When I was in Corrymeela in Northern Ireland about fifteen months ago,
one of our speakers was Harold Good, a retired Methodist minister, one of the
two clergy who had overseen the decommissioning of weapons in that
community. Harold was talking about how
we deal with conflict and asking the question as to what Christians can bring
to the table when we are seeking to address issues of significant
conflict. He suggested that there are
three things we can and should bring.
The first is confession. We live
in a world of blame culture, but we are always trying to shift the blame. How we prefer to avoid folk instead of
confessing our part in getting things wrong.
He suggested, and I agree, that we all have some confessing to do. He also made the point that confession isn’t
just about what we have done. It can be
about what we haven’t done. O, and if
confession sounds too religious, too much of church, perhaps an alternative
word is honest. We need to be
honest. We need to be honest before God.
The second thing we can bring is grace.
We tend to get to a point where we want to stand up for justice. There are times when we need to do that. There are issues which demand that we seek
justice. Justice is not to be ignored,
and is often desperately needed. But we
simply cannot ignore the fact that grace is ultimately more needed and more
important. One of the great things we
discover as we follow God’s way is just how great God’s love is and what that
means in terms of things being as they should be. That is grace. God’s love is immense. As Desmond Tutu has it in his book ‘No Future
Without Forgiveness’ – “Someone has said there is nothing I can do to make God
love me more, for God loves me perfectly already. And wonderfully, there is nothing I can do to
make God love me less. God loves me as I
am.”[1] As my kids might say to me – how good is
that? I am not going to pretend that
things never get messed up. That is
patently untrue. We live in a chaotic
world and we often find ourselves having to cope with some of the struggles and
problems which that produces. But
somewhere in there, always, is God’s love.
Somewhere, always, too, is the call to be God’s people. O, and if grace is too religious or two
churchy a word, try ‘generosity’. God is
so generous to us. How generously do we
respond?
The third thing that Harold Good suggests we bring is
forgiveness. We have already said that
we are always looking for somebody whose fault it is and what we can get out of
them by way of compensation. Forgiveness
is counter-cultural, but at the heart of our faith. David Stevens, a former leader of the
Corrymeela Community, has said this: “The gospel offers us an alternative
reality to fearful, frozen and defensive living. It invites us to imagine ourselves and our
world differently. Reconciliation in
Christ takes us to a new place – the house of Christ – where we think, speak
and act in his way, where fear becomes trust and hurt permits healing. Christ breaks down the middle wall of
partition and invites us all into a space created by him to find people who
were previously our enemies.”[2]
I think that forgiveness is the thing that the world
most needs, that the world most lacks. I
am currently reading a book called ‘Forgiving is Healing’ by a guy called Russ
Parker. He says this: "By definition forgiveness is confrontational. It exposes and challenges the 'be-attitudes'
of both the forgiver and the forgiven.
It uncovers what is going on in both the giver and the receiver when
forgiveness is on offer. We must not
imagine that it is easy for us to forgive even with the help of God's
grace. This is often because in the very
act of forgiving we must also let go of our hurt or sense of outrage at what
the other has done to us. To forgive
another is to enter into a commitment to love them."
He goes on to say: "Jesus
expected his disciples to be forgivers.
What is also important is that he did not regard this as an option but a
commitment." And then again, "Prominent
among the routes to wholeness is the need to be set free from the old,
crippling agenda of the past, and the prime resource for this is to forgive and
be forgiven."
