Day Seven - God was in Christ, reconciling (II Cor 5:19)

There is an incident from my school days that is seared on my memory. A teacher – one of these large mysterious adults, who occupied so much of the daytime hours of a six year old – had treated me with such unfairness, and exposed me to such ridicule in front of the other children, that I was utterly outraged. And I could do nothing about it.

I vividly remember sitting and fuming. Hmmm. There must be something I could do. I know! I would become a teacher, so that I could do the same thing to another child when I was grown up. When I got home, I told my mother all about it. She asked me, very reasonably, what good that would do, because the children I would be hurting would not have had anything to do with the person who had inflicted the injustice. It would just make things worse.

It was my first real lesson in the intransigence of injustice, and the complexity of restoration. Where is all that rage to go, when power structures are unequal, or it is not possible to visit your anger on the perpetrator of wrong? Do you end up hating all teachers? Some do. Or the whole system of education? Again, some do, especially if the unfair treatment is based on divisions of class, or race, or gender …

Human culture is riven by hostilities, driven by hatred that sometimes stretches back through countless generations. Over the years we have proved to be capable of apartheid, class wars, rape and abuse, race hatred, world war, and even genocide: all of them born of the desire to inflict rage on another generation, to pass it on, so that it never ceases.

The alternatives seem too weak to stand up to all that destructive power. What place does forgiveness have, or repentance? How do we seek reconciliation, or justice? Where does reparation fit it? What about apologies that also stretch back through the generations, for the trade in enslaved African people, for example? How does that work?

And yet, we do see that long, patient, intelligent efforts at reconciliation can bear fruit. And we can, above all, be sure that this hard work is God’s hard work. God, in Christ is in the tough business of forgiveness, reconciliation and renewal, that starts with the outraged child, and runs through generations of rage and hurt, to a transformed future.

At the mid point in the Climate change conference, it is clear that the work of reconciliation is intricately tied up with the health of the planet. Hostility between peoples and nations drives destruction in the environment, and hampers the concerted efforts that we need to make, to heal a ravaged world. And worsening environmental conditions hit the most powerless hardest, and drive even deeper divisions between us.

God in Christ

We pray for the reconciliation of the world:

for the sake of our children,

our communities

and this Earth.

Open our hearts to forgiveness

our minds in repentance

and our hands for healing.

Amen

Janet Wootton