Listen

The Goal of a Difficult Conversation

...and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church...

— Matthew 18

After spending several weeks reflecting on peace, unity, family, neighbors and genuine love, eventually we have to confront an obvious problem.

What happens when people don't get along?

Jesus actually gives us a procedure. If another member sins against you, go to that person privately. If that doesn't work, take one or two others. Only after those attempts fail does the matter reach the larger community.

But something in the passage caught me today that I had passed over many times before.

Jesus keeps talking about whether the other person will listen.

Not whether I can defeat his argument. Not whether she admits that I was right. Not even, at this point, whether we agree.

“If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.”

Regained.

That tells us something about the purpose of the conversation. The objective isn't victory. It's relationship.

And listening is considerably harder than it sounds.

We sometimes call “agreeing to disagree” listening. Sometimes that's the best outcome available, and there's nothing wrong with it. But I think genuine listening asks more of me. I want to understand how the world looks from where you're standing. I become willing to discover that something in your perspective might require me to adjust my own. Perhaps the best answer will eventually contain something neither of us possessed when the conversation began.

That's very different from waiting quietly while you talk so that I can deliver my next argument.

It is also very different from what we increasingly do online. Someone offends us, and rather than talking privately to that person, we tell everybody else. We post about it. Gather allies. Trade screenshots. Drop a laugh emoji. Develop better arguments for the next round.

Matthew 18 moves in exactly the opposite direction.

Start with the person.

And listen.

Only when private reconciliation fails does the circle become larger. Public involvement is near the end of Jesus' process, not the beginning.

Maybe that explains why peacemaking is so difficult. It doesn't merely require two people willing to stop fighting. It requires people willing to learn something from one another.

Listening doesn't guarantee agreement. Some disagreements remain. Some offenses require accountability, and Jesus plainly recognizes that reconciliation sometimes fails.

But look at His first objective:

“You have regained that one.”

After all our recent reflections about unity, perhaps that's the question I should carry into my next disagreement.

Not: How do I win this?

But: How do we regain each other?

And perhaps it begins with one of the simplest instructions we've encountered yet.

Listen.

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