The Hope for Peace & Reconciliation
“Transience, which human beings experience as death, is an enemy at the end of life, whose menacing and violence-inducing presence casts a dark shadow on the entirety of life. Similarly … it exacerbates significantly human evil by nudging human beings into conflict.” 1
The Scandal of Reconciliation
Among the great stumbling-blocks of the cross, for Christians and agnostics alike, is its call to reconcile relationships through forgiveness of a genuine enemy, witnessed acutely in Jesus’ cry, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” So much focus is given to being made right with God in many Christian circles (vertical focus Eph. 2:1-10) that full reconciliation with enemies / one another (horizontal focus) is often an overlooked part of cruciform living (Eph. 2:11-22, esp. 2:14-18). One cannot exist without the other.
C.S. Lewis comments on Jesus command to forgive, without which we cannot receive forgiveness (Mt. 6:14-15): “He doesn’t say that we are to forgive other people‘s sins provided they are not too frightful, or provided there are extenuating circumstances, or anything of that sort. We are to forgive them all, however spiteful, however mean, however often they are repeated. If we don’t, we shall be forgiven none of our own.” This is demanding but it helps if we realize the depth of our own evil is likely worse than we think (whether we’ve ignored certain evil actions; lessened the ‘badness’ of our selfishness; or failed to see that we hurt someone deeply with what we thought was a minor offense; etc.). In his great essay, “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis observes that genuine forgiveness has nothing to do with a lack of blame. Most are willing to forgive when someone has a legitimate excuse – when they are not really culpable. But, as Lewis notes, in such instances, there really is nothing to be forgiven. It was nobody’s fault. “If you had a perfect excuse, you would not need forgiveness.” When God forgives us; when we forgive another … we are recognizing that someone really did something genuinely wrong or evil. But, we are not going to hold it against them or over them as a curse that we can use to denounce them the rest of their life. This kind of real forgiveness is not practiced much in our world, in my experience. Certainly not in the court of public opinion or social media.
Eminent Yale philosopher-theologian Miroslav Volf, quoted above – who suffered, in his words, “almost unbearable shame” growing up as a Croatian believer in a Serbian town under the communist-Marxist state behind the iron curtain of Cold War Yugoslavia, and later witnessed moral atrocities in the Croatian-Serbian war – offers profoundly thoughtful and valuable insights for us on this:
“[evil] is committed in a multidirectional and multilayered interaction between people and … takes the form of conflict between persons and communities in which violence, injustice, and deception are the order of the day and in which the weak suffer at the hands of the strong and today’s victims often become tomorrow’s perpetrators.”
“But if redemption aims at the establishment of the order of peace then the divine embrace of both the victim and the perpetrator must be understood as leading to their mutual embrace. Persons cannot be healed without the healing of their specific socially constructed … identities.… If those reconciled with God are not to remain unreconciled among themselves on account of their unreconciled pasts, the final justification will have to be accompanied by the final social reconciliation.”
“There must be a final social reconciliation … relationships need to be restored … and humans must be willing participants in such relation restoration.”
“There must be a final social reconciliation … relationships need to be restored … and humans must be willing participants in such relation restoration.”
“The final justification presupposes persons as active recipients of divine grace; the final social reconciliation conceived of as the redemption of the past presupposes persons as channels of that same grace toward others; there must be a final social reconciliation … relationships need to be restored … and humans must be willing participants in such relation restoration.” 2
The Church & Reconciliation
A central purpose of the church is to model to the world this scandalous reconciliation between enemies – that is between violent offenders of one another – in the present. The goal of Christ is nothing short of the “reconciliation of all things” (Col. 1:20). Sadly, we Christians are too impatient with one another, too driven by fear of present social, economic, nation circumstance, too wedded to cultural mores and culturally driven theologies (past and present), too judgmental of the sins of others, and too quick to sever relations in which we are to seek reconciliation. In this we are no different from the world. Volf again:
“Our present is not at peace with our past and future. We feel anxiety about what we expect and carry the burden of what we remember, and are thus robbed of unattenuated joy in the present.”
But the deeper call of God is to model reconciliation in the healing power of patient, compassionate grace, having died to and been freed from this world and its “violence-inducing transience” into a New Creation (present and future) – “if anyone is in Christ, New Creation!” “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (2Cor. 5:17; Col. 3:3 – if we have died already how can anyone kill us or harm us?). If we are to participate in such it will require the suffering pain of humbly repenting of our foolish, sometimes ignorant, evil; and humbly forgiving those who have deeply wounded – even crucified – us or our loved ones.
This is why crucifixion – a slow, humiliating, agonizing death to self – is the metaphor for Christian life, for the purging of evil from ourselves, for the means of our mutual reconciliation with one another, and why resurrection hope that turns the clock back on death and suffering, putting an end to scarcity and finality, is so central to this great reconciliation to each other that, I believe, the Creator God seeks in order for peace and joy to reign. Both now and in the future.
Once more, Miroslav Volf:
“Ultimate fulfillment is thinkable only as human beings’ undeluded enjoyment of God, of one another, and of their environment in a new world of perfect love. Eschatological transition entails that evil in human history be finally and unmistakably exposed and judged, that the evil-doers themselves be transformed by God’s grace, so that they can be freed from all evil, reconciled to one another, and thus reach the state of new innocence … In a world … in which innocence and love reign, there will be nothing in the past to resent or repent of and nothing in the future that would have to be achieved or avoided. Every present will be saturated with a joy that is undiminished …”
May we seek to bring this joy to the world and each other, today and yet future.
God, help us.