We Need To Invest In Resolving Conflict At Our Own Expense

Last updated on: January 4, 2017 at 10:49 am by Paul Louis Metzger

We Need To Invest In Resolving Conflict At Our Own Expense 2017-01-04T10:49:35-08:00 Paul Louis Metzger

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Why did Jesus care to resolve the conflict between God and humanity? Jesus was really invested in resolving the conflict between God and humanity because he was and is divine and human.

If we do not somehow represent the various parties in a conflict, we will never work to transform a conflict so that it is beneficial to all.

Beware of a person who is not invested in a conflict except to benefit from it at others’ expense. Those who are most involved in a conflict have the greatest amount of motivation to resolve it. For example, beware of gun manufacturers who are not invested in resolving a conflict to the benefit of all parties, but profit from the conflict at others’ expense.

Jesus benefited others–God and humanity– at his own expense. So, too, his servant Martin Luther King, Jr., who died seeking to bring about a double victory: redemption and healing to all peoples, black, white, and beyond. Here is what King wrote in a 1967 Christmas Sermon on this theme:

I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many sheriffs, too many white citizens’ councilors, and too many Klansmen of the South to want to hate, myself; and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the country, and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, and we’ll still love you. But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”

In the end, my closing question is this: How are we invested in racial conflicts today?

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