Blessed Are The Peacemakers Series

Our society is rife with rancor, and we view the guy down the block as a numskull because of the political sign in his yard. We have forgotten how to disagree. In a democracy, we ought to be able to disagree and not shoot each other. We can thrash through the issues, listen, learn, test our ideas, understand why other think as they do. Learning how to disagree sounds like making peace, and is also the secret of inching ever closer to the truth, without which we will never have any peace.

Peace is not passive, but aggressive, engaging in the far more arduous labor of making peace, of reconciling with the person who hates you, of sparing no effort to get inside the other’s skin and figuring out how to live together on this planet. But the dominant melody in the chorus of justice is one of care, of inclusion, of striving after shalom. Peacemaking requires people who work tirelessly for a just society that mirrors, however obliquely, the kingdom of God.

Peacemaking seems almost impossibly daunting – but largely because we do not think so much about making peace until war is raging. What if we thought about peacemaking less as a remedy, and more as a preventative? Haven’t we failed to work on peace when there is not conflict? To bring it up once we’re in the thick of war is like suggesting to an enraged married couple that they might work on tender communication but the pots and pans are already flying.

When it comes to peacemaking, the subtle topic we often seek to avoid is FORGIVENESS. Without forgiving one another, can we ever have true peace. It seems that we do a lot of pretending, we may “kiss and make up” in an effort to regain peace, but the anger and bitterness remain; and the relationship remains fractured. There is no peace, and sadly both parties know it. Yet they hide behind that thicket of the cordial and cold hug, or the handshake that meant nothing to either party. What is really needed is to dive in and seek to understand, to acknowledge one another, to listen, and ultimately to forgive. We may shrink back from forgiveness, from the peacemaking, not merely because it’s hard work, but because there can be something darkly delicious about an unhealed grievance. We think we have something over our brother or sister, when we are simple holding something against ourselves.

Frederick Buechner wrote ~

To lick our wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back — in many ways, it is a feast for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the end of the feat is you. {Frederick Buechner Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 29.}

Forgiveness isn’t always a warm and fuzzy feeling. If you forgive me, it doesn’t mean you feel like showering me with hugs and kisses. Forgiveness is not a feeling, it is a decision, a commitment to look at me through God’s eyes. In broken families this may be a daunting challenge: you may forgive a parent, or a spouse, but this does not require one ounce of gushy emotion. Forgiveness is not just a word, not just a feeling, but a behavior, a practice, a new habit of behavior whose goal is nothing less than a fully restored relationship.