How to Live Peacefully in Divisive Times
- Rev. Kyle Norman Crosswalk.com Contributing Writer
- Updated Sep 01, 2020
Calgary, the city where I live, is a fairly quaint place. Although it’s a city of over one million people, it has a relatively low crime rate, and I never feel unsafe. It’s mostly a peaceful place to reside. This is why a recent local news story stands out so much. Two drivers exchanged biting words at a stoplight, and one driver got so irate that he exited his car and threw a hot beverage through the open window of the other. Tragically, this hot beverage struck a passenger in the car, a seven-year-old girl, burning a large portion of her face.
The above instance is tragic, but sadly, nothing new. Scenes like this are played out on almost a daily basis throughout the world...hence the term “road rage.” Isn’t it sad that seething ire has become so common during daily commutes that we’ve given it a unique term? What’s more, the news continually reports instances of physical violence, criminal activity, racial inequality, and generalized injustice on almost a daily basis. Each community or city, like mine, will have its local stories; unfortunately revealing the divisiveness, discord, and unrest all too rampant today.
If we believe we’re to live in opposition to another (or an ‘other’), it becomes all too easy to fill our lives with hatred and anger. We become incapable of offering respect, a listening ear, loving service, or forgiveness. Such a mindset destroys the peace that we, as Christian people, are called to live out.
Peace Is a Defining Mark of Our Christian Lives
Peace is among that which constitutes the Fruit of the Spirit—a sign of God’s Spirit abiding within the heart of the believer. Jesus said to his disciples:
My peace I leave you, my peace I give you – John 14:27
And Paul calls each person:
If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. – Romans 12:18
Yet this biblical call to peaceability is a lot more radical than we might think. The peace that Jesus offers is much more than a simple lack of arguing or fighting. After all, even if we don’t engage in road rage, or any act of physical violence or aggression, we can be so internally filled with anger and vengeance that we hardly can be described as peaceful.
I wonder if this is how we often view the call to peace. Peace becomes nothing more than a spiritual sound-byte, or something caricatured as that which is hoped for in speeches and well-meaning prayers, but ultimately not holding a lot of reality in this world of ours.
As Christians, We Commit to Living Out an Alternate Reality
When Scripture calls the Christian believer to strive for peace, the call is to a deep and abiding harmony; with God, with ourselves, and with the world. This means that peace begins with a change in our dispositions—a transformation of heart and soul. As the old hymn goes “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”
Living out the call to peace means that we not only step away from outer expressions of discord or unrest, but also the reality of those things in our inner selves. To use Christ’s image, we wash the inside of the cup as well as the outside (Matthew 23:26). This means we must deal with the destructiveness of feelings of hatred, frustration, intolerance, and ultimately, anger.
If we seek to combat the divisiveness, unrest, discord, and rampant anger that is so often expressed, sometimes violently, in our world we must take seriously the spiritual danger of anger.
The Spiritual Danger of Anger
Anger has been listed as one of the chief vices plaguing the people of faith. The early desert fathers and mothers spoke of how anger destroyed one’s spiritual life. Anger (one of the eight spiritual vices later repackaged in the Catholic conception known as “The Seven Deadly Sins”), was to be resolutely jettisoned from the lives of all who wished to follow the way of Christ.
Astoundingly, these early fathers and mothers advised that the way to combat the temptation towards anger was not through pious and solitary prayer, but community.
John Cassian, of the fourth century, writes about how stepping into community combats the anger latent in one’s heart or soul. In his discussion of the eight vices, he writes “When we are angry with others, we should not seek solitude on the grounds that there, at least, no one will provoke us to anger...Our desire to leave people is because of our pride.” (from The Philokalia: The complete text, Volume 1; 1983, G.E.H Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware, Eds; Farrar, New York, NY).
Peace Is Not Simply Solitude, Uniformity, or the Absence of Arguing
Peace is not the same as uniformity, nor is it found in simply removing ourselves from outward expressions. For example, taking away cars may stop road rage, but it will not actually address the underlying issue. In true biblical community, one refuses to allow anger to grow into bitterness, and bitterness to grow into excommunication.
This was radically lived amongst the early church, where they understood their community as consisting of “neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The Christian life calls us to live life together—to embody a bold and radical peace that transcends all evils of the world, and the brokenness of people.
Of course, the radical thing about community is that this call to peace occurs in the context of an imperfect world. Peace does not mean the cessation of violence or discord, nor does it mean that disagreements, even arguments, will never occur. The early Christians were undoubtedly aware of this, as they faced, disagreement, hatred, persecution and, eventually, martyrdom. Yet the radical call of the gospel is to live differently. Peace involves such a radical step away from the vileness of anger, that astoundingly, Paul could call on the Christian community people to refrain from retaliation and revenge. (Romans 12:19).
Peace Doesn’t Seek or Ruminate on Revenge
Part of what makes anger such a deadly vice, and what makes revenge so destructive, is that this is not always played out physically. Frankly, you can take revenge on someone without doing anything; you just replay what you would like to do over, and over, and over again.
Have you ever spent time imagining what you could say, what you would do, if a situation ever arose again? Have you ever spent your internal energy, the energy of your heart and your soul—the part of yourself that should be reserved for worship, prayer, and service—playing out a scenario where you are the victor and your enemy becomes humiliated? I know I have. I may not act on it, I may not do anything, but in my imagination, I take revenge again and again.
This is precisely why Christ’s call to be agents of peace amid a divisive time and culture is more than simply how we externally react to others. Thus, Paul’s admonition for Christians not to take revenge is not simply referencing acts of retaliation against those who persecuted them. Rather, it involves a deeper call to still the imagination, to cease our dreams of anger and vengeance being played out in our minds.
“But,” we may ask, “doesn’t scripture say, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?” Yes, it does. But this is precisely part of the radicalness implicit in Christ’s community. This “Law of Retribution” is found in Exodus 21. Yet this mandate was a call of fairness. ‘An eye for an eye’ served as a call to a just and peaceful end to conflict. It was about making one whole.
Of course, because so often we get in the way of God’s pure intentions, this notion of fairness and peace became twisted into a law of “If you hurt me, I hurt you.” Yet this was never the way that God’s people are called to act towards one another, externally or internally. Praying that our adversaries get their just desserts is not actually a Christian prayer.
How often do we allow anger and frustration to control how we respond to others? How often do we allow hurt to drive us away from people—to write them off and refuse to listen or associate with them anymore?
Conversely, when we choose to overcome anger with community, this leads us to look more deeply into the lives of those we would consider enemies. We begin to open ourselves to their lives, to the recognition that they are people made in God’s image and redeemed by Christ’s love.
Furthermore, we may uncover that anger and vengeance is but a mask for hurt or wounding. When we can step away from the internal drive for vengeful retaliation, we free ourselves to bring peace into another’s life, just as Christ brings peace into ours.
Peace Seeks Relationship, Healing, and Redemption
Thus, the call for the Christian is not to retaliate against the enemy, but to bless them. Thus, as Paul instructs, “if your enemy is hungry, feed them, if thirsty, give them something to drink” (Romans 12:20). The indication here is for the follower of Jesus to take the time to get to know what is going on in the life of our enemy. Instead of simply retaliating, Christians are called to uncover where we may live out the peace that passes all understanding, logic, or common sense.
There is something quite profound in the thought that the way we overcome anger and divisiveness in this world is not in separating ourselves from it, in silos of spiritual perfection, but through entering more deeply in human life.
We seek relationship not retaliation, healing not hatred, redemption not revenge. We are not called to enjoy peace with a certain branch of people (the like-minded perhaps?), and then jettison others. No. The real call for the Christian is how we embody the love and peace of Jesus precisely in the places that are difficult.
Is there anyone in your life today that you need to seek peace with? Is there anyone to whom you need to change cursing into blessing? Is there any anger that you need to let go of, either in deed, or in imagination?
As followers of Jesus, we do not overcome hatred or evil by separation or revenge but by clinging to that which is good, holy, and loving. May the church today be a body of people demonstrating this reality in the world.
Photo Credit: ©GettyImages/fizkes
