“If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.” Matthew 18:15
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There is more of a reason to want peace than just to horde the comfortable feelings it brings. We want not just to be peace-horders but peace-givers, peacemakers.
Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:9 that peacemakers are such a blessing to Him that they will be called “Sons of God.” Paul presented the same high calling to the Roman Christians: “If possible, so far as it depends upon you, be at peace with all men” (Romans 12:18). Peter agrees as he echoes Psalm 34: “Let him who means to love life and see good days…seek peace and pursue it” (1 Peter 3:10-11). And these are just a smattering of all the Bible says about the virtues of peace.
Because of the abundance of scriptures pointing us toward living peacefully, we might have picked up a dangerous stereotype worth examining. There is more to this “peace” than meets the eye, and this command from Leviticus 19:17 can help us uncover some of its less obvious aspects: “Do not hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt.” Hey, what's going on here? The second part of this scripture doesn’t seem to fit with the first half. This could simply mean that if we know a brother’s (or sister’s) sin and don’t help him/her see it, we could be held partially responsible. But if this is true, why is it in the context of not hating him? Rebuking doesn’t sound like peacemaking, so perhaps we could just chalk up the seeming contradiction of both commands to the often misunderstood Old Testament way of thinking akin to “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” After all, we know that Jesus nixed that way of thinking in His Sermon on the Mount when, with His “You have heard it said, but I say,” He set out to teach us about the higher law of love.
But this argument just won't hold up. For right there in the same book with Jesus’ Beatitudes, He further instructs His disciples: “And if your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault…” Obviously, then, Jesus, whose every word was in harmony with all His other words, meant that sometimes to achieve real peace, something active must happen.
Yes, certainly sometimes peace can be achieved quietly and passively; we can and should just flat purposely overlook some sins against us. Other times, however, true peace that will keep us from hating our brother or sister in our heart must be something that we more actively “seek” and “pursue.” At these times we must confront our brother or sister whom we need to forgive. In this light, the warning in Leviticus not only lines up with the teachings of Jesus but makes a lot of sense its own context: Whatever our brother or sister has done to us cannot possibly be worse than our hating him or her for it.
In His Beatitudes, Jesus referred to peace in the deepest, most heartfelt sense, even if it means going to some trouble to achieve it. Otherwise, we are not peacemakers but peacefakers.
Sometimes making the peace and keeping the peace requires action, even risky action. After all, you might wonder, what if confrontation makes things even worse? (This, by the way, is the same excuse often used when parents don't want to ruffle their kids' feathers, even though their feathers are obviously dangerously infested with mites, fleas, lice, ________ [fill in the blank with whatever vermin is disgusting enough to cause you to say, "Whoa! Enough of this vile stuff!" and start ripping feathers out with a vengeance in order to save the child.] )
If your heart can't finally drop it, prayerfully, carefully take action to stop the infection. Stop the faking. Make the peace.
