In the eighteenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus lays out what could be described as the basic steps of reconciliation. If someone sins against you, first go to that person and try to settle it just between the two of you. If that doesn’t work, then go back again—this time taking a few others with you. If you still are not successful, then inform the entire congregation and have them join with you in a consolidated effort to solve the conflict. And at that point, if no remedy is found, then it will be painfully obvious that the other person is not interested in having a relationship with you.

There are a couple of things that strike me about this advice. First, Jesus puts the burden of reconciliation on the victim—the one who has been sinned against. Second, Jesus seems to be far less interested in who is right and who is wrong than he is in getting people back together again.

It’s difficult advice, and frankly, the reason it usually doesn’t work is because, most of the time, we don’t even come close to following it. Our strategies for solving the problem are much different. For example, if someone else has hurt us, many of us just keep it to ourselves and pretend that the offense never took place because the illusion of harmony is always easier to achieve than actual harmony.

A second strategy might be to give the other person the cold shoulder. You never tell them what is wrong; you simply ignore them. After all, they were in the wrong … let them figure it out.

Yet a third strategy is revenge—the silent, deadly kind—whereby you embark on your own personal smear campaign, never missing an opportunity to question the other person’s character in public, or to point out their flaws. You rationalize this, of course, by telling yourself that it makes you feel better. Only you have to keep telling yourself that over and over again because the truth of the matter is you don’t really feel any better at all.

In his book The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis paints a vivid picture of hell as a vast, gray city, with rows and rows of empty houses in the middle—because everyone who once lived in them has quarreled with the neighbors and moved, and quarreled with the new neighbors and moved again, until only the outskirts of the city are inhabited. That, says Lewis, is how hell got to be so large.

The bottom line is that if you want reconciliation, you are going to have to work at it. You may even have to give up the ability of saying, “I was right, and you were wrong,” in order to say, “Praise God that we are together again!”