Seven Aspects Essential in Christian Peacemaking
Excerpt from "Following Christ in a Violent World," presented to the Orthodox Student Association of Finland in 2003. Source: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2005/01/09/following-christ-in-a-violent-world/
Reflecting on the word and example of Christ, we can identify seven aspects of spiritual life that are essential aspects of Christian peacemaking: love of enemies; prayer for enemies; doing good to enemies; turning the other cheek; offering forgiveness; breaking down walls of division; and resisting evil in ways which may lead one’s enemies toward conversion.
Love of Enemies: As used in the Bible, the word ‘love’ has first of all to do with action and responsibility. The stress is not at all upon sentiment. It does not refer to how you feel. To love is to do what you can to provide for the spiritual and physical well-being of another, whether you like that person or not, whether you feel like it or not. What God does is love. In explaining His Father’s love, Christ talks about what God gives. He offers the metaphor of rain falling on both the just and the unjust.
An act of love may be animated by a sense of delight in someone else or, more significantly, it may be done despite anger, exhaustion, depression or fear, done simply as a response to God, our common Creator, “who makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”
Paul taught that the greatest gifts of God were faith, hope and love, and, of these, the greatest is love. Genuine love, he wrote, is patient and kind, without jealousy or boasting, without arrogance or rudeness; it does not demand its own way, does not rejoice at wrong but rather in the right, and endures everything. These are the essential qualities of any peacemaker.
Prayer for Enemies: Inseparable from love of others is prayer for them. “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Prayer is the primary form of connection — an invisible reaching out, first toward our Creator, but also toward other people, whether loved or feared, through God. The moment I pray for another human being, I am connected to that person. He may be unaware of it, but a relationship is established in prayer.
Without prayer for enemies, how can we possibly love them? In fact the only love we can offer anyone, friend or enemy, is God’s own love. Prayer can give us access to God’s love for those we would otherwise regard with disinterest, irritation, fear, contempt or active hostilityWe are given a witness to the power of prayer in the life of Saint Silouan of the Holy Mountain. He was a Russian peasant born in 1866 who fell asleep in the Lord in 1938 after many years of monastic life on Mount Athos. He devoted all his adult life to prayer. Earlier in his life, he had an intimate experience of his own violence, nearly killing a neighbor in his own village. In his many years of spiritual combat as a monk, Saint Silouan learned that the love of enemies is not simply an aspect of Christian life but is “the central criterion of true faith and of real communion with God, the lover of souls, the lover of humankind ... Through Christ’s love, everyone is made an inseparable part of our own, eternal existence... for the Son of Man has taken within Himself all mankind.”
Doing Good to Enemies: Jesus calls us not only to prayer but to action: “Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you.” Prayer is not an alternative to action; in fact, prayer may empower us to take personal responsibility for what we wish others would do. In his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul says, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them ... Repay no one evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends upon you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by doing so you will reap burning coals upon his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."
This is what the Samaritan was doing to the Jew he found dying on the side of the road in Jesus’ parable of the compassionate enemy. In offering help to an enemy in his distress, he transformed the wounded Jew’s idea of Samaritans. He could never again think of Samaritans simply as enemies. If we were to tell the story in modern terms, it could be a Turk assisting an injured Greek or a Christian helping a Muslim.
Turning the Other Cheek: Jesus says to His followers, “If someone strikes you on the cheek, offer him the other also.” How different this is from the advice provided in the average Hollywood film or politician’s speech! There the constant message is: “If you are hit, hit back. Let your blow be harder than the one you received. In fact, you needn’t be hit at all in order to strike others.” Provocation, irritation, or the expectation of attack is warrant enough.
Turning the other cheek is often seen as a suspect doctrine, even dismissed as masochism. We hear it as Jesus at His most unrealistic: “Human beings, but especially my enemies, just aren’t made that way.” For a great many people, the problem can be put even more simply: “Turning the other cheek isn’t manly.”
The conversion of the ancient world had much to do with Christians turning the other cheek in many acts of courageous witness that can never be forgotten. In the 20th century, such witness was offered again by countless believers persecuted in the Soviet time.
Forgiveness: Every time we say the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God to forgive us only insofar as we ourselves have extended forgiveness to others: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Christ also says, “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce, you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own?” On another occasion, Peter asks Jesus how often he must extend forgive ness. “As many as seven limes?” Jesus responds, “I do not say to youseven times, but seventy times seven.” It is such teaching that inspires the verses we sing every Easter: “Let us call brothers even those who hate us and forgive all by the Resurrection.”
The Desert Father Abbot Moses was once asked to take part in a meeting in which the community was planning to condemn a certain negligent brother. Abbot Moses arrived carrying a basket from which sand was pouring out through many openings. “Why are you doing that?” he was asked. “You ask me to judge a brother while my own sins spill out behind me like the sand from this basket.” The embarrassed community was moved to forgive their lax brother.
Nothing is more fundamental to Jesus’ teaching than His call to forgiveness: giving up debts, letting go of grievances, pardoning those who have harmed us. We are called to forgive. We need to seek forgiveness, offer forgiveness, and accept forgiveness. We are followers of Jesus who taught us forgiveness even when His hands were nailed to the wood of the cross: “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”
Breaking Down Walls: In Christ, enmity is destroyed. As St. Paul wrote to the Church in Ephesia, “For He is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of enmity... that He might create in Himself one new person in place of two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing enmity to an end.” Jesus gives the example Himself many times, for example in His encounters with the Roman Centurion and the Samaritan women at the well.
We live in a world of many walls of separation: racism, nationalism, all sorts of tribalism. Nothing is more ordinary than enmity. Far from living in communion with others, we tend to flee from communion. Metropolitan John of Pergamon comments: “Communion with the other is not spontaneous; it is built upon fences which protect us from the dangers implicit in the other’s presence. We accept the other only insofar as he does not threaten our privacy or insofar as he is useful to our individual happiness... The essence of sin is the fear of the Other, which is part of the rejection of God.”
Resisting Evil while Seeking Conversion: We are obliged to oppose evil and, as we are both flesh and spirit, we must use both flesh and spirit in our acts of resistance. But in what way ought we to resist?
Certain kinds of resistance are clearly rejected in the Gospel: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil.”
Responding to evil with its own weapons, though it can seem an obvious good, easily results in a life centered on evil. Very often people who live in fear of violent men become violent men. They take up the same weapons and even adopt characteristics and hated practices of the adversary. When the Nazi forces bombed cities, there was immense revulsion in Britain and the United States, but in the end, the greatest acts of city destruction were perpetrated by Britain and the United States.
But then what are we to do? Are Christians supposed to do nothing more than pray in the face of injustice and oppression? Are there not warriors as well as pacifists among the saints?
We see in the example of many saints that our choice is not limited to passivity on the one hand and bloodshed on the other. There is the alternative of unarmed resistance. This is a form of combat that begins with the refusal to collaborate with injustice but which actively assists the victims of oppression, which protests evil, and finally which prays and works for the conversion of adversaries. Among the saints of this century, Mother Maria of Paris is an example of these qualities. The houses of hospitality she founded in France became, in the time of Nazi-occupation, centers for rescuing Jews and others whose lives were in danger. She herself finally was sent to a Nazi concentration camp, dying on Good Friday, 1945. We see in her that nonviolent, spiritually-rooted struggle is not without risk and great suffering. It can easily cost us our lives, just as happens in armed struggle. But we prefer to put our own lives at risk rather than the lives of others. Only we must not be cowards.
This approach to conflict begins with a conscious aspiration to find solutions rooted in respect for life, including the lives of our enemies, and our hope that they too may be saved. We cannot be sure we will always discover a nonviolent solution, but what we fail to seek we certainly will fail to find. As is expressed in the membership statement the Orthodox Peace Fellowship: “While no one can be certain that he or she will always find a nonviolent response to every crisis that may arise, we pray that God will show us in each situation ways of resistance to evil that will not require killing opponents.”
This a way of life that many men and women witnessed in the great Russian saint, Seraphim of Sarov, who lived in peace with everyone around him and who sometimes fed a wild bear from his own hands.
“Men cannot be too gentle, too kind,” he said. “Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. But remember, no work of kindness or charity can bring down to earth the holy breath, unless it be done in the name of Christ. When it is, joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the heart of him who receives. All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other, not even those whom you catch committing an evil deed. We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves. When we gaze at our own failings, we see such a morass of filth that nothing in another can equal it. That is why we turn away, and make much of the faults of others. Keep away from the spilling of speech. Instead of condem ning others, strive to reach inner peace. Keep silent, refrain from judgment.' This will raise you above the deadly arrows of slander, insult and outrage and will shield your glowing hearts against the evil that creeps around.”
Consider the Beatitudes, that short summing up of the Gospel that we find at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes are only eight. No Christian dares be inattentive to any of them. The seventh is the Beatitude of peacemaking.
In the early Church, the whole world was astonished at how Christians witnessed to the peace of Christ, not only refusing to shed the blood of their enemies but trying in every possible way to save their enemies. May we do all in our power to renew such faithful witness in our time.
How desperately we need such people! We need them not only in places where wars are being fought or might be fought, but we needthem in each household and we need them within the Church and within each parish. Even the best and most vital parishes often suffer from deep divisions. And who is the peacemaker who is needed? It is each of us. Often it is harder to forgive and understand someone in our own parish than an abstract enemy we see mainly in propaganda images on television. Even within our Orthodox Church that we do not simply disagree with each other of many topics but often we despise those who hold opposing views. In the name of Christ, who commanded us to love one another, we engage in a war of words in which, far from loving our opponent we do not even respect him. But without mercy and forgiveness, without love, I am no longer in communion either with my neighbor or with Christ.
At the deepest level, the peacemaker is a person being used by God to help heal our relationship with God — for we get no closer to God than we get to our neighbor, that is any person regarded as ‘different’ and a ‘threat.’ St. Silouan of the Holy Mountain taught that love of enemies is not simply an aspect of Christian life but is “the central criterion of true faith and of real communion with God, the lover of souls, the lover of humankind.”
Let us recall those challenging words of Mother Maria Skobtsova of Paris, a martyr who died in 1945 in a German concentration camp:
The bodies of fellow human beings must be treated with greater care than our own. Christian love teaches us to give our brethren not only spiritual gifts, but material gifts as well. Even our last shirt, our last piece of bread must be given to them. Personal almsgiving and the most wide-ranging social work are equally justifiable and necessary. The way to God lies through love of other people and there is no other way. At the Last Judgment, I shall not be asked if I was successful in my ascetic exercises or how many prostrations I made in the course of my prayers. I shall be asked, did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoners: that is all I shall be asked.
