Every year around this time I find myself with all kinds of conflicting thoughts and feelings as we head towards Australia Day. I am a recent arrival to Australia, not yet a citizen. In this country I am a massive beneficiary of colonising culture. Tthis country is rich, safe, well run, with wonderful democratic institutions, a phenomenal social safety net, a magnificent health care system, brilliant education and an justice system that is the envy of the world. You name it, Australia is an extraordinary place in which to live. All of this is built on ‘Western’, judaeo-Christian, Enlightenment, industrial and capitalist culture, secured with great military power and sprinkled with a bit of organised Christianity for good luck. It’s the best of the UK, the USA and Scandinavia all wrapped up in glorious weather and gorgeous beaches.
It’s also build on stolen land. On centuries of dispossession, inhumanity, racism, brutality and utter disregard for the humanity of the original inhabitants. Australia as it is is an impossibility without the suffering, degradation, and destruction of our indigenous people and their culture.
That’s the history of the world. My tribe, the Jews, can trace our slavery and oppression back to the Egyptians! 3500 years of suffering. Human history is the history of conquest, oppression, assimilation, and development. Richer, larger, more technologically advanced peoples invade, conquer and occupy others. The uncomfortable, paradoxical truth is that this brutal Darwinism has made us immeasurably better off, taken as a whole. But it is also always built on the suffering of the conquered and the exploitation of the weak and vulnerable.
So how do we live with this? We can’t pretend that we are not all way better off today because of British colonisation/invasion of Australia. We can’t pretend that this wasn’t a great evil, and a catastrophic tragedy for indigenous peoples, a tragedy whose reverberations can still be felt in all the myriad ways so many indigenous people fail to thrive in the Australia of today. Is there a way to live with the glorious and awful truth of our history (and our nature!) whilst charting a new course of healing and hope?
Yes. And Yes.
With every fibre of my being I believe that the hope of the world lies in building a better world on the foundation of people whose hearts have been radically changed by Jesus. Only as we deeply, humbly, authentically follow Jesus can we build a better world, breaking free from the tyrannies of past and present. You see, only Jesus has defeated the ‘gods’ of the nations that make invasion, colonization and destruction the norm between people groups. Only Jesus has defeated the ‘gods’ that inspire people to ruthless ethnocentric domination of others. Only Jesus has the defeated the ‘gods’ that keep us captive in cycles of bitterness and unforgiveness. Only Jesus has defeated the ‘gods’ that lead us to exchange our humanity for the accumulation of wealth. Only Jesus has defeated the ‘gods’ that co-opt religion into the legitimation of cultural genocide.
And who else but Jesus can do all of this by walking the path of suffering, dispossession and death? Who else but Jesus can give hope of exaltation to the oppressed and of forgiveness to the oppressor?
So, in totally non-trivial ways, this Australia Day, as my head and heart swirl with the complexities, the pain, the joy of all of this, I am driven back to the hope of the world, to my hope, to our hope, Jesus. May you be to.