King David and the Path to True Reconciliation
Fr. Carlos Raines
“What shall I do for you? And how shall I make atonement,
that you may bless the heritage of the Lord?”
Part 2
Turks bristle at the idea that they should meet with Armenians and try to atone for the genocide of Armenians (and Greek Orthodox and other Christians) at the end of the Ottoman empire. “It was a great time of troubles,” they will say. “Ugly things happened on both sides,” they will say. But in reality, it was a very one-sided genocide.
“The white men made us many promises. But they only kept one. They promised to take our lands and they took them,” said an Indian chief in the late 19th century. Native American activists like Russell Means have spent most of their lives tirelessly pointing out the 300 or more broken treaties with Sovereign Indian Nations. Many Americans balk at the idea that they should try to atone for the treatment of Native Americans. These Americans say something like “It was inevitable. The two ways of life could not exist on the same land” which ignores the fact that the Cherokee co-existed very well with early settlers in North Carolina and Georgia----until gold was discovered on their lands.
More apropos to our study of 2 Samuel 21, is the recent “effort” of the U.S. Government belatedly and unilaterally to atone for the broken treaty of the Lakota Sioux Indians. A billion dollars was given to the tribe to “pay for the land” stolen from them ever since the 1868 Laramie Treaty was ratified. Yet even as the Gibeonites said “It is not a matter of silver or gold between us and Saul or his house….” the billion dollars is still sitting in a bank, but not a single Sioux has taken so much as a dollar. “It’s not about money” they say. “It’s about our land.” But unlike David the King, no one ever says to them something like “What shall I do for you? And how shall I make atonement, that you may bless the heritage of the Lord?” Nor does any such conversation happen concerning the more than 300 broken treaties with the other Indigenous Nations. Yet since the turn of the 20th century over a quarter of a million Indians have served the United States in the U.S. military. Like the Gibeonites, they have tried to keep their place in the land as best they could while still being loyal Americans; even to the point of shedding their blood and giving their lives alongside their former enemies who took nearly all their land. What is the way forward? “What shall I do for you? And how shall I make atonement, that you may bless the United States of America?”
Recently there has been a growing movement for something called “reparations” for African Americans in order to atone for slavery and the subsequent years of discrimination and oppression, but many wonder; is there enough money on the planet? And will it ever be enough to wash away forever the stain of slavery?
Examples of such an atonement do exist, however. From Wikipedia comes this paragraph about reparations paid from Germany to the Israeli people ever since 1952:
In the early 1950s, the negotiations began between the Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Claims Conference Nahum Goldmann, and the Chancellor of West Germany Konrad Adenauer. Because of the sensitivity of accepting reparations, this decision was intensely debated in the Israeli Knesset. In 1952, the Reparations Agreement was signed. All in all, as of 2007 Germany had paid 25 billion euros in reparations to the Israeli state and individual Israeli Holocaust survivors.
How does one make peace? How does one find reconciliation?
In my work as a pastor and my life as a member of a family, these issues and these questions about reconciliation are as real as any of the above examples. Who will take the road of peace? Who will risk the vulnerability of the open-ended offer? Who will face the shame?
It amazes me that in the passage found in 2 Samuel 21 God never tells David how to make atonement; how to effect reconciliation; how to make peace. God simply discloses or, more likely, reminds David of the injustice he and the rest of the Israelites are willing to forget and bury. Shame is a guest best locked away behind a door never opened again. But God never forgets.
So, God simply tells David the facts. There is “blood guilt” on Saul and his family. The plague will continue; the disease will flow from the locked room where shame dwells, past the lintels and door posts and into the air of the house of Israel. The air becomes poisoned and the people sicken.
This is how it is with us.
There is a much-respected African American pastor in our little city of Fresno, California who has this to say about seeking reconciliation with Whites: “I have to ask the question: what do we reconcile to? When in all of history was there a time when we lived together and respected one another as equals? What happy memory of this do we both share? There is no “re-conciliation” possible. But in Christ Jesus we may yet find unity.”
Having considered the massive walls erected by a history of atrocities, broken promises, lies, deception and bloodshed; having considered the oppression when one people is overwhelmingly powerful and happily uses that power to prevail in all cases (like Saul and his household against the tiny and vulnerable people known as the Gibeonites) how do the powerful find the vulnerability to earn the trust and demonstrate the repentance necessary to make peace...and to effect that peace not out of power but out of a deliberate adoption of vulnerability?
David found the way.
Two times he repeated an open-ended offer to the Gibeonites. “What shall I do for you?” You tell me...how can this be made right in your eyes? What does justice look like to you?”
David shows us how to make the offer, but with the offer made in honest vulnerability the weaker brother is also tested. Does he desire peace? Or punishment and revenge? Therefore, will he be reasonable or make an offer intended to choke the one who comes with an open hand? One cannot make peace with those whose only wish, born out of simmering hatred and bitter resentment, is utter destruction. The modern Israeli says this; “We have no partner with which to make peace. The Palestinians want it all, and us thrown into the sea.” Sometimes implacable enemies exist; sometimes there is little desire for peace on behalf of the aggrieved party. But the hope for peace does not end here; it is not banished forever. Time and patience may yet create room for peace to grow and both brethren to live together in the same land; in the same household.
The Gibeonites rose to the challenge. The offer they made was costly---but reasonable: the life of seven of Saul’s sons. It was highly symbolic: to be hanged “before Yahweh” in the capitol city of Saul’s tribe, the Benjaminites. Evidently this included the bodies remaining on the poles indefinitely as a sign for all to see. Thus, for the Jews, the shame is met, embraced and extinguished. For the Gibeonites, justice is accomplished and the manhood and the dignity of the minority re-established. When they said “It is not a matter of gold or silver for us” this is what they meant. The intangible shame; the intangible memory of horror and helplessness; the sting of bitterness and the embers of resentment were for them extinguished. “Now we can look into each other’s faces again. Now the nightmare is over and we have all awakened to new possibilities of being.”
What price is peace and reconciliation?
In the creation and fall of this world, the One truly aggrieved is the Creator God. Strangely, in this case it is the weak and vulnerable who need to say to God “what must we do to make atonement for our sin against You and one another and the earth itself?” Clearly, we are not capable of making it right by our own measure or suggestion. Who could atone?
So God, the aggrieved yet also the powerful, made atonement Himself by sending His own Son. The powerful in our world acted toward him as though we humans were the aggrieved! Like the Gibeonites (truly a biblical type!) we cried out “Crucify Him!” and demanded that he be “hanged before Yahweh” outside the city of Jerusalem. Not Rizpah, but Mary herself watched over her dying Son and saw to it He was taken down and buried respectfully. This is how reconciliation is made: God the powerful and the aggrieved sacrificed Himself for our sins. He tasted death to destroy death. And then He raised His son from death to be the “firstfruits of the new creation.” He also demonstrated for us how we make and maintain peace, speaking the truth in love and acknowledging our sins honestly. Then coming to the one we’ve hurt and asking “What can I do for you? How can I atone for how I have hurt you?” Here is what St. Paul said about atonement in Ephesians Chapter 2:
13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. 17 And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. Ephesians 2
1 I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (Ephesians Chapter 4)
And especially these words from Philippians Chapter 2:
1 So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, 2 complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. 5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 1 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, 1 being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
This is how one makes and maintains peace.
Part 1 is here: https://sanjoaquinsoundings.blogspot.com/2020/11/king-david-and-path-to-true.html
No comments:
Post a Comment