1. Reconciliation as a Way of Communicating the Gospel in a World marked by Conflict
2. What Reconciliation is not
3. The Gospel of Reconciliation
4. The Ministry of Reconciliation

RECONCILIATION AS A WAY OF COMMUNICATING THE GOSPEL IN A WORLD MARKED BY CONFLICT

How does one bring the message of the Good News of Jesus Christ to the world today authentically and effectively? What constitutes an authentic way of mission, that both honours the fulness of what God has revealed in Christ, and the deep human needs to which it responds? These are questions that are never answered exhaustively by any generation, either for themselves or for the fulness of time. We have become aware of the variety of human difference within a world Church, and of the even greater difference among the 65 per cent of the world that is not Christian. One realizes that there cannot be a single strategy to carry out the mission of the Church that can hope to touch each place with equal effectiveness. Yet without some larger vision we cannot maintain any critical relationship with any one response in a local situation. We run the risk of succumbing to the moment. We wish to sacrifice neither the integrity and fulness of the Gospel message, nor the human situation into which it comes or where it becomes manifest. How best might that be done? If we look back over the two immediately previous periods of mission that are still part of our living experience, namely that marked by expansion and then by insertion and solidarity, we can see points in the Gospel message that encapsulated both the Good News and how it was to be communicated.

In the period of mission as expansion that accompanied the colonial adventures of Europe and then of North America, Matthew’s text, called frequently the Great Commission, exemplified both the message and the method of mission: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you" [Mt 28:18-20]. The call to go out in mission paralleled the expansionist ethos of the colonial age. Baptizing and teaching were the chief methods of bringing the Good News. For members of missionary institutes and societies, it was generally felt that the task was to replicate the Church of Europe in the mission lands. In order to achieve that, the future missionary had to be socialised deeply into the patterns that he or she was expected to reproduce in those countries, much as their counterparts who were to stay at home were receiving. What made missionary formation different was the zeal, the heroism, and the self-sacrifice that was to be expected of the missionary.

The Great Commission as a focus of missionary motivation can be traced to Justinus Lipsius at the end of the 16^th century. In the immediate period before that, mission was less characterized by going out to other peoples as by inviting them to come in. The model of mission was the parable of the wedding banquet, where those outside were invited to come in, much as those on the highways and byways were urged to do in Jesus’ parable.

In the period of mission as insertion and solidarity that marked much of the latter half of the 20^th century, the story of the Disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24: 13-35 might be taken as exemplifying both the message and method of mission. In this story the Stranger on the road is not recognized by the Disciples. He walks with them and hears of their anguish and disappointment over recent events in Jerusalem. The Stranger then retells their story to open their eyes and hearts to its true significance, so much so that their hearts are set on fire. It is only then that they recognize who the Stranger is.

Such might exemplify a style of mission marked especially by dialogue, inculturation, and liberation. The Good News is not seen as alien to the struggles of human existence, coming from outside the world of human experience. Rather, it lies hidden or obscured within people’s experience. The task of mission is to walk with humanity in all its anguish and poverty, walk along side them, as the Stranger in the Emmaus story did, until their story emerges as one touched by God.

Formation for this style of mission emphasized skills of accompaniment and solidarity. Capacities for social analysis, intercultural communication, and a willingness to risk reprisal for insertion and solidarity have been the hallmarks of missionary formation in this period. Rather than skills helpful for the education and betterment of peoples [such as skills training and medicine] as had characterized the previous period, emphasis was now placed on skills for human interaction across cultural boundaries.

If we find ourselves in a different world order now emerging, one marked by conflict that is fuelled by the powerful social forces of globalisation and an international market economy, yet whose relations of power are not checked or directed by any commensurate global political forces, what will be the message and method that will exemplify mission in this period?

One candidate being put forward for this role is reconciliation. At first, reconciliation seems a natural candidate for encapsulating the message of the Good News and a method for bringing it to a troubled world. It is a term that is increasingly found in Church documents, especially papal pronouncements.

But can reconciliation be so quickly assumed to be Good News in a world of conflict and division? The purpose of this presentation is to examine the assumptions about and the appearance of reconciliation as the best way of communicating the Gospel—both in its message and in its method—as we end the century and enter a new millenium.

WHAT RECONCILIATION IS NOT

[Section 2 of the talk entitled Reconciliation as Good News in a Divided World? by Robert Schreiter CPPS]

As best as I can tell, the language of reconciliation first started to appear in mission discussions in Latin America in the 1980’s. There it was taken up by opponents of liberation theology, asserting that the latter implicitly or explicitly supported a conflictual view of existence as normative for human life. The true goal of humanity, so this line of thinking went, was reconciliation between enemies, rather than liberation from oppression.

Around this same time, the latter 1980’s, a number of dictatorships began coming to an end in Latin America and elsewhere [such as the Philippines]. Into the early 1990’s, long-standing civil struggles also started coming to an end in Central America and parts of Africa. The profound changes that came to Eastern Europe at this time, followed by the transition to a post-apartheid government in South Africa, were also taking place. In many of these situations, Church leaders called for a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation. Words about reconciliation were on the lips of many, but it was unclear just what reconciliation was and what it would actually require.

For many, reconciliation meant putting the horrors of the past behind them, and moving into new forms of working together where enmity had once prevailed. Sometimes reconciliation in this sense was sincerely intended as a way of breaking with the past and beginning a new future. At other times the intent was more self-serving, especially on the part of those who had been largely responsible for the horrors that had been enacted upon the population. Setting aside the past was a way of escaping punishment for crimes committed and remaining in power with impunity.

What has become painfully apparent in the intervening years is that the past can never simply be abandoned for the sake of a different future. To do so denies the memories and the suffering of those whose lives were irrevocably changed through the loss of loved ones by disappearance, torture and death; who lost their homes and communities to the uprooting and wrenching experience of exile; who experienced the horror of conflict in their own lives and who have it inscribed on their own bodies by the scars of violence and torture. In short, to ask people who have suffered simply to forget or abandon the past is to ask them to forget or abandon experiences that have forever shaped them as human beings. It is, is a word, to ask them to abandon or disown their own humanity.

Awareness of this fact has led to assertions that there can be no reconciliation without justice, or no reconciliation without truth. But these well-founded claims for justice and truth come across sometimes more as pious hopes than realizable goals.

Part of the reason for this is the difficulty in understanding just what reconciliation is and what is needed to achieve it. One view is that reconciliation is primarily about ending hostilities so that some form of peace might be negotiated. The efforts of skilled negotiators to end overt hostility and lead warring sides to the bargaining table rather than to continuing violent action is itself a remarkable human achievement that cannot be overemphasized in its importance. Necessary as it is, however, it is not sufficient for reconciliation. A willingness to negotiate does not of itself guarantee an agreeable solution to all parties in a dispute. Thus the negotiation of the end of hostilities, necessary and indispensable as it is, does not itself constitute reconciliation.

A second notion of what reconciliation is imagines the confession of wrongdoers, who acknowledge what they have done wrong and repent of that wrongdoing, asking the forgiveness of their victims. The cry is frequently heard for such acts of acknowledgment and repentance as that which brings about reconciliation. Acknowledgment of wrongdoing honours the memory of the victim and repentance is an implicit promise not to do such horrible things again.

Such acts of acknowledgment, repentance, and the forgiveness that it hopes for seem to be at the heart of reconciliation. But two things seem to stand in the way. Sometimes the wrongdoers are powerful enough to escape retribution, and cloak their wrongdoing in amnesty or some form of pardon. This effectively stops the cycle that leads to what is hoped to be reconciliation. Frequently also the victims themselves are not there to forgive the wrongdoers even if they do repent. All too often the victims are dead, beyond the reach of the living. We cannot forgive on behalf of the dead. This effectively stops the cycle of acknowledgment, repentance, and forgiveness.

Thirdly, even for a wrongdoer who wishes to repent, it may not be possible for the wrongdoer to grasp the extent and repercussions of the evil deeds; nor may it be possible for the victims to articulate to the wrongdoers just how the evil done has changed their lives irrevocably. This is especially the case when the wrongdoing has crossed generations, and its effects have so silted down into the lives of victims that it can no longer be isolated and identified. Such has been the case in situations where invaders and their descendants have tried to repent to the indigenous peoples of the Americas or Australia, or to peoples who were taken from Africa to become slaves in the Western hemisphere. It is a lone, protracted process of entering into memories, lives, and pain before anything like what is imagined to be reconciliation can take place.

Even when there is agreement between wrongdoers and victims about the need to come together to overcome the past and create a new society, the process is long and often discouraging. Dutch human rights lawyer Daan Bronkhorst has identified three stages in the move of a society from violence to a path towards reconciliation. The first stage is one in which the contradictions and lies that hold a violent regime together begin to unravel. This unleashes a great deal of energy in the society to move away from the violent past and bring about something different. The second stage is the transition itself, which often happens rather quickly and is marked by a symbolic moment. The transition holds out to the imagination of people the possibility of a genuinely new and free future. The third stage Bronkhurst calls the adjustment phase. This is a long, slow process of rebuilding a society after violence. The experience is often one of dreams delayed and disappointed, of compromises made that seem to violate the integrity of the vision, and a kind of low-grade depression overtakes hope among those who have struggled so long for a different kind of future.

Fourth and finally, reconciliation is sometimes equated with the acts of justice. To be sure, any reconciliation that tries to sidestep justice will be abortive. The problem is trying to determine just what justice is in a situation after violence. The first response seems simple enough: the punishment of the wrongdoers. But too often the calls for punishment have more to do with vindictiveness or revenge than justice. The other extreme of response in the call for justice is one of distributive justice: to redress the very conditions of inequality that led to violence in the first place. This goal of justice is rarely easy to realize. Frequently this is so because the civil war that is the object of reconciliation has its roots deep in ancient injustices that can no longer be arighted as can acts within living memory. This is not to say that justice should not be pursued. It is only to acknowledge that justice is not something simply isolated and simply done.

What all of this points to is that reconciliation, while obviously an antidote to a world order marked by conflict that no one can completely control, is not a ready answer to the world’s ills. There is too much disagreement on what reconciliation really is, and how it is brought about. Reconciliation is, therefore, not automatically the Good News to the ills of a conflictual world.

THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION

[Section 3 of the talk entitled Reconciliation as Good News in a Divided World? by Robert Schreiter CPPS]

Is there a message of reconciliation that can truly be said to be the Good News of what God is bringing about in the world through Christ? I think there is. It intersects with our human efforts at bringing about an end to violence in our world, but it is not coextensive with it. It transcends the human effort at reconciliation at key points, opening up a new vista on how God works in situations of brokenness and alienation. This biblical message of reconciliation, found especially in the insights Paul provides in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, and in the so-called Deutero-Pauline Letters, gives us a perspective on what Christian mission has to offer to the task of reconciliation today.

As we have seen, one of the difficulties of taking reconciliation as a method and message for mission is deciding on what reconciliation is, where it begins and where it ends. Should it be identified with the cessation of hostility, the repentance of the wrongdoer, the working of justice? In Paul’s understanding of reconciliation, reconciliation is first and foremost the work of God. We do not reconcile the world. God reconciles the world through the saving work of Jesus Christ. Reconciliation begins not with the repentance of the wrongdoer, but with the victim: God restores the humanity of the victim, damaged through violence and human strife. The message to the victim of the violence perpetrated on the victim –be it war, displacement, torture, or loss of loved ones—is that the victim is to be regarded as less than human. God’s reconciling grace counters that message of degradation by restoring the dignity of a full humanity to the victim. The experience of being touched by God in this way moves the victim to a new place. The victim becomes, in Paul’s words to the Corinthians, a new creation [2 Cor 5:17]:

It is the victim, from the "new place" as a new creation, who is able to see the situation from a different perspective. It is the victim so reconciled who can best understand the plight of the wrongdoer, and offer a forgiveness that could bring the wrongdoer to repentance.

No doubt most of us have experienced such reconciled persons in our ministries. They have not forgotten the terrible things that have been done to them; indeed, they could not without losing their own selfhood as persons. The way they remember no longer keeps them bound to that past. The past becomes a source of healing and new perspective for the future. A good example of such reconciliation is the story of the risen Jesus with Thomas in John 20. The risen, glorified body of Jesus still bears the wounds in his hands and in his side, the scars of his torture. Not even the transforming power of the Resurrection can erase those wounds. But they no longer are memories of a painful past. They become for Thomas and the other Disciples a font of healing.

A recent example of someone who has exemplified that experience of reconciliation is Nelson Mandela. One wonders what would have happened in South Africa in the transition from apartheid had there not been someone like Nelson Mandela to give leadership. It takes the vision of the reconciled to imagine a new future. South Africa provides an abundance of other examples of such reconciled existence, especially in the testimonies given before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. On one of the first days of hearings, a woman appeared to testify how her son had been abducted from her home. He was tortured and then killed by the Police, and his broken body was returned to her. When asked by the Commission what she wanted from the new government, she paused and said: "I want the new government to buy a tombstone for my son." She did not want revenge or even recompense for what had happened to her. She wanted the government to acknowledge what had been done by setting up a memorial stone to her son.

This is not to say that justice should not be pursued. A new government that does not pursue justice runs the risk of falling prey to the very violence it has tried to overcome. But the response of this woman reveals the limits of what human justice can achieve, necessary though it is. Justice cannot bring back the dead.

Those who have experienced reconciliation often discover with it a calling to carry forth the work of the new creation into which they have been brought. They are the most important agents of a new society because they have been brought to experience and see the world in a new light. What they see is not the trajectory from violence to the end of violence that we see from the side of the horrors of history. They are able to see a new creation, all of which is from God.

It is the preaching and, more importantly, the enacting of this message of reconciliation that is at the heart of a missionary message and method for a world order marked by conflict. It is our task in bringing the Good News of how God is reconciling the world in Christ to work on two fronts at once in a world of conflict.

The first is to cooperate and promote human efforts at reconciliation. That means working first of all for the cessation of conflict. When that fragile peace has been achieved, we must work for the establishment of truthfulness that is the basis of a just society. Re-establishing truth in society perverted by lies is a difficult task. As missionaries we should work to establish truthfulness. After a time of civil conflict, that means locating and identifying the dead, hearing stories of the survivors, helping reconstruct the basic structures of civil society that will promote trust, bring about justice, and create reasonable hopes for a society different from the immediate past. Little by little this can help a society come to terms with the past—not by sidestepping that past, but learning to remember it in a different way so that animosities of that past can come to rest and not subvert the efforts to create a more just future.

The difficulties of coming to terms with the past can be nearly overwhelming. Injustices have often been built upon enmities and wrongdoing that reach far back into the past. Here the work of the missionary on the second front begins. Here the biblical message of reconciliation must be heard, of how God, who sides especially with those who suffer and who are on the margins, brings healing and a renewed humanity to the victim. The reconciliation is not a cavalier sweeping aside of history. It has been achieved through the suffering and death of Jesus—Jesus, who knew betrayal, false accusation, torture, and a brutal execution. Jesus, who was raised up by God from a death that had seemed to end all the promises that God had made through him. Jesus, who in the glory of his Resurrection healed the hearts of his Disciples: the disappointed Disciples on the road to Emmaus, the grieving Mary Magdalene, the disoriented Thomas, the anguished Peter who had betrayed his master.

The biblical message of reconciliation is about the irruption of the graciousness of God into our world, but it is a graciousness that has paid a great price. The peace that God’s reconciliation brings to the world, has been made through the blood of Christ’s cross [Col 1:20]. It is not the hasty peace of those who want to put the past quickly behind them. It is not the superficial peace of amnesty or impunity. It is a hard-won peace that has known the suffering of victims and bears the scars of the past.

THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION

[Section 4 of the talk entitled Reconciliation as Good News in a Divided World? by Robert Schreiter CPPS]

Paul speaks of the ministry of reconciliation that has been entrusted to us. Just what is that ministry of reconciliation in today’s mission? The ministry of reconciliation, as it refers to the reconstruction of society after violence and conflict, is not a ministry that the Church can arrogate to itself automatically. It too must acknowledge its failures and its deeds, and repent.

The ministry of reconciliation in this special sense is one of creating conditions under which victims can experience God’s work of reconciliation in their lives. We cannot bring about God’s reconciliation. Only God can do that. But we can create the conditions under which that might become more possible.

That ministry begins by creating zones of safety and hospitality in which victims might come to terms with what has happened to them. In these safe places, like the Upper Room where Jesus encountered his fearful Disciples, or on the seashore where he welcomed the Disciples who had fished all night and caught nothing, these places of safety and hospitality provide the basis for the rebuilding of trust. That renewal of trust is essential for the restoration of a damaged humanity and the possibility of a new society. In those safe places, we undertake to accompany the victims, listening to their stories, hearing them over and over until, like the Disciples on the Emmaus road, they come to understand them differently. Then the hearts of the victims may burn once again with trust and with love. The moment of reconciliation is not our doing; we but help create the conditions under which God might act. It is a long, patient, and demanding work.

Once victims have achieved reconciliation, the task of the missionary is nor completed. A further accompaniment of the reconciled victim is needed to come to the place where the erstwhile victim might experience a calling as to how to live out the grace experienced. That living out the new reality involves coming to terms with those who have done wrong. It also means finding the vocation of how to live a new creation so that a new society might come about.

We as missionaries, therefore, must help create these communities of reconciliation through which God might enact healing and hope. These are communities where truth is lived, and hope can be reborn.

In recalling the two immediate past periods of missionary activity, as expansion and as insertion and solidarity, the specific kind of missionary formation was also reviewed. For reconciliation to be a model of mission, special missionary formation was also reviewed. The skills of mediation that are so important in working together with others in the first stages of reconciliation now become central to missionary activity after a time of violence and conflict. Learning how to create communities of reconciliation, where victims feel safe and can retell their stories as stories of redemption rather than continued suffering, will take disciplines about which we still know too little. Knowing how to listen, learning how to wait with the disconsolate, and having the ample heart within which others might dwell: these are some of the things needed in the missionary as agent of reconciliation. We must create communities that struggle to dwell within truth. Without such truth, there can be no justice. Without such truth, the lies simply go on.

Biblical images captured each of the missionary approaches discussed above: the invitation to the wedding banquet in the Middle Ages, the Great Commission of Matthew’s Gospel during the age of colonial expansion, the Emmaus story during the time of mission as insertion and solidarity. Let me close with what I think might be the biblical image for mission as reconciliation in a world order marked by conflict that seems to elude any control. It holds forth the vision of what we as missionaries might be as communities of reconciliation. It is from the Letter to the Ephesians:

Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law and its ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death hostility through it. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the Apostles and the Prophets, with Jesus Christ himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built spiritually into a dwelling place for God [Eph 2:12-22].