Author Archives: RJ Hamster

I was born on 6 August 1956 in San Francisco, California to Janet and (the late) Richard Hovis. I grew up in Santa Monica, California where I attended elementary, junior high school, and high school (graduating in 1974), in addition to involvement in sports and recreation (Little League +, the Boy’s Club ++). Further, it was in elementary school – St. Augustine’s By-the -Sea Parish School that I found, and made the choice to truly journey with God. I attended Arizona State University from 1974 to 1977 – seeking to become an architect, however, I was not accepted, and, as such, I graduated with a Liberal Arts degree. Upon graduation from Arizona State University, I attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and studied City and Regional Planning at the Master’s level. I successfully completed one (1) year in a two (2) year program – I did not complete the Master’s degree in City and Regional Planning – due to personal reasons. I returned to Santa Monica where I started (October 1979) my career as graphic designer with Exxon Company, USA. I spent five years with Exxon Company, USA. While working with Exxon Company, USA I was accepted into architectural school – Sci-Arc in Southern California, however, I did not attend preferring to stay with Exxon.. In 1982 I married Laura Flosi and in April 1983 we had our one and only child – Lauren Alain Hovis – a gift from God. We moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1984 from Los Angeles, where I went to work as a graphic designer with Kitchell CEM (from 1985 -1987). From 1987 – 1995 I was an independent contractor, and a registered representative in mortgage finance, financial management, graphic design, and drafting. Further, I attended the University of Phoenix and successfully obtained a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) in 1982. I was also a member of the Scottsdale Jaycees, where I became very involved in community events and projects. In 1994, I accepted a cartography position with the Defense Mapping Agency in Reston, Virginia. As such, I relocated from Phoenix to Reston. In 1998, I was accepted and worked as a Visual Information Officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2002, I worked as a Support Officer until my retirement (due to a need for shoulder surgery) in September 2018. Away from my Federal Government service, I have been involved in various organizations and activities in Northern Virginia. In November of 2011, I married Rebecca Ouellette in Santa Monica, California. I reside in San Tan Valley, AZ with my two hamster - Jess and Timothy, our fish, our lizard - RJ Lizard., and our cats - Pearl and Grey. As to hobbies, I enjoy playing sports, attending sporting events, mentoring individuals from financial management to hamsters, building models, photography, travel, multimedia design, managing partner for RJ Hamster, and jazz – smooth jazz to a samba or a bossa nova. Love and God Bless, Peter – aka RJ Hamster Jo hi

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BNZI posted 169 percent revenue growth – is a turnaround forming

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BNZI Ignites AI MarTech Disruption with Triple-Digit Growth, Expanding Enterprise Adoption, and a Potential Turnaround Setup as Wall Street Re-Rates the Stock Higher!

Banzai International (NASDAQ: BNZI) is rapidly emerging as a high-growth disruptor in the AI-driven marketing technology space, delivering explosive financial performance that underscores its accelerating momentum.

The company posted full-year 2025 revenue of $12.2 million, up 169% year-over-year, alongside fourth-quarter revenue growth of 116% and gross margin expansion to 81.9%, signaling a scalable, high-efficiency SaaS model taking shape.

With more than 150,000 customers and enterprise adoption from major brands, BNZI is building a unified AI platform that integrates marketing automation, content creation, and sales acceleration into a full-funnel ecosystem.

Its planned acquisition of ConnectAndSell, expected to contribute roughly $15 million in annual revenue, further expands its reach into sales execution and could more than double the company’s current scale. Combined with rising earnings estimate revisions and a recent Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) upgrade, institutional confidence is clearly building around BNZI’s improving fundamentals.

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Berkshire Hathaway’s Record Cash Hoard: Why and What’s Next?

Written by Chris Markoch. Posted: 5/5/2026.

Key Points

Berkshire Hathaway’s $397 billion cash hoard reflects caution amid elevated market valuations
Leadership transition to Greg Abel may influence future capital deployment strategies
Energy, financials, and selective diversification could guide Berkshire’s next moves
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On May 2, Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.B) shareholders attended the first annual meeting without Warren Buffett presiding. Buffett announced his retirement in 2025 and named Greg Abel as the company’s new chief executive officer.

If investors were expecting fireworks, they were disappointed. For at least the current quarter, it’s more of the same. That includes Berkshire’s focus on building cash, which has now grown to over $397 billion, up from $373 billion at the end of 2025.

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If the stock market is a voting machine, then Berkshire Hathaway sitting on a record pile of cash could be seen as a vote of no confidence. But there are several reasons the company may be keeping a record amount of dry powder on hand.

3 Reasons Why Berkshire May Want to Hold Cash

Warren Buffett is known for his focus on valuation. That’s unlikely to change at Berkshire even as Buffett steps away. So, it makes sense that the company would continue hoarding cash in 2025.

Stocks are objectively expensive. The average price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of the S&P 500 as of May 4 is a robust 27.5x, well above its rolling 10-year average of around 20x.

There’s also some thinking that Berkshire was moving to cash in anticipation of a market correction. That’s worth considering only because the company’s move to cash began in 2024, a year marked by heightened uncertainty in a presidential election cycle and opaque economic data.

However, the market has posted two strong years in 2024 and 2025, so that argument seems less likely. After all, Berkshire was an aggressive buyer in 2022, when its cash pile dwindled to around $105 billion.

A third popular theory is that Buffett knew he was retiring and wanted to leave Abel with the flexibility to make his own decisions. Buffett was in attendance at the shareholder meeting and reiterated his confidence in Abel. However, it will likely take a few quarters to see how Abel may want to shape his own legacy.

From Sidelines to Spotlight: How Berkshire Might Deploy Its Cash

With BRK.B down about 13% over the last 12 months, it stands to reason that shareholders would like to see some of that cash put to work. After all, the criticism of a record cash pile is that it could be used for something more productive.

But how could Berkshire consider deploying that cash? Looking at the current composition of the Berkshire portfolio could offer some clues.

One area to watch would be energy stocks. The energy sector makes up about 11% of Berkshire’s portfolio. That’s enough for fourth place in terms of weighting, but it’s still well below the 42% held in financial stocks, which carry the most weight. Berkshire currently owns Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX) and Occidental Petroleum (NYSE: OXY). Adding to these positions on a dip could make sense.

It would also be intriguing to see whether Berkshire invests in more service-related companies that offer more attractive valuations. Many of these stocks also pay attractive dividends, which are an important part of the Berkshire strategy.

A contrarian view might be technology. Berkshire is known for having Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) as its largest holding. However, investors know that Buffett was famously slow to embrace tech stocksbeyond Apple. For example, in 2024, the company sold $133 billion in tech stocks while making less than $6 billion in new purchases.

However, with roughly 23% of the portfolio in technology, almost entirely through Apple, even a modest diversification into other tech names wouldn’t represent a dramatic shift in strategy.

What may be more likely is that the company will build on its strongest position. As has been the case since its founding, financial stocks carry the most weight in Berkshire’s portfolio. After Apple, the two stocks with the next highest weighting are American Express (NYSE: AXP) and Bank of America (NYSE: BAC).

A speculative wild card could come from basic materials stocks. Berkshire has historically approached this sector with a long-term, value-oriented strategy.

This isn’t a suggestion that Berkshire will contradict Buffett’s aversion to owning gold. But the commodity super cycle is real, and that could mean Berkshire increases its exposure to companies that fit its investment philosophy, which targets businesses with low-cost production advantages and resilient demand.

The Waiting Game Continues

Berkshire’s record cash hoard reflects both discipline and transition. Whether Abel chooses to deploy capital aggressively or maintain Buffett’s patient approach remains to be seen.

What’s more clear is that the company has enormous flexibility heading into an uncertain market. Investors willing to trust the process may find that Berkshire’s caution today sets the stage for outsized returns tomorrow, or whenever the right opportunity finally arrives.

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Just How Big a Problem Could Amazon’s Cash Burn Rate Be?

By Sam Quirke. Posted: 5/6/2026.

KEY POINTS

Amazon is burning $6 billion a month as it goes all in on the AI opportunity.
Based on recent price action, the market is increasingly accepting that this level of cash burn is no longer reckless, but strategic.
With AWS growth reaccelerating and analysts as bullish as ever, the risk/reward setup remains attractive despite overbought technicals.
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Shares of Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN)have traded above $270 for several sessions in a row for the first time. They’ve gained more than 35% since the end of March in a move that has taken the stock to fresh all-time highs and marked a sharp turnaround from the concerns that dominated after February’s earnings report.

Back then, investors were spooked by the scale of Amazon’s capital expenditure plans. The worry was straightforward: even if the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) was a huge opportunity, how much cash would Amazon need to burn before that opportunity started showing up in the numbers?

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While February had investors leaning toward a pessimistic outlook, last week’s response seems to have had the opposite effect. But even if investors are more willing to look past it for now, Amazon’s elevated cash burn hasn’t gone away.

The real question is how much it actually matters, and what it means for the stock through the rest of the year.

The Cash Burn Looks Ugly at First Glance

While last week’s report delivered solid beats on headline expectations, there was no getting around the $200 billion capital expenditure figure. For context, that’s roughly in line with the annual economic output of a mid-sized economy like Hungary, and the bulk of it is being plowed into the infrastructure needed to support Amazon’s AI ambitions.

Put another way, the company is effectively burning about $6 billion in cash a month as it ramps up spending on data centers, chips, servers, and networking infrastructure. Understandably, Amazon’s free cash flow has been under serious pressure, but management has been clear that this level of spending will continue in the near term. That’s the trade-off investors are being asked to accept.

On paper, it makes sense. Amazon has to spend heavily to monetize the infrastructure it is building and take advantage of the opportunity. But that also means free cash flow could look ugly while the company navigates the early stages of this AI growth cycle.

However you look at it, it’s going to be a little uncomfortable. At the same time, it’s exactly what a company like Amazon should be doing if demand is real and accelerating. The question is not whether its cash burn rate is too high and putting pressure on cash flow, because it clearly is, but whether that pressure is creating assets that will generate much larger returns later.

AWS Is Starting to Justify the Spending

This is where the latest numbers matter. Last week’s report showed AWS revenue growing 28% year over year, its fastest pace in 15 quarters, with AI demand playing a central role in that acceleration. Amazon also highlighted that AWS AI revenue is already above $15 billion annually, making the CapEx story much easier for investors to stomach.

That changes the framing considerably. A few months ago, the company couldn’t point to these proof points, and the market was forced to view Amazon’s massive AI spending as a growing risk. Now, with these numbers, there’s enough justification to treat the spending as a strategic, potentially necessary growth lever that’s already paying dividends.

The Risks Are Still There, Just Smaller

The risk is that Amazon is still spending at a scale that leaves little room for error. If AWS growth slows, AI demand disappoints, or margins come under pressure, the same CapEx that looks strategic today could quickly become a drag again.

There’s also a technical risk. After a 35% rally in little more than a month, Amazon is extremely overbought, and any fresh concern around spending could easily trigger profit-taking.

But the key point is that the market has clearly changed its mind, and Amazon is no longer being punished for its aggressive spending. As long as it continues to provide updates like the one last week, Wall Street will likely tolerate a cash burn rate far beyond what would normally be acceptable.

Why the Setup Still Looks Attractive

Recent analyst updates support this thesis. DZ Bank and New Street Research have both reiterated their Buy ratings on the stock this week, while assigning Amazon fresh price targets of $320 and $350, respectively. Considering that implies as much as 30% additional upside from current levels, investors can get a sense of just how indulgent Wall Street is willing to be.

The reality is that Amazon’s cash burn rate is only a problem if it fails to produce returns. Right now, the evidence suggests it’s doing the exact opposite. As long as that remains the case, there’s no reason it should become more than a footnote in a much bigger growth story.

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I Spent Three Days On the Ground in Costa Rica

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“Costa Rica isn’t a real estate story. It’s a scarcity story.”

Karim Rahemtulla, Co-Founder, Monument Traders Alliance

Karim Rahemtulla

Dear Reader,

Just over a week ago, I flew to Costa Rica.

And before you roll your eyes, yes, it was for work. I’m a lucky guy, what can I say?

But three days on the ground with a pair of international real estate scouts from Ronan McMahon’s Real Estate Trend Alert (RETA) team was, in fact, work.

We toured multi-million-dollar properties in master-planned communities modeled after Italian hill towns.

We also visited new project sites you won’t find by searching online.

I noticed the golden-sand beaches were busy in what was supposed to be the “off-season”.

Safe to say, Costa Rica is the place to be right now.

I didn’t just come back with a tan and post-trip depression…

I came back with a sharper perspective on international real estate.

Most people think of Costa Rica as a lifestyle destination. Beaches, surf towns, vacation homes.

Ronan looks at these markets the way I look at fundamentals on a company’s balance sheet.

He looks for constrained supply, infrastructure shifts, rising demand, pricing disconnects, and asymmetric upside.

What I saw on the ground confirmed what his team has been reporting for some time.Costa Rica isn’t a real estate story. It’s a scarcity story.

And one specific market is the last real chance to own true beachfront property in the country.

The 1977 Law That Took 95% of the Beachfront Off the Table

In 1977, Costa Rica passed the Maritime Zone Law. In plain English, it took the first 200 meters of every beach in the country and put it under government control.

The first 50 meters are public. Nobody can own them. The next 150 meters are leased to private holders through 20-year government concessions, not sold.

That means only 5% of Costa Rica’s oceanfront is titled freehold. The kind of ownership Americans take for granted at home, where land can be freely sold, inherited, or mortgaged.

The other 95% is leasehold from the government, with all the restrictions that implies.

And the small slice that is titled? It almost always lands in the hands of luxury hotel chains like the Four Seasons, the Ritz-Carlton Reserve, the Andaz, and the Waldorf Astoria. These are the players that can afford to develop the rare freehold parcels.

A retail buyer almost never sees a true titled beachfront deal in Costa Rica. The ones that do exist sell for prices that only make sense for a hotel operator with branded residences.

That’s the supply side of this market.

Now Look at the Demand Side

While the supply has been legally capped for nearly half a century, the demand has been quietly accelerating.

Costa Rica’s tourism arrivals just crossed 1.9 million through the early part of this year.

Direct flights now run into Liberia (the country’s Pacific airport), from Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, and a dozen other U.S. cities.

The drive from the airport to the coastal resorts that used to take three and a half hours now takes thirty minutes on new highway infrastructure.

The country is no longer remote. It’s a four-hour flight from the East Coast.

And the money is following the access.

The development next to where I stayed in Las Catalinas is being built by Steve Case, the founder of AOL.

The homes around it are selling for $2 to $15 million. Those are U.S. prices… in Costa Rica.

When the guy who built one of the biggest tech companies of the 1990s is putting his own capital into the same Pacific coast you used to need a four-wheel-drive to reach, you are not looking at a speculative bet.

You are looking at a transformation that is already happening.

The One Exception Ronan Just Secured

Most people get this market wrong from the start.

If you fly down cold and start looking at houses on the open market, you are paying the prices I just told you about.

$2 million on the low end, $15 million on the high end of a normal range, not the outliers.

That’s the dumb way to do this.

The reason I flew down with Ronan’s team is that RETA works the other side of this market.

RETA scouts properties two and three years before the broader money arrives, negotiates group-buying power on pre-construction projects, and gets members in at prices not available to a retail buyer walking off the plane in flipflops.

The track record speaks for itself. RETA members have been making returns of 60%, 70%, and sometimes 90% on properties over the last few years.

Lots near Ojochal doubled in seven years. Two-bedroom homes near Playa Flamingo went from $286,800 to $500,000 in just 17 months.

And right now, the team has secured something exceptionally rare.

A titled true beachfront project on a 2.5-mile stretch of beach in Jacó, the closest beach town to Costa Rica’s capital, San José. About an hour from the airport on the Caldera Highway.

For years, Jacó was known mostly as a laid-back surf destination. That’s changing rapidly.

Luxury development is arriving and higher-end buyers are showing up. Pre-construction condo prices moved roughly 6% in a single quarter earlier this year.

According to Ronan, the new deal his team secured isn’t beach access, isn’t “steps from the beach,” isn’t across the road from the sand.

It is true titled beachfront. Step out from your condo, past your resort-style amenities, and directly onto the sand.

In a country where only 5% of the oceanfront is titled and almost all of it is owned by hotel chains, that’s a category-defining piece of inventory.

The Numbers

I asked Ronan to walk me through what he expects this deal to do over the next several years. His response:

“With this deal, we’ll have a chance to lock in what I believe will be gains of $223,000 just five years after taking the keys. These are luxury condos in a best-in-class true beachfront community. Our condos are going to be in massive demand as rentals. Short-term I’d expect $50,200 a year in gross rental income. That’s a 17% gross yield. And I’m being conservative.”

I have known Ronan for more than 20 years. He’s not the type to blow an opportunity out of proportion. When he says he’s being conservative on a 17% gross yield, that’s the floor of what he expects, not the ceiling. Logo

YOUR ACTION PLAN

This Tuesday, May 19, @ 2 p.m. ETRonan is joining me inside Monument Traders LIVE.

We are going to walk through what I saw on the ground, the specific Jacó deal, the numbers behind it, how RETA negotiates off-market pricing for its members, and how this particular project came together.

Ronan is also going to open this deal to attendees of the session. That part is unusual. Normally these projects are reserved for paying RETA members only.

If you’ve been thinking about diversifying trading profits into international hard assets, this is the right conversation to be in the room for.

ADD THIS EVENT TO YOUR CALENDARWant more content like this?

FUN FACT FRIDAY

Costa Rica saw a whopping 660% spike in residency applications year-over-year recently, catapulting it into the top four global residency programs favored by Americans.

This residency boom (tied to its “pure life” lifestyle, stability, and incentives) is supercharging real estate growth.

It’s drawing high-net-worth individuals and expats, with projections for a net influx of over 350 HNWIs in 2026 alone, bringing roughly $2.8 billion in investable assets.

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Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) Community

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Are You Up for This “Money Ladder” Challenge?

Are You Up for This “Money Ladder” Challenge?

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Michael’s note: We got a fantastic response yesterday to the launch of Jeff Clark’s first-ever trading challenge.

Jeff is one of our in-house options trading experts. And he’s aiming to harness the big moves we’re seeing in stocks this year – and turn a $5,000 stake into $1 million in 12 trades or fewer.

Think of it like a money ladder. Each rung is a single trade, and the winnings from one trade become the stake for the next – climbing higher with each rung.

More than 3,000 folks tuned in to Jeff’s launch. But there are still slots available to join Jeff and the other Challenge participants.

The odds of hitting $1 million are still low, as Jeff is quick to admit. But as he gets into below, in his 43 years as a trader, he’s seen only a handful of markets this favorable for an attempt like this.

Over to you, Jeff…

BY JEFF CLARK, EDITOR, MARKET MINUTE

The press dubbed it Software-Mageddon.

In January, the AI company Anthropic released a product called Claude Cowork.

It can create software on demand. A small business owner can describe what he wants in plain English and have a working program built for him in minutes.

Wall Street did the math fast. If businesses can create their own software for a couple of hundred dollars of AI subscription fees, why keep paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to the software companies?

The selling was brutal. Over $1 trillion in software market value was wiped out in a matter of weeks. Salesforce (CRM) – which makes the software companies use to keep track of sales – fell 45% from its high.

And it wasn’t alone. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF (IGV)– which tracks dozens of America’s biggest software names – plunged 35% from its September high in just five months.

That’s a faster collapse than most investors will live through more than two or three times in a career.

Every pundit on every financial network was saying the same thing: AI is going to destroy the software industry.

I disagreed.

Not because I’m an expert on the software industry or AI. But because of what the IGV stock chart was telling me.

By Feb. 24, IGV was trading more than 20% below a key trendline called the 50-day moving average. In my 40-plus years of trading, this fund had almost never strayed more than 12% from that line before snapping back.

That morning, I told my Jeff Clark Trader subscribers to buy a call option on IGV. We paid $2.50 a contract.

Seven days later, we sold it for $5.50.

A 120% gain – in one week – on a sector everyone else had given up for dead.

And over the last year, I’ve given my subscribers the chance to make 13 other triple-digit wins and 51 double-digit wins.

Those are the kinds of gains you can make as an options trader during the disruptions we’re seeing in today’s market.

It’s why I’m so excited about that 12 Trades to $1 Million trading challenge I launched yesterday. These are ideal conditions for an options trader like me.

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This Is Not a Normal Market

The kind of move we saw in IGV doesn’t happen in a normal market.

In a normal market, a sector ETF doesn’t fall 35% in five months on the back of a single product announcement. Stocks don’t reprice 20% or 30% in a single session. Companies that should be steady don’t start moving like speculative small caps.

But this isn’t a normal market.

In a slow, grinding bull market, the kind of mean-reversion trade I took on IGV is hard to find. Stocks drift higher in a steady line. The rubber band never stretches far enough to snap. Most of my trades, in those years, are quiet doubles on quiet setups.

But in a disruption window – when stocks are moving 20% in a session and sectors are repricing overnight – the rubber band stretches far. And when it snaps back, it snaps back hard and fast.

That’s why I’ve issued the first-ever trading challenge of my career.

It’s built around the idea of a “money ladder.” We’ll start with a $5,000 stake. Then we’ll try to turn it into $1 million in 12 trades or fewer.

Low Odds, But Not Impossible

As longtime readers will know, this isn’t how I typically trade.

I’m a conservative, low-risk trader. I use options to generate income and to make low-risk speculations. I like to take my profits off the table rather than letting them ride. This strategy has kept me in the options game for more than four decades.

There aren’t many options traders who can claim that sort of longevity. And, it is mostly due to my conservative style of trading.

But one of my team members recently went through the track record of my newsletter recommendations. And across nine years and 381 closed trades, there were 36 separate streaks of three or more winning trades in a row. Twenty-one of those streaks ran five trades or longer. Eight ran for eight trades or more.

And on two occasions, the streaks were long enough that – if you’d rolled a $5,000 stake from one trade into the next – you would have crossed the $1 million mark.

The first was during the 2023 banking crisis. Nine trades that could have turned $5,000 to $1.3 million with a rollover strategy.

The second was during the AI repricing of 2025. Twelve trades that could have turned $5,000 into $2.6 million.

The timing of those two streaks wasn’t a coincidence. On both occasions, market conditions looked a lot like what we’re seeing right now: high volatility, broken assumptions, stocks moving 20% or 30% in a single session, sectors getting repriced overnight as the rules of normal investing temporarily stopped applying.

The odds are still low of hitting $1 million. I want to be clear about that.

Even in the best conditions I’ve seen in four decades, this requires favorable markets, disciplined execution, and some luck. Any trading carries real risk of loss. The money you use for the challenge should not be money you rely on to put food on the table.

But for the right person with a few thousand dollars they can afford to lose, it’s worth a real attempt.

Here’s How We’ll Scale the Money Ladder

Like I said, I’m recommending challenge participants start with $5,000. But if $5,000 feels too steep, you can do this challenge with $500 or even $200.

Here’s how it works. Whatever you put into the first trade, we attempt to double it. We’re aiming for a 100% gain on each option trade.

So if you start with $500, it becomes $1,000. Then we exit that trade and move to the next one. The downside is that if we lose 50% on any given option position, we exit the trade as well.

We never want the entire account exposed to one position, and we never want to hit zero. So if we put $5,000 into the first trade and it gets cut in half, we’re down to $2,500 and we exit immediately.

Then we move to the sidelines and look for another opportunity.

Yes, there will be times when we cut a loss at 50% and the trade later reverses in our favor. That’s going to happen. But we can’t focus on hindsight.

The rules are simple – we enter an option trade, and if it doubles, we exit. If it gets cut in half, we exit.

If we’re correct and the trade doubles, that means we can lose two trades for every one winner and still break even. That’s a 33% win rate. Historically, we’ve done much better than that in my services over time, so I like the odds of this working in our favor.

I expect we’ll have the first trade recommendation out within the next few days. I’m waiting for a setup that I believe is a no-brainer before we jump in.

I’m not going to force these recommendations. If we sit in cash for a while, I’m perfectly okay with that because I want this challenge to be something we can look back on six months from now and say, “What a fantastic run that was.” Not only because we made money, but because we learned a lot, too.

I’m excited about what’s ahead over coming weeks and months as these disruptions roll on.

You can check out the full details of my challenge and how you can participate here.

Best regards and good trading,

Jeff Clark
Editor, Market Minute

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Matthew 5:38-39 – Jesus Teaches Turning the Other Cheek: A Lesson on Non-Retaliation

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Matthew 5:38-39

(38) “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ (39) But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.
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Some may have taken the Old Testament guideline (see Exodus 21:23-25) in a literal fashion. At first glance, it seems that, if a person’s tooth or eye were lost in a scuffle or accident, the one who caused the loss to happen would be required to forfeit his own tooth or eye. Though some may have demanded this in times past, it is clearly not God’s intent for the law. Instead, it is a principle, given in concrete, understandable terms, that damage is to be justly compensated.

According to commentator Adam Clarke, the Jews of Christ’s day abused this law to extract every last penny from another, and in the majority of cases, there was no mercy shown. Human nature being what it was then, and still is now, they insisted that the one who caused the problem receive every bit of punishment coming to him. In short, they wanted and exacted revenge! Jesus wants us to understand that His disciples are not to act this way.

In countering the faulty understanding of this Old Testament law, Jesus teaches, “But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (Matthew 5:39). He begins by instructing us not to escalate the situation by stubborn resistance or, worse still, by perpetrating an additional offense. Elsewhere, Paul writes, “Repay no one evil for evil” (Romans 12:17). If offended, do not offend in return. If injured, do not inflict an injury in payment. In other words, retaliation is not the answer.

Note that Jesus is not speaking of dangerous situations, like facing a robber with murderous intent or a rapist on a dark street. On His mind are circumstances of daily life that are insulting, bothersome, or even mildly injurious, but not life-threatening. The Interpreter’s Bible comments on the latter half of the verse: “A blow with the back of the hand to the right cheek was an insult, thus the palm of the hand was now poised to bring a blow to the left cheek.” The blow is struck contemptuously rather than homicidally.

In a situation like this, the first thing that comes to most minds is revenge. Jesus desires that, rather than avenging oneself and acting with the same attitude of hatred as the aggressor, we reflect our calling and suppress the urge to seek vengeance. We should even be willing to take a second slap, this one from the other’s open hand, without retaliation. Such pacifism usually pours cold water on the situation, avoiding further tit-for-tat retribution.

— John O. Reid

To learn more, see:
Go the Extra Mile