Bring Back the Buffalo (VI): The Cross and the Buffalo Skull
In Jesus and the Victory of God, N. T. Wright argues that somewhat controversial point that for First Century Jews, like those to whom Jesus of Nazareth first proclaimed the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, “sin” and “forgiveness” were tightly bound together with the Old Testament narrative of exile and return. His position—and in broad strokes, I tend to agree with it—is that in a Second Temple Jewish context like Jesus’, “forgiveness of sins” meant, in particular, forgiveness of the national sins of apostasy and corruption that were the cause of and explanation for the Roman oppression and national subjugation they suffered as a people. He makes the case that they would have interpreted their present situation in terms of the Babylonian exile described in their sacred scriptures, and they would have seen the Roman occupation as evidence that in some real sense the exile had not yet ended. Inasmuch as the Babylonian exile was a direct result of ancient Israel’s corporate, national sin, the “sin” that needed to be confessed and forgiven in Jesus’s Judea, in the mind of a first century Jew, was also corporate, and national in nature.
In N. T. Wright’s succinct assessment: “Forgiveness of sins is another way of saying ‘return from exile.’”
This position was controversial when N. T. Wright first articulated it, mostly because it seemed to undermine the widely-accepted, individualized gospel popular in modern day evangelicalism, that understands “sin” as our personal, individual moral failures and shortcomings that need we need to be “saved from” by making Jesus our “personal” Lord and savior. This popular-level understanding of the Gospel has little room for the idea of corporate sin, that needs to be confessed by a people, in order that corporate forgiveness, in some sense, might be proffered. And yet, in N. T. Wright’s reading of the New Testament, this was at the heart of the historical Jesus’s ministry and message.
He suggests, for instance, that when the gospels relate that the whole region of Judea was going out to the Jordan river, “confessing their sins” and being baptized by John, they were not confessing their individual sins, or even their personal sinfulness. They were “confessing” the fact that Israel was still, in a very real sense, suffering the realities of the exile, and that they were, in another very real sense, implicated in the national, historic sins that had resulted in this situation, and that they wanted the Lord to end the exile and heal their national life.
It's a poignant reframing of the story, though it doesn’t fit neatly on a 4-point Gospel Tract.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this idea lately, that for the historical Jesus, “forgiveness of sins” might be more about the healing of national, corporate sin than it is about individual absolution from personally-committed sins. It’s been especially helpful to me as I’ve processed my recent trip to Pelican Lake First Nations Reserve, where a delegation from our church participated in a Bring Back the Buffalo initiative with Loko Koa and Tearfund. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the goal of this initiative was to gift a First Nation community with a herd of buffalo, as a small step towards restitution and reconciliation.
Ever since I heard about this project, I found it deeply inspiring and profoundly moving; it becomes more so after you’ve done a bit of research into the horrific story of Canada’s systematic decimation of the buffalo herds that once roamed freely across the prairies, sustaining Indigenous communities and playing a central role in their culture. Throughout the 19th Century, the Canadian government actively encouraged the slaughter of millions of buffalo, both to clear space for settlers and agriculture, and to force the Indigenous people who relied on the buffalo to accept treaties and move to reserves. There were an estimated 30 million buffalo roaming freely on the Great Plains of North America when settlers arrived in the 1600s; by the end of the 19th Century these had been hunted to the brink of extinction.
I have never hunted a buffalo; I’ve never posed for a grotesque photo next to an obscene mountain of bleached buffalo skulls; I was born long after the last buffalo hunt ended on the great plains of Canada. In that sense, I am not “responsible” for the decimation of those herds.
I have, however, benefitted from the prosperity and the security that the nation of Canada enjoys, a prosperity owing, at least in part, to the fact we’ve had so much resource-rich land to make ourselves at home in, land we acquired, historically speaking, through Government policies that exploited and oppressed the First Nations who called this land home before us.
I grew up visiting Elk Island National Park as a child, home to one of the few remaining “free roaming” herds of buffalo on the continent (I put “free roaming” in scare quotes because, even though the buffalo at Elk Island are left to roam at will, the area of the park they’re allowed to “freely roam” amounts to little more than 75 square miles). We used to oooh and ahhh over the buffalo herds we saw grazing peacefully in its meadows and among its trees, but no one ever told me the reason why the entire population of wild buffalo in Alberta could now fit in a 75 square mile enclosure, when they once teemed across the prairies.
In this sense, I am implicated—personally implicated—in the sad story of greed, violence and racism that is the history of Canada’s dealings with its Indigenous neighbors, even though I myself have never personally slaughtered a buffalo.
This is one of the reasons I find N. T. Wright's read on the gospel so compelling, because it reminds us that sin runs far deeper than just our individual shortcomings, that it is woven into the entire web of social relations, both present and historical, that make us who we are and form the context in which we live. The individual first century Jew who went out to hear John and be baptized may not personally have done anything to cause the Roman occupation, but they were implicated in Israel’s national sins nonetheless, and knew it, and received John’s baptism as a profound sign, both of their acceptance of their part in the problem, and of their longing for corporate absolution and restoration.
When we realize that Jesus offers us forgiveness at that broad, corporate level, that through the Gospel we can be forgiven—even of our part in the decimation of Canada’s buffalo herds—it sets us free, I think, from the paralyzing, unspecified sense of shame that often inhibits robust action towards reconciliation, while allowing us still to face these issues squarely, with an honest acknowledgement of our own responsibility in them.
I realize this might be misunderstood. It may sound like I’m saying that, even if Canada’s historic treatment of Frist Nations people was sinful, and even if I have benefitted personally from that sin, well, Jesus forgives me, so it just doesn’t matter.
That’s not what I’m saying at all.
What I am saying is this: that when we come to terms with the implications of the cross in its broadest sense, we discover that even the systemic sins that we may have unwittingly participated in have been judged—condemned and atoned for—in the crucifixion of Christ; and if we accept the Son of God’s death on our behalf for even those sins, he forgives us of that culpability and, in so doing, graces us to pursue right relationship with our Indigenous neighbors, not out of a place of shame or a need for self-justification, but out of a profound longing to live as agents of the very shalom we ourselves have experienced in the cross.
Realizing that Jesus died for our corporate sins, too, sets us free, I mean, to redress those sins honestly and authentically, with no fear of condemnation or need for excuses. I have tried in previous posts to give some ideas of what it might look like to “redress those sins honestly,” but my sense is that, unless such efforts are tied intimately and inextricably to the cross, they can very easily slip into self-righteous virtue signaling that do more harm than good.
When they are done in response to the cross, though, and as the outflowing of the grace we’ve experienced in the cross, they can be done with all the humility and grace, the longing for community and neighborliness, the open selflessness and shared understandings that are so crucial, if our interactions with our Indigenous neighbors are going to result in genuine truth and real reconciliation.
Bring Back the Buffalo (V): Truth and Reconciliation
As a Christian, I find it profoundly significant and deeply sobering that the Government committee tasked to investigate and address horrific legacy of Canada’s residential school system was called the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” I call it significant because “truth” and “reconciliation” are both such heavily weighted words in Christian theology. We confess that Jesus himself is the Truth incarnate (John 14:6) who came to reconcile us first to God and consequently to one another. Similarly, his Gospel is both the truth that sets us free (John 8:32) and the ultimate message of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:20). Churches that are truly transformed by the power of the Gospel, in other words, should be living as God’s agents of truth and reconciliation when it comes to addressing the legacy, not just of residential schools, but the broad history of Canada’s bad-faith dealings with the First Nations of Turtle Island.
And this is why I also call the name of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission “sobering.” Especially considering the church’s culpability and complicity when it comes to Canada’s residential schools, the fact we need a secular, state-run commission to motivate us to pursue truth and reconciliation in our dealings with Indigenous people is a sobering reminder of the church’s past failures to take the lead in this kind of work.
I’ve been thinking about these issues deeply in the last number of months, as I’ve continued to process everything I learned and experienced during my recent visit to the Pelican Lake First Nations Reserve in northern Saskatchewan, where I had the opportunity to participate in a Loko Koa/Tearfund “Bring Back the Buffalo” initiative with that community. In recent posts, I’ve shared a number of ways this trip impacted me, from deepening my theology of creation to broadening my understanding of prayer. The question I’m still wrestling with today, though, has to do with the implications of the cross when it comes to truth and reconciliation. In particular, I’m wondering how the cross might provide us the resources we need to pursue reconciliation authentically, and what a cross-shaped reconciliation might look like when it comes to our relations with Canada’s Indigenous People?
I’m asking these things because, as I continue to reflect on what I experienced at Pelican Lake, I am becoming increasingly convinced that reconciliation must start here, not with pious personal efforts to make a change, but with a humble return to the theological underpinnings for all genuine Christian ethics: the Cross of Jesus Christ. In her book, The Cross and Gendercide, theologian Elizabeth Gerhardt argues that a genuine theology of the cross “shifts the centre of ethics from human experience to the theologia crusis,” rooting it in “the self-giving act of Jesus on the cross” (Gerhardt, The Cross and Gendercide, p. 84). When we ground our ethics like this, in the crucifixion of the Son of God, we discover that “suffering as a result of violence is Christ’s suffering” and that “the cross and resurrection . . . constitute the central historical event that gives power and meaning to the work of justice building and peacemaking.”
This is true, I think, for all acts of peacemaking, but there are several themes in the Gospel that speak with special poignancy to the issue of Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. To stretch her point to its inexorable conclusion: Christ himself was with, in, and present to the abused Indigenous child wrenched from her home and forced to attend a Residential School; Christ was there, in, with, and as, the Indigenous parents, despairing of feeding their family because the buffalo herds that once sustained them were decimated by intentional government policy. His suffering gathered up and in some mysterious, divine way, participated in their.
A close reading of 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 is a helpful place to start if we want to grapple deeply with the implications of the Cross when it comes to truth and reconciliation with Canada’s First Nations. Paul is writing to heal divisions within the Corinthian Church, and he does so by urging the Corinthian Christians to live out the full implications of the Gospel: that through Christ we are reconciled to God, and in Christ we are called to seek reconciliation with each other (v.18). Paul’s argument here is subtle but profound. We no longer consider people the way the world considers them, he says (v.16), because Christ’s death “for all” (v.15) assures us of each one’s deep worth in God’s eyes and compels us to love in a similar way (v.14). Transformed by our participation in Christ’s death for the world, we become his ministers of reconciliation, the ones to whom he has “committed . . . the word of reconciliation” (v.19). This is the theological heart of the passage, Paul’s conviction that the cross can and does put an end to enmity between God and humanity—that “God was, in Christ, reconciling the world to himself” (v.20). What is interesting, however, is that being reconciled to God necessarily requires us to be reconciled with others—those for whom Christ also died—and failure to be reconciled with others is a breach in our reconciled relationship with God. We are “God’s ambassadors” he tells the Corinthians, through whom God makes his appeal to the unreconciled. This appeal is, specifically, “to be reconciled to God” (v. 20), but it is made, of course, as the culmination of an argument urging inter-personal reconciliation in the church. To be reconciled with God, then, we must also seek reconciliation with others.
Paul’s line of reasoning here resonates deeply with the teaching of Christ himself, who promised that “the peacemakers” will be called children of God (Matt 5:11), and who urged his followers first to be reconciled to their brothers and sisters before they present their offering to God (Matt 5:23-4). Though they are not always interpreted specifically in light of the cross, these sayings form the bedrock of the Gospel. Children of a “peacemaking God,” adopted through his son Jesus, will necessarily be his peacemakers in the world; and inasmuch as our worship is predicated on the reconciling work of Christ on the cross, all acts of corporate and individual worship must surely involve “first being reconciled to our brothers.” As Gerhardt puts it: “It is the mission of God’s followers to embrace others (not in the abstract but in reality) as a result of the grace and forgiveness given to them” (Gerhardt, 109).
Modern Evangelicals are deeply conditioned to think about the Cross in individualistic, transactional terms, content to believe that Christ died for my personal sins to save my individual, disembodied soul and simply leave it at that. As a result, we often remain deaf to the clarion call the Gospel sounds, summoning us to see the Face of the Divine in the suffering of those who are or have been abused by institutionalized violence, and to accept our responsibility to live as God’s ambassadors of reconciliation for no other reason than the fact that we ourselves have been reconciled to God in Christ. If we did hear it, though, we’d hear echoing in it, as a somber but hopeful undertone, an urging to take seriously our responsibility, as Christians in Canada specifically, to pursue right relationship with our Indigenous neighbours, authentically, earnestly, and as a humble expression of our faith in the Crucified One.
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