Chaplain’s Note
As we think about ‘Bridging Now to Next’ as part of Reconciliation Week, I thank God for the courage and faith and survival of the first Australians, who offer to us an invitation to walk together in humility and hope, forgiveness and reconciliation.
In the first few pages of the Bible, Genesis chapter 4 tells the story of the first murder. Eve’s first-born son, Cain murders his brother, Abel. The Lord inquires of Cain as to Abel’s whereabouts, to which Cain replies – notoriously – ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Of course, Cain condemns himself since God indeed intends that we should honour one another as fellow creatures made in God’s image. The Lord responds in these rather startling words in Genesis 4:10 ‘What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.’
Rob and Leanna Haynes were serving with the Church Missionary Society at Nungyalingya Bible College in Darwin, when their students read this verse and couldn’t go on with the class. They had to stop. Because it spoke to them so powerfully of their own experience and history. They felt that God knew all about them because he hears the voice of blood shed in violence and betrayal.
Captain Cook recorded in his own journal on 29 April 1770, that when preparing to land at what is now Kurnell in Botany Bay, they first sighted people on the shore and he opened fire to scare them off. But this only provoked them, so that he subsequently fired two more shots, injuring one of the men before they withdrew. The very first contact between the British settlers and the original inhabitants of this land, even before Cook and his party had landed on shore, was one of violence.
When Arthur Phillip returned to Sydney in 1788, he had explicit instructions to care for the original inhabitants, a strict injunction included in the commission issued to those who came to people Australia that the original occupants their heirs and successors, should be adequately cared for.
In fact, as early as 1790, Governor Phillip’s convict gamekeeper shot some Aboriginal men, and was speared in retaliation for the shooting. Governor Philip then ordered a retaliation demanding the detention of two Aboriginal men and the execution of ten men. The retaliation party, including Lieutenants Watkin Tench and William Dawes, were issued with axes and sacks to bring back the heads of those they killed.
Dawes and Tench were both Christians and expressed their reluctance to comply. For this insubordination, Dawes was sacked by Governor Phillip and sent back to England. Tench argued with Phillip and the mission was reduced to killing two men rather than ten. Tench returned empty-handed saying he had not been able to find anyone. But Governor Philip’s decision to retaliate established a principle of violence and killing.
I mention these realities of our history not because no good came from British settlement. On the contrary, we all continue to benefit from the courage and enterprise of the first settlers. I mention these facts first because they are so little known, and second, because they relate to events within a few months of British Settlement in Sydney, the part of the city we live, work and learn in. The least we owe them is being informed.
It is right for us to be committed to what is sometimes called truth telling – by which is meant, I take it, that we learn the Aboriginal history of Australia as well as the other two great strands of Australian history, as Noel Pearson has described them – the history of British settlement, and the history of migration. As the song goes, ‘I am, you are, we are Australian’, but we have not always heard with courage and compassion all the stories Australia has to tell.
That class at Nungyalingya Bible College heard that the blood of Abel called out from the ground for justice, for the Lord’s vengeance on murder and bloodshed; but they also knew that the blood of Jesus speaks a better word. The final place that we find a reference in Scripture to the blood of Abel is in the Letter to the Hebrews:
You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, 24 to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Hebrews 12:23b-24)
The blood of Jesus speaks a word of forgiveness, of the penalty paid, of sins washed away, of reconciliation between people and God and between people and people, through the blood of Jesus. Because the death of Jesus reconciles us to God, those who have faith in Christ are reconciled to each other. Our relationship with one another is not under the shadow of guilt, but in the freedom of repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation.
In his book The Queen is Dead, Stan Grant reflects extensively on the connection between Christianity and colonialism. He wonders how Jesus who “stood against tyranny and empire, who spoke only of love, became allied to the service of conquest?” His answer: through the White Jesus of Christendom, the Jesus whose image was placed at the head of European armies and European empires.
But he also speaks of the little wooden church in Wiradjuri country in which his own Christian faith was nurtured. He says that he knew nothing but love in that church. But it was love as experienced by the afflicted and the forsaken. His pastor-uncle taught him quite specifically to be a Wiradjuri Christian, not a European Christian. The Christ he learned to follow was the “crucified Christ” — the one who was himself afflicted and forsaken. He spells this out by describing his faith as an Easter Saturday faith, a faith that doesn’t rush to a triumphant resurrection, but waits for the resurrection as the manifestation of love. (I commend his latest book Murriyang to interested readers).
As Jack Jacobs describes, “Aboriginal Christianity has little to do with the church, with its kingdoms and cathedrals, and more to do with the strange figure of Jesus Christ himself, the “man of sorrows”. Christ on the cross is a natural ancestor for Aboriginal people: a “tribal man”, as I once heard him described by a Wiradjuri Elder. His is the brown, battered, body hanging on his final tree, who calls us all, by way of his own brokenness, to love each other in our shared lament. In an age obsessed with politics and its power to define every aspect of our lives, this body, a symbol for the lament of Aboriginal people, calls us to embrace a deeper, more rooted humanity: to do away with the spells that hold us captive to our own poor imaginings and sit silently with sadness”.
Stan himself says that the Wiradjuri expression, “Yindyamarra Winanghana means to live with respect in a world worth living in.” To create that world, we need to start with the respect to quietly listen and learn. Then we can hope to look forward to that
‘…country I’ve heard of long ago,
it speaks of grace and heaven, a place that all may know;
we may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
her emblem on a hilltop, the Cross of suffering,
and soul by soul and silently, her citizens increase,
her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace.’ Sir Cecil Spring-Rice (1859-1918) revised and expanded Richard Bewes.
I’d like to close with the Reconciliation prayer that was written by Wontulp-Bi-Buya Indigenous Theology Working Group in 1997:
Let us pray.
Holy Father, God of Love,
You are the Creator of this land and of all good things.
We acknowledge the pain and shame of our history
and the suffering of our peoples,
and we ask your forgiveness.
We thank you for the survival of indigenous cultures.
Our hope is in you because you gave your Son Jesus
to reconcile the world to you.
We pray for your strength and grace to forgive,
accept and love one another,
as you love us and forgive and accept us
in the sacrifice of your Son.
Give us the courage to accept the realities of our history
so that we may build a better future for our nation.
Teach us to respect all cultures.
Teach us to care for our land and waters.
Help us to share justly the resources of this land.
Help us to bring about spiritual and social change
to improve the quality of life for all groups in our communities,
especially the disadvantaged.
Help young people to find true dignity and self-esteem by your Spirit.
May your power and love be the foundations
on which we build our families, our communities and our nation,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Rod Farraway
Chaplain