Conflict Resolution 2

Don: Jesus’s remarks in Matthew 18 about conflict resolution are confrontational and may leave those of us who prefer to avoid confrontation feeling uncomfortable. The principles he espoused were that the confrontation should be done without delay and that if it cannot be achieved one-to-one then others in the community should be brought in.

M. Scott-Peck’s book The Different Drum on community making and peace would seem to me perhaps to imply that Jesus’s remarks about conflict resolution might really have been about the difference between true community and pseudo community.

Scott-Peck pointed out that true community takes time and effort. Pseudo community tries to buy community through pretense, by telling little white lies and not telling all the truth. In essence, they seek to avoid conflict. True community, in contrast, seeks to resolve it, he wrote. Pseudo community etiquette requires that you do not upset other people and that if they upset you, you should act as though you are not bothered in the least. If a disagreement looks set to persist, then you should smoothly change the subject to something else.

So pseudo community can seem very pleasant, whereas true community must go through processes of chaos and emptiness. It seems that Jesus is telling us that there is power in the process of resolution, in forgiveness. Something happens within the community, and perhaps more importantly, something happens within the individual who goes through the process of conflict resolution and forgiveness.

When the situation is serious enough to require resolution, walking away does not produce a deep-seated true community. But not everything needs to be raised to this level of importance (Psalms 19:11).

Holocaust survivor and historian Eli Wiesel has written extensively on the topic of forgiveness, including his own forgiveness of god for allowing the Holocaust. It helped to heal him.

Luke 7:36-50 is also instructive:

Now one of the Pharisees was requesting Him to dine with him, and He entered the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. And there was a woman in the city who was a sinner; and when she learned that He was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume, and standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing His feet and anointing them with the perfume. Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet He would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching Him, that she is a sinner.”

And Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he replied, “Say it, Teacher.” “A moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. So which of them will love him more?” Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have judged correctly.” Turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave Me no kiss; but she, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss My feet. You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed My feet with perfume. For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” Then He said to her, “Your sins have been forgiven.” Those who were reclining at the table with Him began to say to themselves, “Who is this man who even forgives sins?” And He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Albert Einstein once saw a newsreel in which Mahatma Gandhi greeted British officials with the traditional Hindu greeting “Namaste.” Einstein wrote to ask Gandhi what the “Namaste” meant. Gandhi explained that, to him, it meant that “when the god in me sees the god in you, then we are one.” Remember, Gandhi was using the expression in the context of reconciliation and forgiveness over Britain’s treatment of India and its people.

A number of peer-reviewed medical studies have found strong correlations between a forgiving nature, on the one hand, and psychological, emotional, and physical health, on the other. A 2005 study from the University of South Carolina showed patients assessed to have a forgiving disposition tended to sleep better and had healthier heart rate and blood pressure. UCSD had similar findings. Duke University found stronger immune system function in forgiving HIV patients. NYU found forgiving heart patients had lower stress and lower cholesterol.

In light of all this, should we be more ready to intercede in conflicts?

Kiran: I struggle to be reconciled. I find I must first forgive my protagonist in my heart and mind before I can approach him personally. But it is really challenging to do this.

Robin: The greatest benefit in the process is to the forgiver.

David: There seems to be an important difference between resolving issues and resolving conflict. An issue—a disagreement, a perceived injury—requires that both sides ultimately have to agree on the facts and the rights and wrongs of the case if the issue itself is to be resolved. They have to get to the bottom of it, and that can be very difficult. But a conflict can be settled through the simple expedient of “agreeing to disagree,” or of forgiveness, regardless of whether the issue is resolved or not. So I think it is vital and helpful to consider what it is we are attempting to resolve: An issue, or the conflict it has caused. The Daoist “Do Nothing” of conflict avoidance seems to me a legitimate form of conflict resolution, though it could never aspire to issue resolution. If Jesus would agree with this (and I think he might) then there is for me no problem with the scripture. But if he would not agree, then I would have a problem!

Ada: Working in an OR, confrontation is a positive way of resolving issues, which often arise out of simple misunderstandings. At the end of the day, in such a life-critical setting, issues have to be resolved.

Don: There is indeed a distinction between issue resolution and interpersonal conflict resolution. We are not all going to agree about everything all of the time. The trick is to agree to disagree without rancor, without enmity, without divisiveness. In true community, it is possible for differing ideas and perspectives to coexist without leading to personal conflict. But we seem to have difficulty even just agreeing to disagree; we want to make our protagonist accept that we are right and s/he is wrong. This seems particularly the case in issues concerning religion.

Jason: How the matter ends is what matters. Matthew v. 17 says that if the protagonist won’t agree, then you are to treat that person as you would treat a gentile or a tax collector. But what does that mean? Jesus spent more time with these than with the Pharisees, so surely he could not have been advocating shunning them.

Kiran: The bible is full of apparently contradictory statements.

David: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a splendid practical example of conflict resolution and community building. It certainly worked insofar as it kept the community—the nation—intact. The apparent scriptural answer to the question of how to deal with conflict resolution is to be proactive in solving the issue, yet as we have just discussed, good people may disagree, some issues may never be resolved, and some perspectives will remain forever irreconcilable. It is not clear to me that the message in Matthew allows for just agreeing to disagree, though I could be wrong.

Don: I do think the passage speaks more to interpersonal resolution than to issue resolution. It begins with the statement “If any man sins against you…”, which makes it sound like the passage is only about interpersonal conflict and not about differences of opinion. And in the end, as Kiran said, the desired result is interpersonal reconciliation. The South African solution was more aimed at healing interpersonal wounds than at resolving any particular issues.

David: The 800 pound gorilla of conflict in today’s world seems to be the Islam vs. The Rest conflict of beliefs. To fundamentalist Moslems, as I understand them from reading them and reading about them, the only possible resolution to this conflict is for The Rest to convert to Islam. For them, there can be no agreeing to disagree. There can be no deals with the infidel. That being so, should Christians, in order to resolve the conflict, turn the other cheek and convert? It would certainly stop the violence against Christians in Egypt if there were no Christians to be violent towards. Come to think of it: Is not turning the other cheek the uniquely Christian approach to conflict resolution?

Don: Not sure it was unique—Mahatma Gandhi was of a similar mind in that respect.

Jason: It is not about agreement, or uniformity, but about reconciliation. The paradigm shift is in loving your enemy enough to give him even more grace—to turn the other cheek—the more he hurts you.

Robin: How were the Pharisees supposed to treat a tax collector?

Jason: Their tradition taught them to have nothing to do with such people. But Jesus behaved exactly the opposite way. Maybe that’s the cause of so much confusion about this whole passage. For most of my life I thought it meant that if I found someone going spiritually astray then it was my duty to try to lead them back into the correct path as defined by my church. That is exactly what most churches seem to take it to mean; that is, you do something wrong, then first we’ll try a one-on-one chat, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll set more and bigger dogs on you, and if all that fails, then you are out. But this passage is immediately followed by a passage on forgiveness. Peter, evidently as puzzled as we all are, asks words to the effect of: So how often do I have to forgive them, if they continue to offend? and the answer is: Every single time! This is the end: Forgiveness, love, and grace. This is the bottom line.

Don: And this is how Jesus approached the tax collectors and the Gentiles.

Robin: It would appear, then, that there are layers of relationship. If there is conflict in which a party does not want to compromise, then they are similar to a tax collector—someone who is not close, but we should treat all with love and grace. As a result, they are more likely to become closer.

Jason: In a true community, I might love a person with whom I disagree more than I love a person with whom I agree, because conflict resolution is so important and requires so much more love. This is another example of Jesus turning our notions upside down—the last shall be first, turn the other cheek, etc. That’s why true community, as Scott-Peck suggests, may need a miracle ever to be achieved! It just seems unnatural to us, especially when you try to fit it into the context and the concept of church.

David: The concept of church, like all our human concepts of community, is something that is structured around a core set of beliefs and principles. But this is not the kind of community Jesus is talking about. He is not talking about the Christian community or Jewish community or the Moslem community, none of which is a true community. He is indeed talking about an almost supernatural community, one in which Christian and Moslem and Hindu and Jew and Buddhist and—why not—Wiccans, agnostics, and atheists live happily and peacefully together. That’s the Kingdom. Absent from such a community are all the attributes of community as we tend to define it: Structure, rules, regulations, and so on. There are none. True community is a system of anarchy minus the mayhem that usually accompanies it. I was thinking of calling the book I would like to write based upon these discussions “The Anarchrist.”

Robin: It would seem then that the church should be more patient with people in conflict with it.

Jason: In true community, patience is irrelevant as far as conflict resolution is concerned. Instead, you have total, unquestioning, immediate, acceptance. But this is a community that allows everyone in, and the fear is that this is destructive to community.

Don: That was precisely the Jews’ chief complaint against Jesus: “You are polluting our community and our identity with your embrace of Gentiles and prostitutes and tax collectors.” They ended up killing him for that very reason.

Michael: Marx wanted to build true community. He thought equal distribution of wealth would help achieve it.

Ada: Jesus just wanted us all to accept one another for who we are and to accept that there are no limits on whom he would allow into the Kingdom.

David: The Jehovah’s Witnesses “dis-fellowship” people who fall incorrigibly out of line. That seems to me about as unchristian a practice as one could conceive.

Don: And they would probably justify it on the basis of Matthew 18! The JWs are by no means alone in the practice of shunning.

David: Michael’s comment about Marxist society has me thinking that there is nothing more structured—and closed to the outside world, ideologically and often physically—than the Marxist community, The very weight and complexity of that structure is almost enough to guarantee its eventual disintegration and collapse, but the entropy inherent to a closed system is its real nemesis. An anarchic community is the very opposite. It is an open system, unaffected by entropy. It is the only kind, science informs us, that can last forever and ever. Amen!