Seventy Times Seven

Jesus's Path to Conflict Transformation

There is a story told by the Sufi Attar of Nishapur that I always find deeply moving when thinking about our natural reaction to others mistreating us and the resulting fear that comes with it. Attar’s story starts with Jesus walking through a town and being verbally mistreated by the townspeople. Jesus responds to the mistreatment by praying for them. One of his disciples responds incredulously to Jesus: “‘You prayed for these men, did you not feel incensed against them?’ He answered: ‘I could spend only of what I had in my purse.’” Jesus had no insults to give, no mistreatment to unleash on the townspeople, and no stones to throw. The only thing he had in his purse was love. It was all he had to give. Practicing Jesus’s path of forgiving and reconciling 70 × 7 involves changing how we interact when we are in conflict with people. In conflict, we often need to defend ourselves or deter, punish, and even hurt the people causing us pain. Most destructive conflicts operate on a spiral pattern where both parties “invite” each other to escalate the conflict. The temptation to metaphorically throw stones is powerful when we are in conflict. Jesus teaches us that stone throwing only begets more stone throwing.

When we “roll away” our stones, we de-escalate conflict rather than inflame it. We do this by looking first at our own complicity in the conflict rather than looking to condemn our adversary. We show our love for God not by collecting a vast arsenal of stones to throw at those who fail to keep God’s commandments and those who hurt us. We show our love for God by rolling away stones and inviting grace and love to restore us.

The Chainsaw Versus the Screwdriver

I was invited to be a guest speaker at a university nearly twenty years ago. As part of my visit, I was asked to go on a talk show that happened every Friday night on campus. I was excited for the opportunity to “sell” peacebuilding as an academic pursuit and vocation to an audience I hoped would be friendly.

The other guest on the talk show that night was a political science professor. I’ll call him Phil. Phil and I sat on a makeshift stage with about two hundred students in the audience. After music and opening jokes, the show’s host introduced Phil and asked him how political scientists approach conflict resolution.

Phil came with props: a tool bag full of hammers, wrenches, sanders, and even a large power saw. Phil explained how these objects represented different tools available to political scientists to manage conflict. He talked about economic sanctions, boycotts, military intervention, and even the threat of nuclear war. The more severe the conflict, the bigger the tool. Then, he pulled out of his pocket a small screwdriver, the kind used to adjust eyeglasses. 

“And this little screwdriver here,” he said with a wry smile, holding up the tiny tool, “is peacebuilding.”

He then looked at me, and the audience roared with laughter. I felt a mixture of humiliation, anger, and fear. Every negative stereotype about peacebuilding I ever heard was masterfully summed up by this solitary object—peacebuilding, especially Jesus’s way, is weak, small, and largely ineffective against the most challenging problems we face. 

By looking at me pointedly, he made it personal. He wasn’t only talking about my field of work; he was talking about me. It wasn’t enough for him to highlight the differences between our two approaches. No, he wanted it to say something about who I was and who he was. The laughter from the audience reaffirmed that they, too, held the same stereotypes. 

I tried to make a joke. “Thanks for finding my screwdriver,” I said sheepishly. “I’ve been looking everywhere for it.” There were a few chuckles. I knew I needed a more robust response.

After Phil’s interview, the host turned to me and asked me what I had to say to all the critics who had indicated peacebuilding was about as effective as everyone sitting in a circle singing kumbaya.¹ I asked Phil if I could borrow the tiny screwdriver and the power saw.

I left the stage with a screwdriver in my right hand and a power saw in my left. Walking through the crowd, I explained that humans are ultimately responsible for conflict. We create and perpetuate the systems that we experience as repressive and violent. Whether through international relations or peacebuilding, change has to happen at the human level. I started asking random people in the audience this critical question:

“If I am trying to change you, what would you prefer me to use? The tiny screwdriver or the power saw?”

One by one, every single person chose the screwdriver. I was relentless. I even singled out political science majors in the crowd, asking them the “screwdriver versus saw” question. With each person who chose the screwdriver, the audience began cheering and laughing louder and louder.

After the last audience member spoke, I looked back at Phil and said simply, “And that is why political scientists have failed to stop war, violence, and human suffering. We need to try a different way. We need peacebuilding.” The audience erupted in applause.

It took me over a decade to realize, I am embarrassed to confess, that contrary to the principles I had championed that evening, I had used a power saw, not a screwdriver, on Phil. I hadn’t seen him with the eyes of my heart. I had responded to his “sin” by picking up a stone and casting it in his direction. It was a direct hit. Phil was wounded, and I couldn’t see his pain because I felt he deserved it.

Any of You Who Is Without Sin

The story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery offers another audacious teaching from Jesus that helps us understand the concept of 70 × 7 more clearly. In this story, Jesus connects loving our enemies to the principle of rolling away our stones.

Jesus teaches a crowd on the Mount of Olives when the Pharisees, a group of strictly devoted religious priests, approach him with a woman who has been caught in the act of adultery. They tell Jesus that according to the law, the woman should be stoned as a punishment, and they ask his opinion. According to the account in John, the questioner’s goal was to trap him. The law demanded justice. Jesus kept talking about grace.²

Jesus takes his time. He writes something with his finger in the dirt.³ The Pharisees press him further, and Jesus finally stands up and utters this paradoxical invitation: “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7).

He then kneels back down and starts writing in the dirt again. One by one, the Pharisees leave, “being convicted of their own conscience” (John 8:9 KJV). Now Jesus, alone with this woman, asks her where her accusers have gone. Then he tells her, “Then neither do I condemn you. . . . Go now and leave your life of sin” (John 8:11).

Jesus’s response to a difficult question—where justice and mercy meet—is confounding and exhilarating. For years, I thought this story was about refraining from judgment and the power of mercy to meet the demands of justice. It is. I also believe the story has significant insights into Jesus’s ethic of 70 × 7. It teaches us about the power of grace and the life-changing effects of practicing inside-outside transformation when faced with conflict. Once we begin loving our enemies as Jesus loves them, we have space to react to conflict in a way that de-escalates instead of escalates it. Jesus was simultaneously teaching a fundamental principle in conflict de-escalation and helping clear up a profound, ever-present misconception about the intersection between mercy and justice.

The conflict transformation principle is pretty simple. Here’s how Elder David A. Bednar put it: “Our purpose is to help people change, with God’s help, from the inside out. The world oftentimes focuses on changing from the outside in.”

Jesus teaches the Pharisees in this story, but we shouldn’t focus on or pick on them. To do so would be a failure to have the eyes of our hearts enlightened toward them and would be another example of outside-inside thinking. Over the years, their negative depiction in scripture has led to antisemitic beliefs among Christians. Those beliefs are deeply inconsistent with the message and life of Jesus. Jesus was Jewish and often demonstrated how much he loved the Jewish people. His disagreements were with some religious authorities during his time, not the Jewish people or even all Pharisees. Instead, it’s important to think not about the particular people in the story but about the attitudes they represent. The issues Jesus addresses weren’t exclusive to a small sect of religious authorities in first-century Judaea. Focusing on their flaws instead of our own will keep the message from sinking in. 

Most people in conflict are accustomed to practicing outside-inside transformation. We look externally for the sources of conflict in our lives and demand that others change. This sort of thinking is prevalent in fear-based, destructive conflict. When I am mired in destructive conflict and riddled with fear, all I can see is how others impact me, and therefore, the only solutions I can think of exist outside of me. 

The thinking goes like this: My conflict goes away when others change. Therefore, I need to make them change. I must inflict punishments, consequences, threats, force, or whatever it takes for them to recognize that they are wrong and I am right. In my story with Phil, throwing stones took the form of a power saw. The law demands an eye for an eye. He had humiliated me, and he had done it unfairly. I felt like I was right. But correcting him wouldn’t be enough. He had to be punished and humiliated. Only then, I reasoned, would he ever learn.

In this scripture story, force comes in the form of stones. Men gather to throw stones at the woman caught in adultery. They want to make her suffer and to make her an example of what happens to people who break the law. Justice demands it. God demands it.

I believe this story is an example of Jesus rejecting this reasoning. Yes, stoning is what the law of the time allowed. But Jesus had come to fulfill the law. There was a better way to deal with sin, a more just way of handling our mistakes. The story invites us to practice inside-outside transformation by casting aside our stones and reflecting on our sins, not our enemies’ faults. It is not the first time Jesus advised this. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus invited similar introspection.

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Luke 6:41–42 NIV)

Why did Jesus use this analogy here? I think it’s because seeing other people’s sins is much easier than seeing our own. Their specks look like planks, and our planks look like specks. When we are trapped in conflict, it’s often clear that our opponents are to blame: they started it and need to change. We are owed justice.

Our sins prevent us from seeing the full ramifications of a given conflict and how we contribute to it. Even if they did start it, and even if they do need to change, and even if we do deserve justice, all our thinking will be warped by the speck of dust or the plank in our own eyes. And if we are blinded by such thinking, we will seek solutions that only escalate the conflict. Paradoxically, the more I seek outside-inside transformation, the more disempowered I become. The bigger I build my pile of stones and the more I throw them, the more conflict escalates out of my control.

In the story, the accusers picked a woman whom they could easily overpower and control. She wouldn’t have lasted long under a barrage of stones. But other people deserved punishment who they couldn’t touch. I can’t imagine, for example, those same accusers dragging in a Roman soldier and asking Jesus the question. The fact that they dragged the woman, and not the man (she was caught in the act, wasn’t she?), says something about the limited power those stones had. When we are offended, hurt, humiliated, or embarrassed, the natural reaction is to collect stones and throw them if the grievances persist. It may feel good. It may feel right. But throwing stones leads us further away from loving our enemies. Rolling away stones is hard to do. Here’s why.

Stones Beget Stones

After the talk show, I didn’t think much about Phil. But something was happening behind the scenes that caught me off guard. Phil knew colleagues at my university, and he started encouraging them to mount opposition to the peacebuilding program. I began hearing secondhand stories from colleagues and students about what was happening in the peacebuilding program and in my personal life.

Students from other majors began making fun of students in peacebuilding classes. Some of my colleagues began to question me critically about the purpose of the peacebuilding program. Opposition grew. While I tried to ignore it, our peacebuilding students didn’t, and soon they were in a rock fight with political science and business students. 

I was frustrated, but I still couldn’t see the connection to what had happened with Phil. One day, while lamenting to my dean, I asked why people had such a negative view of our peacebuilding program. What had I ever done to them? My dean responded bluntly, “Chad, this is happening because you humiliated Phil. I understand why you did. He probably had it coming. But he doesn’t see it that way. You humiliated him, and when you did, you lost any chance of turning an enemy into a friend.”

He was right. That night on the talk show I had had an opportunity to practice 70 × 7 and show Phil what peacebuilding was. Instead, I chose war. I picked up a stone and tried, metaphorically, to slay him. Phil may have started it, but I had invited everything that happened since then by not practicing 70 × 7.

When confronted with people who offend or hurt us or cause us problems, we can rush to find stones to defend ourselves and teach them a lesson in the name of justice. Or we can roll away our stones, look inward, and practice the inside-outside transformation Jesus implored of the woman’s accusers. The only way to make that transformation is to love our enemies the way Jesus loves them. Only then can we fully comprehend that Jesus’s work for us applies equally to them. Without it, the temptation to lash out feels like too much.

After Jesus sends away the woman caught in adultery with the charge to go her way and sin no more, the woman’s accusers return, frustrated as ever by Jesus, struggling to comprehend who he is and why he speaks and teaches the way that he does. No matter what Jesus says, they seem stuck in a way of thinking that can’t let them see Jesus for who he really is. They are trapped in a view of people, sin, and God that is incompatible with the way Jesus is operating in the world. The story in John 8 ends, ironically, with the same people who dropped their stones because of Jesus’s invitation to consider their own sins, picking those stones back up and trying to kill Jesus (John 8:59). 

Practicing 70 × 7 will feel impossible if we don’t truly understand Jesus’s grace. How do we turn the other cheek once, let alone 70 × 7 times, if we can’t see that all the stones we collect that justify us are a dead end? Or even worse, how can we change conflict dynamics when we cannot see that the stones we throw only escalate conflict? Jesus is teaching us to respond to evil with good. The way the world teaches us to fight evil only invites more evil. The way Jesus teaches us to practice 70 x 7 brings about a different sort of justice in which God is deeply interested, the justice that restores us to him and to each other.  

This essay is an excerpt of Seventy Times Seven: Jesus's Path to Conflict Transformation, published by the Maxwell Institute and Deseret Book.

Chad Ford is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Utah State University, specializing in intercultural and religious peacebuilding. He also wrote Dangerous Love: Transforming Fear and Conflict at Home, at Work, and in the World. Listen to his Faith Matters podcast episode.

Art by Kristin Carver.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Feeling overwhelmed by conflict—at home, in your community, or in today’s political climate? Join Chad Ford and Patrick Mason for a thought-provoking discussion on how Jesus’s example can guide us in transforming conflict.

April 30th, 7pm at The Compass

KEEP READING

1. To read a much longer response to what I call the kumbaya fallacy, check out my Dangerous Love: Transforming Fear and Conflict at Home, at Work, and in the World (Berrett-Koehler, 2020), 135–46.

2. It is worth noting that this story (John 7:53–8:11) does not appear in older manuscripts, and the consensus among biblical scholars is that the story may have been added later by scribes. According to New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, this may explain why Jesus speaks so harshly to the Pharisees in the rest of John 8. See N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part 1, 2nd ed. (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 112.

3. It isn’t known what Jesus wrote in the dirt. Levine and Brettler suggest in the Jewish Annotated New Testament that the act of Jesus writing in the dirt may be an allusion to Jeremiah 17:13: “Lord, you are the hope of Israel; all who forsake you will be put to shame. Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust because they have forsaken the Lord, the spring of living water” (NIV is the translation referenced throughout, unless otherwise noted). Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford University Press, 2011), 193.