by Mark G. Brett Professor of Hebrew Bible
Whitley College, University of Melbourne.
Readings: Leviticus 25.8-17; Matthew 5.21-25
St Hilary’s ‘Solace’ congregation, 26th August, 2001
Recently, an old friend from South Africa came and stayed with me for ten days, and each night we sat up late into the night, talking. It was a fascinating time of exploring the similarities and differences between life in Pietermaritzburg and life in Melbourne. In some ways the differences are dramatic: my friend lives in a context where the majority of the population is Zulu and where the Bible is taken very seriously. The Bible permeates popular culture, and whether you happen to belong to an Anglican church or to an African Independent Church, whether you are illiterate or not, in KwaZulu Land, the Bible is often relevant in conversation. In Australia, the Bible can only influence our culture much more indirectly; even many Christians who read the Bible on weekends often find it difficult to see it’ s relevance to the average weekday.
So when we came to discuss reconciliation, it was interesting to bear some of these differences in mind. The release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and the Mabo decision in Australia, both set in motion a whole serious of events and conversations which are, as yet, unresolved. In both countries, we are still exploring the implications of what it means to say sorry, and whether expressions of sorrow are equivalent to confessions of guilt, and what kind of justice might bring about reconciliation between different people groups.
In South Africa, the influence of the church was largely responsible for bringing into existence the ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’. The Commission created a process of truth-telling which was deliberately placed outside the reach of the courts. In fact, many people who were guilty of horrible crimes under the apartheid regime have been granted immunity from legal processes as long as they told the truth to the TRC. I have heard of people who are now able to sleep properly for the first time in twenty years because they at last have been able to tell their story in a public space, to confront the murderers of their children, and it seems that this whole process has done more for reconciliation than what the courts have been able to achieve. It seems that truth has emerged as stronger than retributive justice, and this shows that it is possible to build relationships outside the calculus of guilt and punishment.
Last week, I was emailed the story of Lydia, a black woman whose personal struggle against apartheid began in 1976 when she witnessed some children being shot by police. She became involved with the ANC and had to go into hiding. She could not attend her daughter’s wedding, and she could not attend her husband’s funeral, for fear of being caught. She began to hate white people, even if they had nothing to do with the government, because they benefited from the apartheid system. Today, she is on the ministry team of an ethnically mixed church on the outskirts of Capetown. When asked how she manages to relate to white people she says this: ‘I found it hard to forgive. I knew that if you accept God, you must love one another. It took time, but God did help me to get the hatred out of my heart and allow me to forgive people. Today I can accept white people, laugh with them and talk about anything with them, because I am free inside’.[1]
We should be careful not to misuse a story like Lydia’s. Her example does not give us license to think that reconciliation can be a strategy for suppressing painful memories, as if everything could be fixed if people just became Christians. Lydia was a Christian long before the ANC came to power in South Africa. There are no spiritual shortcuts in this process. Reconciliation cannot be a substitute for justice; it cannot mean that we carry on business as usual, without repentance, without changes that impact on everyday life. But the Bible should lead us to see that the kind of restorative justice which God offers can point us to a future which is full of hope, rather than the kind of justice which is exhausted by a legal calculus of past crimes and due punishments. ‘Restorative justice cannot manufacture repentance and forgiveness. But by placing a concern for the healing of hurts, the renewal of relationships, and the re-creation of community at the heart of its agenda, it [restorative justice] makes room for the miracle of forgiveness to occur and for a new future to dawn’.[2]
We should also be careful to distinguish a Christian approach to reconciliation from a managed process or a political strategy. We are not talking here about a secular mediation through which conflicting interests and values can be negotiated.[3] A model of reconciliation derived from the New Testament would begin with a spirituality which is a response to God’s reconciliation with the world. In this sense, reconciliation is discovered rather than constructed. When we have experienced God’s reconciling action, that discovery naturally leads us to a ministry of reconciliation, as 2 Corinthians 5 suggests. The Christian life is shaped by the conviction that through Christ, God has already reconciled ‘all things, whether on earth or in heaven’, as Colossians 1 says. This vision is cosmic in scope, but it is exemplified in Ephesians 2 in the breaking down of ethnic conflict between Jew and Gentile. And hence, wherever there is ethnic conflict in the world, we should hope for a Christian spirituality at work, not in the managed negotiation of conflicting self-interests, but in a ministry modelled on self-giving love of Christ – who, although he was innocent, gave his life for the world.
It is this kind of spirituality which is evidenced in the reading from Matthew 5.23-24: ‘Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave the gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift’. There are at least two significant points made in this text. First, we cannot worship God in a vacuum, ignoring the human pain around us. If we have really received the love of God, then we have no choice but to pass it on. The love of God and the love of neighbour are actually two sides of the same love. Secondly, this text in Matthew indicates that reconciliation does not have to begin with a conviction of our own guilt. It should be sufficient to know that ‘your brother or sister has something against you’. And if our love is modelled on Christ, who was innocent, it may even be necessary to put aside our protestations of innocence, especially if these are blocking the process of reconciliation.
Even if we are unclear about our guilt, we are still called to listen and to have compassion. And it may be that through a process of compassionate listening, we discover that we are unwittingly living off the benefits of past sins. And if necessary, Christians may be able to draw on the moral resources of scripture to help us hear what our Aboriginal brothers and sisters are saying. The ten commandments suggest, for example, that responsibility can pass across the generations and that God will punish people for sins to the third and fourth generation. This is not the only understandings of responsibility in the Bible, but it is interesting to see that this idea of corporate responsibility is to be found in the commandment prohibiting idols. There is apparently something about idols which visits consequences on the third and fourth generations.
So where are our idols today? The cults of celebrity and consumerism are perhaps the most obvious. In our modern world, idolatrous commitments to particular cultures have had distorting and violent effects which are long lasting. Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa have provided the clearest examples, but the idea that white Australians were justified in taking Aboriginal children away from their own families is another example where white culture was turned into an idol. At the time, these actions may have been seen as beneficial, as serving the greater good of civilization, and so on, but this ideal of civilization turned out to be as vacuous as a false god. And the effects of this idolatry have lasted for generations. In short, there are some areas of life where the Bible encourages us to see things in terms of corporate responsibility, even if we don’t feel personally culpable.
And there is another resource within the biblical laws which may be potentially helpful. White Australians have been in this country long enough to grant the traditional land-owners four Jubilee years. If Leviticus is to be believed, then the life of our nation depends on being utopian and on allowing ancestral land to be redeemed. If we can learn to be respectful of Aboriginal needs, then there is a chance that we might learn how to respect other peoples as well – not by some vague appeal to equal rights, but by attending to the particularity of all the communal stories which have come to be part of Australian life. We will need to understand all the details of ethnic conflict and tension before we can move on to construct a story which responsibly includes us all. The route to genuine reconciliation is a long and difficult one, and any premature papering over our differences will not last long.
There are all sorts of reasons why we might not like the Mabo interpretation of the Australian past. There are all sorts of reasons why we might not want any minority group to interfere with our rational vision of the social and economic future of Australia. But the Jubilee tradition is a challenge to our moral imagination: it challenges us to ask how the structures of our social and economic life reflect our understanding of the grace of God. Leviticus 25 assumes that the Israelite tribes had indefinite claims on, and responsibilities for, particular pieces of land. This same kind of assumption about land can also be found in Aboriginal worldviews. However difficult it may be for Anglo-Australian culture to recognize this point, native land title claims can be related to a scriptural principle which concerns the redemption of land and family.
Redemption means different things in different places. In some biblical cases, it means restoring people to their land, and for others it means redeeming their freedom and dignity. But there is an underlying coherence to the redemptive actions of God; God’s intention has always been to make people whole, to return people to meaningful community. The liberation which the Bible speaks about is not a private matter; it is the freedom which arises from overcoming the distance between the self and the other. Reconciliation is therefore an ongoing task, and for Christians it is about the always-fresh embodiment of God’s redemption.
Reconciliation in this world can never be complete, as if the marks of suffering could simply be erased. Perhaps our expectations should lie somewhere between the idealistic notion that everyone in the world can be our brother or sister, and the despairing form of postmodernism which says that there is no real way of connecting with a stranger. The Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf has argued that reconciliation will succeed only if we are ready to receive the stranger in a way which reflects the self-giving love of God and in a way, therefore, which expands our own identity: ‘Reconciliation with the other will succeed only if the self, guided by the narrative of the triune God, is ready to receive the other into itself and undertake a re-adjustment of its identity in light of the other’s difference ‘.[4] Our identity will need to be constantly on the move, compassionately attentive to the local details of real relationships.
Let us pray that God will give us the grace to embody the spiritual reality that ‘in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile’, neither Aboriginal nor immigrant – not because all differences have been erased and all pain forgotten, but because our identity in Christ allows us to break the idols of our own culture, and to love across all boundaries.
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[1]
Unpublished narrative by Linda Martindale . [2]
Chris Marshall, Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision or Justice, Crime, and Punishment (Sydney: Lime Grove House, 2001), p.284. [3]
Robert Schreiter, Reconciliation: Mission and Ministry in a Changing Social Order (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999), p.25. [4] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), p.110.
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