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Reconciliation as Mission

I'm taking a one week summer intensive course called "Reconciliation as Mission" with six other graduate school friends and a great professor who graciously made the trip down from Michigan. We've only just finished day one and I know this class is going to make a life-altering impact on me. One of the books that we have the opportunity to read for the course is titled, "Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation," by Miroslav Volf. Tonight, before I head off to bed, I want to share a passage from this book that I found to be particularly poignant:

"Forgiveness is necessary, but will it suffice? Forgiveness is the boundary between exclusion and embrace. It heals the wounds that the power-acts of exclusion have inflicted and breaks down the dividing wall of hostility. Yet it leaves a distance between people, an empty space of neutrality, that allows them either to go their separate ways in what is sometimes called "peace" or fall into each other's arms and restore broken communion. "Going one's own way" is the boldest dream many a person caught in the vortex of violence can muster the strength to dream. "Too much injustice was done for us to be friends; too much blood was shed for us to live together," are the words that echo all too often in regions wrecked with conflict. A clear line will separate "them" from "us." They will remain "they" and we will remain "we," and we will never include "them" when we speak of "us." Such "clean" identities, living at safe distances from one another, may be all that is possible or even desirable in some cases at certain junctures of people's mutual history. But a parting of the ways is clearly not yet peace. Much more than just the absence of hostility sustained by the absence of contact, peace is communion before former enemies. Beyond offering forgiveness, Christ's passion aims at restoring such communion -- even with the enemies who persistently refuse to be reconciled.

"At the heart of the cross is Christ's stance of not letting the other remain an enemy and of creating space in himself for the offender to come in. Read as the culmination of the larger narrative of God's dealing with humanity, the cross says that despite its manifest enmity toward God humanity belongs to God; God will not be God without humanity. "While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son" writes the Apostle Paul (Romans 5:10). The cross is the giving up of God's self in order not to give up on humanity; it is the consequence of God's desire to break the power of human enmity without violence and receive human beings into divine communion. The goal of the cross is the dwelling of human beings "in the Spirit," "in Christ" and "in God." Forgiveness is therefore not the culmination of Christ's relation to the offending other; it is a passage leading to embrace. The arms of the crucified are open -- a sign of space in God's self and an invitation for the enemy to come in." (125-6)

Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.