The worst trials reveal humanity’s deepest villainy and its truest valor.
During the Rwandan genocide, President Clinton admirably sent 4,000 U.S. troops to support refugees who had fled to Zaire. He also ordered 200 more soldiers to standby at the Kigali airport, ensuring relief supplies could be flown directly to Rwanda.
Clinton and his staff were of the mind that these troops were there in a peaceful capacity, but their role was limited. The troops “would aid in the provision of humanitarian relief; they would not keep peace.” Intervention, as we well know, poses all manner of problems.
Said Clinton: “Any deployment of United States troops inside Rwanda would be for the immediate and sole purpose of humanitarian relief, not for peacekeeping. Mission creep is not a problem here.”[1. Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.”]
But in an age of civil war in Syria, conflict in Southeast Asia, a deluge of refugees in the Mediterranean, military build-up in Eastern Europe, terrorism and other travails leapfrogging borders in Africa, persecution across the globe, we must ask again and again how, why, and when missions for peace should creep.
This, of course, comes with a barrel of risk. Military intervention has proven damaging, offshore balancing hasn’t stood up to scrutiny, and peacemaking has, apparently, limited and sometimes abusive results.
But if peace is the goal, do we wait for it, or do we make it?
The boundaries of Church and state, the secular and the sacred, become easily blurred. Is there such a thing as an isolationist Christian? Is there such a thing as a moral state? When is peacemaking selfishness in disguise?
It is hard enough to fulfill Jesus’ command, offered from the literal and spiritual heights of the Sermon the Mount, to be peaceful, to love our enemies, to go two miles when coerced one. It is nigh impossible to neither seek nor desire our own justice, to remove the impulse for vengeance, to love utter mercy. But so too is it impossible to be holy as He is holy, and still that is our aim.
But even as some realize and pursue lives of peace, it is not enough, as though the act of contributing to the Kingdom of God stopped within ourselves. As though personal righteousness and inner improvement were all God has called us to seek.
There is something more, an affirmative, outward action. We are not just called to be peaceful; we are called to be peacemakers.
“The beatitude, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God’ is an extremely striking saying, if one bears in mind that in the Roman Empire of that day the only persons elsewhere to be called Sons of God because they were peacemakers were the Roman emperors, the upholders of the Pax Romana. The very same Greek word for peacemaker, eirenepoios, is to be found upon the emperors’ coins. Of this Jesus was presumably unaware, yet how amazing it is that a wandering Galilean rabbi, talking to a handful of fishermen, should have committed to them the role ascribed to emperors! Perhaps unwittingly he was saying that the peace of Rome had provided only an external framework which Galilean peasants must make real by setting within it the peace of God.”[2. Roland H. Bainton, “Christian Attitudes Toward War & Peace.”]

After a few years spent correcting grammatical errors and writing subtle, clever headlines in a Chicago newsroom, Griffin Paul Jackson (’11) now does aid work with refugees in Lebanon. He writes about that, God, and, when the muse descends, Icelandic sheep. Read him here: griffinpauljackson.com.
I’m catching up on the Post Calvin from Mennonite Central Committee’s offices in PA. I hear you’ll be here in a month-plus. Gritty reflections on peace seem appropriate on both ends of the experience– thanks for writing.