Peace-Making in Conflict Situations

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 2001 by Riah Abu Al-Assal

Theological and Ethical Reflections

The Oxford English Dictionary defines peace as: "Freedom from, or cessation of, war or hostilities."(1) This describes the state of one nation or community which is not at war with another. It identifies a state of concord and amity with a specified "other", a recognition of the person's authority and an acceptance of his or her identity and right to be protected.

When it comes to Christian reflection on God's peace, indeed on God generally, one cannot deny the "impassibility" of God, that which makes us assert God's transcendent peace, that reality without which we cannot affirm God's final and everlasting beatitude. Christians believe that God's peace is a fact apprehended and entered into by the help of the Holy Spirit. But, more importantly, this leads to silence, to contemplation, to worship and adoration. It does not lead to asserting all sorts of theories about God and his essence. Our knowledge of God and his peace simply means our acknowledgment of his eternal and everlasting beatitude and goodness to all people; it is about our acknowledgment that peace belongs to God's nature. And then it becomes a gift to God's creatures. In Christ it becomes an ultimate and final gift of God's self-revealed history, within the frame of human experience.

Our aim here is to think of peace-making. As mentioned earlier, this is not to make us produce all sorts of theories about God -- for we are not called to be peace-talkers, but peace-makers. In this we are called to follow the example of Jesus, whose word appears as that which accomplishes what it says. Let us, therefore, reflect a little on Jesus and his example before we reflect on the ministry of the church in the land of the Holy One, and the churches' role in enhancing and fostering peace in the middle of all the conflict, as this reflects our own experience as natives in the land.

Jesus of Nazareth -- as we are told in the gospels -- comes into the heart of the conflict prevalent amongst different religious groups and between the people and the roles which divided them. In the middle of that conflict, the evangelists persist in showing Jesus as the man of peace. But his peace is not simply the mere absence of conflict: it was not about having a "quiet time"; rather, his peace was in doing the Father's will in the wilderness in the temptations, in Gethsemane in the prayer of agony, and on the cross, when he refused to come down and save himself. Jesus worked the work of God, and in God's own way.

Thus his peace was in doing God's will. He emptied himself fully to the point of death, as Paul says. He becomes translucent, "the burning glass through which God's light comes to set the world on fire".(2) He makes an "empty space" of himself for God to enter in. He shows us what it means to be truly human. As created beings, we have a "capacity for God". Our soul is, as the Latin would say, capax Dei. Because we are capax Dei, because we have a "capacity for God", we can receive God's gifts, and we can receive that most characteristic of all God's gifts, the gift of peace.

In him and in him alone is "the tranquillity of order",(3) or the state of concord, as the Oxford Dictionary reminds us. The difference between what the Oxford dictionary says and what we see in Jesus is that that "tranquillity of order" is not destroyed by the sin of humanity. Sin erects the cross of Jesus; sin in traditional Christian thinking contradicts the tranquillity of God's order. But the cross, itself a contradiction, is (as St Paul reminds us) love in such length and breadth, and depth and height, that it brings disorder into order. Sacrificial love presses the disorder of our sin into the pattern of the cross. Jesus reveals to us that there is a true sense in which there has always been a cross in the heart of God; the passion of Christ reveals the compassion of the Father. Christ becomes our peace with the God of peace, reconciling us to our true and perfect humanity. That is what becomes entrusted to the church and her ministry.

Jesus calls us to do God's will, for self-will always leads to conflict, with our fellow people and with God. Self-will enthrones the separate person in a state of self-sufficiency, which is pride. It is the will to power, which acknowledges no other master than itself. Therefore, it comes into conflict immediately with other wills. The problem of human conflict is the clash of so many unregenerate wills. Pilate, we are told, delivered Jesus up to the will of his enemies. Our regenerate will is always destructive in some sense. Jesus challenges those of us who attempt to accomplish the work of God, but not in God's way, our wills not yet being captive to the will of God, to see God's peace in doing his will in the midst of agony and strife and conflict.

Jesus' peace was compatible with agony, but the agony did not overcome it. This is the peace that he gives to his friends and disciples. "My peace", "not as the world gives, give I unto you", "in the world you shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world".(4) These sayings, and Jesus' actions, show that we enjoy the peace which Christ gives not in spite of the conflict, but at the very heart of the conflicts and contradictions of life. Peace is not having a pleasant time; it is not the end of striving, or as we have heard "the cessation of war"; God's peace is the basis upon which we strive more effectively. The Lebanese writer and philosopher, Gibran Khalil Gibran, complements all this when he speaks of peace and says: "Look at the darkness, giving birth to the sun."(5)