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Reconciliation as Mission

I'm taking a one week summer intensive course called "Reconciliation as Mission" with six other graduate school friends and a great professor who graciously made the trip down from Michigan. We've only just finished day one and I know this class is going to make a life-altering impact on me. One of the books that we have the opportunity to read for the course is titled, "Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation," by Miroslav Volf. Tonight, before I head off to bed, I want to share a passage from this book that I found to be particularly poignant:

"Forgiveness is necessary, but will it suffice? Forgiveness is the boundary between exclusion and embrace. It heals the wounds that the power-acts of exclusion have inflicted and breaks down the dividing wall of hostility. Yet it leaves a distance between people, an empty space of neutrality, that allows them either to go their separate ways in what is sometimes called "peace" or fall into each other's arms and restore broken communion. "Going one's own way" is the boldest dream many a person caught in the vortex of violence can muster the strength to dream. "Too much injustice was done for us to be friends; too much blood was shed for us to live together," are the words that echo all too often in regions wrecked with conflict. A clear line will separate "them" from "us." They will remain "they" and we will remain "we," and we will never include "them" when we speak of "us." Such "clean" identities, living at safe distances from one another, may be all that is possible or even desirable in some cases at certain junctures of people's mutual history. But a parting of the ways is clearly not yet peace. Much more than just the absence of hostility sustained by the absence of contact, peace is communion before former enemies. Beyond offering forgiveness, Christ's passion aims at restoring such communion -- even with the enemies who persistently refuse to be reconciled.

"At the heart of the cross is Christ's stance of not letting the other remain an enemy and of creating space in himself for the offender to come in. Read as the culmination of the larger narrative of God's dealing with humanity, the cross says that despite its manifest enmity toward God humanity belongs to God; God will not be God without humanity. "While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son" writes the Apostle Paul (Romans 5:10). The cross is the giving up of God's self in order not to give up on humanity; it is the consequence of God's desire to break the power of human enmity without violence and receive human beings into divine communion. The goal of the cross is the dwelling of human beings "in the Spirit," "in Christ" and "in God." Forgiveness is therefore not the culmination of Christ's relation to the offending other; it is a passage leading to embrace. The arms of the crucified are open -- a sign of space in God's self and an invitation for the enemy to come in." (125-6)

Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.

Which Comes First?

Here's a little poll for you all to participate in, and give some of your thoughts. There was a little living room gathering I was a part of last week and this question came up, "Which comes first, community or mission?" Hmm. Take a few minutes that ponder that question and its implications for life. Then, place your vote on the cute little poll to the right and leave a comment. Start/join the conversation!





共同体　　　
Community


OR　 　

宣教
Mission

Some Background on Japanese Missions (Part II)

"The missionaries suffered severely from the cold -- they had no idea in advance what a Japanese winter could be like. They had difficulty in getting enough to eat. They wrestled with the daunting difficulties of language:

Now we are like so many strange statues amongst them, for they speak and talk to us about many things, whilst we, not understanding the language, hold our peace. And now we have to be as little children learning the language.


They gradually became aware of the imperfections of Yajiro's translations, in particular of the harm wrought by his choice of the wholly inappropriate Buddhist term Dainichi to represent 'God' -- a difficulty the missionaries then dodged by simply introducing Portuguese terms into Japanese to represent the Christian ideas. And yet friendship and understanding did develop, and in spite of all disappointments Xavier never lost his feelings of respect for the Japanese. In a letter of 5 November 1549 he writes:

Firstly the people whom we have met so far are the best who have as yet been discovered, and it seems to me that we shall never find among heathens another race to equal the Japanese. They are a people of very good manners, good in general, and not malicious; they are men of honour to a marvel, and prize honour above all else in the world.... They are a people of very good will, very sociable and very desirous of knowledge; they are very fond of hearing about the things of God, chiefly when they understand them.... They like to hear things propounded according to reason; and, granted that there are sins and vices among them, when one reasons with them, pointing out that what they do is evil, they are convinced by this reasoning.

These early contacts with the Japanese produced a change in Xavier's understanding of the nature of Christian missionary work which was to be of the greatest significance for the whole future of the enterprise. In earlier years he had been inclined to accept uncritically the doctrine of the tabula rasa -- the view that in non-Christian life and systems there is nothing on which the missionary can build, and that everything must simply be levelled to the ground before anything Christian can be built up. This was the general view of the Spanish missionaries in Latin America and the West Indies; in his dealings with the simple and illiterate fishers in South India, Xavier had seen no reason to modify it. But now that he was confronted by a civilization with so many elements of nobility in it, he saw that, while the Gospel must transform and refine and recreate, it need not necessarily reject as worthless everything that has come before. This new idea was to be fruitful in results -- and also in controversies." (132-3)

Neill, Stephen. A History of Christian Missions. London: Penguin Books, 1990.