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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