Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
Painful Reconciliation
Scriptures: Genesis 45:1-15
Reconciliation is a hot topic right now, mostly in terms of our relationship with Indigenous people. One of the challenges we face is that we have a hard time understanding what reconciliation looks like.
Reconciliation between groups is complicated, so looking at reconciliation within families might help. It’s where we have the most experience and a sense of what can work and what can go wrong.
Reconciliation of an estranged couple can be complex. We have a sense that wrongs need to be forgiven and that a new partnership needs to be developed. We don’t just want to see someone who has been abused go back into an abusive situation to be treated badly again. We know that’s not reconciliation: that’s surrender and a profound injustice.
So we understand that reconciliation is about change, necessary change, to make a relationship work. If you want things to go back to the way they were, reconciliation is impossible.
Reconciling other family members can also be very difficult. Siblings, for example, can remember injustices going back decades, even into childhood, and the feelings can run really deep, even though one of the siblings feels that the other is being unreasonable for bringing up old stuff and the first feels like the other is being uncaring and refusing to take their feelings seriously.
All of this messy stuff is part of reconciliation and we will never get it sorted out if we become impatient or refuse to listen to each other.
A brilliant example of family reconciliation is in today’s Genesis lesson where Joseph reveals himself to his brothers as the one ten of them had sold into slavery many years before. Only the youngest brother, Benjamin, who had the same mother as Joseph, was innocent of that crime and knew nothing about it.
Joseph’s feelings ran so deep that he threw all his officials out of the room while he made peace with his brothers. It could have gone badly: he had them in his power at that moment. Yet he understood their feelings enough that he forgave them and offered to help the whole family, using his new position of power. He could have gone for bitter revenge but he chose forgiveness and love.
It was a painful process. Joseph’s own wailing was loud enough that his officials heard him through the doors. He wept with his betrayers and with Benjamin, who had been a mere child when Joseph had been sold into slavery. After his brothers got over their disbelief and shock and had a chance to deal with their guilt, it was a noisy reunion with the sharing of many stories.
It was a painful process, but worth it and it saved a family that would become a nation.
Taking this experience of family reconciliation and translating it into a group process can be done. There are some good clues in this story.
But even more, we find that the gospel lesson actually shows us a reconciliation between two individuals who represent two estranged peoples: the Jews and the Canaanites. Remember, when the Hebrews entered the Promised Land they practised genocide on the Canaanites as a way of creating religious purity.
A Canaanite woman wanted her daughter healed and Jesus was maintaining the traditional separation between the people of Israel and everyone else. He even expressed some of the popular prejudice of his people, calling the woman and her daughter “dogs” which is a deep insult in the Middle East, even today.
It’s an unequal relationship: Jesus was part of a people that isolated itself on purpose, but he was also the one with the power to heal. He was a man, she was a woman, so he automatically had a lot more standing than she did. She was coming to him from a position of weakness.
She didn’t want the same old relationship to continue. Her daughter would never be healed that way. It’s amazing what courage people can find when they are defending their children.
She couldn’t use any kind of power to persuade Jesus, so she was clever, taking his own insulting words and turning them around against him. It caught Jesus off guard and impressed him. He was forced to see her has a person, not just as a foreigner, a Canaanite. He saw her as a real person, as real as anyone he had helped from his own nation. As soon as he looked at her that way, he could appreciate her feelings, her desire to help her daughter, and he healed the girl.
This is the first step in reconciliation that Jesus made with the Canaanite people that his ancestors had conquered.
Jesus had been limiting his ministry to the people who had invaded the land and it was only because of the initiative of this Canaanite woman – her willingness to live with the pain of begging for help from a man of the nation that had conquered hers hundreds of years before – that this reconciliation began.
Clearly, that reconciliation is not complete. I’m not aware of any people who identify as Canaanites today, but the fight between the state of Israel and the people of Palestine demonstrates that a lot of work is still to be done.
The followers of Jesus figured out quickly that they could reach across ancient barriers and try to reconcile with people who were generational enemies. That’s part of how the church grew so explosively: this willingness to forgive and share together in building a future that addresses everyone’s needs.
The example Jesus set is a good one for us to follow:
- to acknowledge and drop his own prejudices;
- to see the person in front of him rather than the stranger;
- to take her feelings and her experiences to heart;
- to not make any grand statements about the Hebrew past with the Canaanites; and
- to address the immediate issue that she was presenting and heal her daughter
How much progress could we make if we issued fewer statements and fixed more inadequate water systems to get rid of boil water advisories?
We can get tied up in theories and abstractions. We manage to continue to treat indigenous people as “others”, who are unreasonable, demanding. We cast them as those bratty little siblings who bring up conflicts from the past: “Why can’t you just get over it?”.
As long as we think that way, reconciliation will never happen, not the least because that kind of thinking keeps “them” separate from “us” in our hearts and minds.
Both Jesus and Joseph were successful in their reconciliations, painful as they obviously were, because they made a point to empathize with the people in front of them. They listened, welcomed, loved and took part in a heart-felt conversation that led to new and transformed relationships.
As we seek reconciliation, let’s keep these biblical examples in mind. They teach us what we need to make reconciliation work: a willingness to acknowledge injustices; a commitment to deal with the challenges that exist today; a determination to listen and be empathetic; a willingness to forgive and be forgiven and; at the core of it all, a recognition that those “others” really are people worthy of as much love and respect as we are.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 