imagine that! The problem is, as well as things turned out for Joseph, the reason he is in Egypt at all is because of the jealousy of his brothers. He was his father Jacob’s favorite son, the eldest of his union with Rachel. Joseph’s ten half-brothers hated the way Dad doted over him. So they sold him into slavery and told the old man he was dead.

Now if we look closely, we might say that things unraveled in an unholy way because one sin was piled atop another. Jacob was wrong to love one son more than the others. Joseph enjoyed his favorite son role and seemed to rub their noses in it. The ten brothers lied and connived to rid themselves of Joseph. And once in Egypt he probably copped the same attitude and found his fortunes rising and falling more than the NASDAQ Composite Index.

When Joseph finally has his chance at revenge, though, he does something remarkable. He tells his brothers not to be angry with themselves or distressed about what they had done. It was really God who sent Joseph to Egypt for just such a time, in order to preserve life.

Now parenthetically, notice: only Joseph could have come up with this insight. Imagine the brothers approaching him and saying, Now listen, Joseph. We know you think it was a bad thing we did to you, but really it was a good thing. In fact, it was a God thing. God made us do it so that you could be in a position to save the family. I don’t think so. This is something only the victim can really come to. It is the gift of spiritual insight that the victimizer cannot suggest.

A husband who beats his wife can’t quote Jesus and tell her that she should turn the other cheek, since God is surely using his rage to bring something good out of it for her. No, to turn the other cheek means to stand up to your abuser nonviolently and hold him accountable. In the case of an abused wife, turning the other cheek might mean calling 911! Getting slapped on the right cheek meant to be backhanded across the mouth in that culture and thus insulted. To offer the left cheek was a defiant yet nonviolent way of resisting the belittling. Jesus words should not be taken to mean that we are to stand idly by and let abusers hurt us or others without resistance.

Joseph did not see the need to treat his abusive brothers the same as he had been treated because he saw something they failed to see. He saw how God had worked things out to preserve life rather than to ruin it. And this is just the insight we need if we are to be life preservers in the world and not death purveyors.

Of course Joseph didn’t know it right away. He wasn’t riding off in a caravan to Egypt thanking God that this would be a good thing for him. He didn’t lie awake at night in an Egyptian jail thinking about how God would reverse his fortunes. He simply learned to leave room for God to turn evil into good without taking things into his own hands. God doesn’t do evil in order to bring about good, but God can take our evil and bend it to the good in order that life and not death will have the last word.

Do you remember the Victor Hugo story Les Miserables? The escaped convict Jean Valjean is hiding from the authorities with a good bishop. Valjean repays the kindness by stealing the bishop’s silverware. When he is caught and brought back to the bishop, the good man of God says that no, he didn’t steal the silverware; it was a gift. Then he holds out some candlesticks and reminds Valjean that he had given those to him also. By returning good for evil, the bishop marked Valjean with grace and gave him a chance at life. He was a life preserver.

Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu is one of the finest spiritual and moral leaders of our time. During the stifling years of apartheid policies in South Africa, when the native black majority were relegated to second- class citizens, the small man Tutu stood tall. He always believed freedom would come because evil’s days are always numbered. Tutu headed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the years following the change. We all know about Nelson Mandela, but Tutu, speaking in Toronto a year ago, recalled the many tales of otherwise anonymous people who came before the panel.

One such woman was Mrs. Savage. Injured in a hand grenade attack by one of the liberation movements, she ended up in intensive care. When she came out of the hospital, she was still so badly injured that her children bathed her, clothed her, and fed her. She told the commission that she couldn’t go through security at the airport because she still had shrapnel in her and all sorts of alarms would go off. When asked to speak about the significance of the experience that left her in that condition, she said, It has enriched my life! She said she would like to meet the perpetrator—she, a white woman, and he, almost certainly, a black man — in the spirit of forgiveness. Then Tutu continued, She would like to forgive him [which was wonderful], and then extraordinarily she added, And I hope he forgives me. Now that is almost mind-boggling.

Unless you have the mind of Jesus, that is. Jesus’ wisdom, that Joseph before him practiced, makes life preservers out of us.

See, they’re wrong in what they say: revenge is really sour. Grace, on the other hand, grace is sweet. And amazing.