Pistorius: Eye for an eye makes us blind to Christ

While many South Africans demand an eye for an eye punishment for Oscar Pistorius, NEIL MITCHELL OP believes that real justice can be found in Christ – even if for some Free State barbers Christian justice is for sissies.

Ou Willie was glad to have a customer as times are tough in this Free State town with its dwindling white population, where he has his business. As he got me settled in the chair for my haircut, the radio still on loud, he began holding forth about what sentence he thought Oscar Pistorius should get.

As is common in his profession, Ou Willie is a great raconteur. He lamented that South Africa no longer has the death penalty, but thought that if Oscar was made to work for the rest of his life in a mortuary washing bodies of shooting and stabbing victims seven days a week, that might be punishment enough. Ek is wreed, ne?, he laughed.

With his mane of white hair, wizened face and twinkling blue eyes, Ou Willie is quite a character. He became a barber, he says, because his father told him he was too dom to do anything else. Although he insists he respects all people, and although his compassionate side often shines through, he uses the k-word as a matter of course to refer to black people, and tells crude racist jokes.

Sometimes when I’m waiting for a haircut in this little enclave of the old white South Africa that is Ou Willie’s barbershop, paging through the only reading material he provides, the Volksblad, my ears burn as I overhear the conversations he has with the ou toppies who come for their monthly haircut. It is intriguing to hear these Afrikaners trying to cope with their loss of power in the new realigned South Africa. They sigh with resignation as they mutter about the potholes, Zuma and his wives, and the lack of rain. They don’t mind Mmusi Maimane  he can’t be too bad because he has a white wife, jy weet  and they even admit to a sneaking admiration for the way Julius Malema and his EFF are taking on the ANC.

Ou Willie is fascinated that I’m from the Roomse Kerk, and asks me all about it. He himself is staunchly NG Kerk, although he admits to an occasional diversion to the Lighuiskerk, one of several independent evangelical churches that have sprung up in the town. We have wonderful religious discussions, and I try gently to challenge him on his racist attitudes, but it’s a bit risky when he’s got a sharp razor in his hand, a few centimetres from my throat. I once dared say to him after one of his racist comments, Nee, man, nou praat meneer lelik. Dis nie mooi vir ‘n Christen mens nie, and was relieved when I got away with it.

On the radio, Judge Masipa was now talking about the need for justice to be tempered with mercy. Ou Willie objected, saying he believes what the Bible says, which is eye for an eye. When I told him eye for an eye was in the Old Testament, he asked where. I told him it’s in Exodus, and that Jesus had kind-of replaced it in the Sermon on the Mount with do not retaliate in kind. This was news to him.

I gave him my take on what Jesus was up to. Jesus was trying to take us to a deeper understanding of moral behaviour and human relationships that were not based on retribution, and certainly not on violent retribution. But Ou Willie was having none of it. Nee man, he said, that’s for sissies. People must be severely punished when they do wrong; that’s how his father brought him up, and anyway, Oscar not only looks like a woman but also screams like a woman. It seemed that for Ou Willie, that in itself was reason enough to punish Oscar severely.

And even if Jesus said that about turning the other cheek, Ou Willie nevertheless reckoned that he would just have to switch between the Old and New Testaments as circumstances dictated, soos dit my pas. I told him that Gandhi had said that eye-for-an-eye will end up making the whole world blind, but I think it may have been lost on this old dyed-in-the-wool Calvinist.

As I was making my way to my next appointment, Ou Willie’s cafeteria Christianity made me wonder whether we have lost Jesus’ central Gospel message, and regressed to the very things Jesus worked hard to overturn with his new consciousness. How could someone with a lifetime of churchgoing in a denomination that gives the highest place to preaching the Word not know that eye-for-an-eye is pass?

But perhaps I should not be surprised, because Jesus’ improvement turn the other cheek, give your undergarment as well, go a second mile  has been so trivialised and dumbed down that what Jesus actually meant has been distorted into the very opposite of what Jesus meant. These sayings make sense only in the context of Jesus’ times  masters insulting servants with backhanded slaps (and sometimes husbands putting wives in their place in this way too), debts incurred in the system of hired day labour, the taboo on nakedness in Judaism, and the Roman occupation where soldiers ordered Jews to carry their heavy backpacks.

Turn the other cheek needs to be quoted in full, and from Matthew rather than Luke: If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. Strikes and right cheek are the operative words. Jesus was giving the downtrodden people of his time creative strategies to take on the system that insulted and exploited them, in a way that exposed its cruelty and lampooned its pretensions to justice, but yet maintained the dignity of its perpetrators and invited them to change. Jesus was preaching nonviolent revolution, not telling us to be nice to one another in the syrupy Christian way that Ou Willie thinks is for sissies.

My next appointment was to visit a lady in hospital, Jenny.* Jenny was rushed to hospital with terrible stomach pains. She lives on her own with her four dogs and two birds, and had crawled to her front gate hoping to ask her neighbours for help. Fortunately the neighbours across the road saw her, called an ambulance, and stayed with her until the ambulance arrived.

I had met Jenny only a few days earlier at a birthday lunch for a Catholic Sister. Jenny is not a Catholic, but she told me this Catholic Sister had helped her through a terrible tragedy in her life, when she lost her daughter and three grandchildren in a motor accident. Their photo was on her keyring. She was looking for a new church, because she felt that her old church dealt with her tragedy in a way that kept raking it up for her. While I was visiting her in hospital, the neighbours also arrived to visit. They brought gifts of fruit and juice. Jenny poured out her thanks to them for the way they had so willingly come to her assistance.

As it happens, Jenny is white; the Catholic Sister (whose name is Joy) and the neighbours are black, and, as it happens, they live in a place called Harmony. Clearly for them all, race doesn’t matter. They don’t even see it. Even in this dry and dusty Free State town, where the old racial tensions are sometimes tangible, they’ve transcended the stereotypes and divisions of the past and reached out to one another as fellow human beings.

I think I’m going to tell Ou Willie the story at my next haircut, even if I have to tell it in my faltering Afrikaans. I hope some of those ou toppies are sitting there reading the Volksblad with its negative articles carping about the new South Africa, and that they overhear it too. In our violent and crime-ridden society, where a beautiful, compassionate and promising young woman, the product of a Catholic school, is brutally killed because, ostensibly, she is mistaken for an intruder, we need such stories of hope and joy, stories which testify to Jesus’ new transforming way of mercy, harmony and reconciliation.

* Not their real names.