These days more than ever, it seems that the problems confronting us as leaders are increasingly complex and difficult to preside over. This is especially so when it comes to the interpersonal tensions that develop among people in general and that have their distinctive ways of playing themselves out in our churches.
Thirty-some years ago, when I entered ministry there was less intensity camping behind the inevitable squabbles that rippled through the congregations I pastored. Interpersonal stresses simply were not loaded with the exasperation that tends to overhang many of the clashes that erupt in congregations today. The differences of opinion that forecast only a brief bicker some years ago, may today portend long-term campaigns that have the potential, in some cases, of crippling the well-being and ministry of a whole congregation. Increasingly also, pastors today seem to be drawn to center stage when it comes to these escalated battles.
One of the more disturbing aspects of the deepening dissension in much of our culture and in our churches is that we seem to have fewer people among us who possess the golden qualities that are necessary to the endeavor of working and living together in productive community. It is instead socially fashionable in many of our cultures to value qualities that in the long run irritate our difficulties. We seem to lack the type of people who know how and are actually able to consistently handle disagreement and dissension constructively because they possess a certain bearing, an inner capacity or attitude that immediately makes a positive difference within a group of battling people. Such people are pure gold. Such pastors are pure gold. "Blessed are the peacemakers ..."
As I think about all this it seems to me that it is imperative that we face up to the fact that we ourselves and not merely our institutions ("conditions in the church," "negative social conditioning," "the government") are the source of our predicaments and that it will only be when we have dealt with the error in ourselves that we will be able to deal effectively with what is wrong in the church or in the world.
It is terribly true that very little will change in the patterns of our congregations or our world if we only seek to change our organizational frontiers, realign our demographic compositions, or hone our political, administrative, or even our "doctrinal" expressions. Things will change when we change.
In other words, increasingly, thank God, we ministers are being brought back to the basics of our original divine call by the sheer force of negative necessity. We are being forced by the pain of our conflicts and by our anguished sense of need to seek out and effectively rediscover the authentic spiritual tangibles that cluster in the person of Christ Jesus Himself and that are so basic to the prosperity of any group of people.
Let me try to come to what I'm actually driving at by quoting one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. In reflecting upon the horror of the war he had experienced and especially the cruelty and disdain that had been focused upon him as a prisoner of war, Sir Laurens van der Post talked of the overpowering necessity of finding a quality of forgiveness sufficient to dissolve the destructive force accompanying the attitudes that had been unleashed against him and that had found their mark in his soul and in the souls of his fellow prisoners. With immense insight he wrote, "judgment and justice had brought us far but that far was not far enough. Only the exercise of the law of forgiveness, the declaration for ever of an unconditional amnesty for all in the warring spirit of men, could carry us on beyond." 1
It is astoundingly true that all of us tend constantly to seek ultimate arbitration only at the feet of "judgment and justice." It begins at the knee of our mother. We continue it later with other authority figures in our schools. Still later we make our appeals or lodge our complaints at our workplace and in our social, legal, political, and ecclesiastical institutions.
The persistent search for justice goes on unabated in the cogitations of our own thinking because in it all we have come to believe or suppose that when we finally find it (justice), or when it is finally properly dispensed, we will find satisfaction and peace. But the truth is that as essential as justice is, it can only take us so far. To stop with it, expecting it by itself to heal and restore us and our situation, casting out of us the demons of our own hurt and anger, is to ask of it too much.
Judgment and justice must by all means be called on. Forgiveness could not gain a foothold without them. But to bring about the quality of healing that is needed after all is said and done, is simply not their role.
It is the divine balm of the spirit of forgiveness that we simply must find if we are to be healed either personally or as quarreling congregations. This is a forgiveness that is not just a cognitive doctrine producing a benevolent action when necessary. Instead it is an all-pervading attitude or worldview that will inevitably by its nature have a far-reaching, positive influence wherever it is lived out. We need to look deep into the heart of this truth and so do our congregations. We tend to be shallow in it. Thus we are predisposed to depreciate and neglect it, turning away from it, trying to accomplish still more by means of judgment and justice alone.
It is by no means strange that God has so much to say about the vast, immeasurable ocean of active forgiveness that is out there, and that it stands at the front gate of rebirth and cleansing and is poured out from there by God Himself. It is preeminently true that the only place where this spirit of forgiveness can be seen in all its glory, along with judgment and justice, is in the magnificent person of Jesus Christ, whom it is our vast privilege to know, to proclaim, and to follow.
Reflecting further on his war experience, Sir Laurens said some thing else: "I had learnt to fear the Pharisee more than the sinner."2 It is the Pharisee, strong in us and strong in much of our religious heritage, that causes us to oppose or neglect the wonder of true forgiveness in favor of the limited role of mere reason and justice. There is perhaps no other point at which the contrast between Jesus' truth and that of the Pharisees may be drawn more clearly than on the matter of how forgiveness is to be administered among us. It was, after all, the Pharisee who not only rejected the way of forgiveness but placed its truest Source on the cross, thus giving us perhaps the clearest and most fundamental contrast between true and false religion.
We must see clearly that we are not here promoting that old thing called "cheap grace," nor the easy-does-it, peaches and cream gospel, but something transcendent, high and holy, yet at the same time terribly real and down-to-earth. The summons of forgiveness insists, by its nature that we do one of the most difficult things there is for a human being to do. Let's embrace, proclaim, and live in the spirit of forgiveness as it was manifested in Him who is altogether lovely.
1 Laurens van der Post, Feather Fall (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1994), 68.
2 Ibid.
