My friend Marcel Serabungo is a pastor in the Congo and works for World Relief.
Once when he was visiting Oregon, I invited him to sit in on a staff meeting at our church to share a bit of his experience with us. As he shared his heart with us, he began to plead with us, as passionately as anything I’ve heard, to forgive each other of the slights, misunderstandings and ways we may hurt each other, to pursue unity at all costs, and to learn to truly love each other as a church team.
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Marcel speaks in a methodical cadence and with an accent that comes from English being his second language. I found myself being entranced by his exhortation and wasn’t ready for the final point he was driving toward. He abruptly changed direction and gave this concluding remark:
“If all of you can’t learn to forgive and be reconciled here, with relatively minor and petty offenses, how can you ever hope to have anything to say with regard to forgiveness and reconciliation to the brothers and sisters in Congo and Rwanda who have suffered genocide, murder, rape or the pillaging of their land?”
Loving Like Jesus is Hard Work
True forgiveness and reconciliation means we’re willing to let our enemies become our friends.
We always want to out-love them, out-last them, out-rejoice them. We do not want to let enemies defeat us.
Ultimately, however, the goal is not just to survive bad relationships, but to redeem them. Christ died for our enemies just as he died for us. It’s a subtle yet real danger that the righteous can become self-righteous.
As Christians, we must not claim to be Bible-believing yet become love-denying in practice. We cannot devour each other with petty rivalries and selfish ambition. As those who seek to do justice in the world, we must understand the full implication of forgiveness and reconciliation for our own lives.
It’s rare that it happens and sometimes it feels risky or exhausting, but the Christian ethic of love means we see our current enemies as our future friends.
