Encyclopedia > Turn the other cheek

  Article Content

Turn the other cheek

Turn the other cheek is a famous phrase from the Bible. It is generally interpreted as an admonition from Jesus not to return evil for evil.

In a literal interpretation (as depicted in the film The Big Fisherman), if a person has been slapped in the face by another as an insult or provocation to a quarrel, a Christian ought not to respond by hitting back or otherwise responding hurtfully. Rather, he ought to present the other cheek (the one that has not been slapped yet) and offer to let that cheek also be slapped in the hopes that the other person's conscience would be pricked and would not slap it, thus preventing a quarrel from really getting started.

However, the phrase is almost always used in the metaphorical sense.

See: Sermon on the Mount



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Reformed churches

... (Scot-Irish Presbyterians) Canadian Reformed Church[?] (Dutch Reformed - Liberated) Canadian and American Reformed Churches[?] Christian Reformed Church in ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 33.5 ms