Healing the wounds of nations: A biblical perspective†

April 29, 2025

Antoine Rutayisire

As a survivor of the genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda in 1994 and with 12 years of active involvement in the reconciliation of the Rwandan community as a member of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, Rev. Canon Dr Antoine Rutayisire has extensive experience of personal and collective woundedness. Drawing on this, he explains why issues of healing of relationships, forgiveness, confession of offence and reconciliation are better understood when presented from a biblical perspective. 

Reconciliation is at the heart of the biblical message and goes beyond peaceful cohabitation and absence of open conflict. The Bible’s message takes us beyond just living together without war or tension and calls for forgiveness, acceptance and love between former enemies. People can live together peacefully, next to each other, while still hating each other or still unhappy about the social arrangements established and imposed by the political powers in place.  In his book, Healing the Wounds of America, John Dawson writes:

Liberal spokesmen, promoting more government interventions as a solution to problems, have only aggravated racial tensions… People are weary of politics. The process itself has become synonymous with breaking open old wounds… An enormous expenditure of energy has largely resulted in disappointment. We feel misunderstood and rejected.[1]

Similar sentiments are expressed by Stan Grant in his book, The Queen is Dead, when he writes:

I am not here to speak of politics. Politics feels cheap to me. Whenever I come to politics, I feel diminished. Mere politics cannot ease the depths of our affliction. Politics alone cannot deliver justice.[2]

Why do political actions not bring lasting solutions to issues of race, ethnic groups and social conflict? God himself, through the prophet Jeremiah, asks the same question: ‘Why then is there no healing for the wounds of my people? Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?’ (Jeremiah 8:22). Why do the wounds of the past linger long and seem to get worse from generation to generation?  What can be done to heal the wounds of a nation? This article is an attempt at answering these questions using the Rwanda experience as a reference.

In 1994, more than one million Tutsi of Rwanda were massacred by their Hutu neighbours at the instigation of a government in shortage of solutions to multiple issues that were plaguing the nation, one of them being the war with the Rwanda Patriotic Front made up of refugees predominantly of Tutsi origin. The genocide left the country destroyed with most of the private and public infrastructure dilapidated, millions of people in internally displaced camps, millions more in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, and a traumatised population with more than 10% incriminated with having taken part in the killings.

The task of reconciling the country was enormous and turned out to be a school of rebuilding and restoring social cohesion. Extensive debates at all levels were held with the intent of finding the best solutions that would bring lasting effect. How do you make people live together in the same village, sharing the same schools, churches, and markets when yesterday one was on the heels of the other, hunting him like an animal? How do youImage: vecteezy.com make people forgive when they have lost everything and every member of their families? How do you help people cope with the guilt of having killed even their own wives and children because they do not belong to the same social group? Where do you find the courage even to talk about reconciliation in such a context?  

This paper is built around the three major lessons we learnt from the exercise of answering all those questions. First, the road to healing and reconciliation starts with a serious consideration of the state of woundedness, personal and collective. Second, an effective policy for reconciliation calls for a multifaceted intervention that involves all the stakeholders in the community, the government and their different organs, the church, the civil society, the institutions of education and the private sector. Thirdly, the message of the cross of Jesus Christ provides an effective response to the hurt of the offended and the guilt of the offender.

Understanding collective woundedness and its consequences

Living together in the same country does not necessarily turn people into one nation. Country populations are often made up of people groups that do not share common ancestral origins, customs, lineage, language or even land.  Relationships between those differentiated groups will always generate friction, exploitation, conflicts, wars and even massacres that watershed into collective woundedness. In recent history, such cleavages alongside social identities led to the conflagration of some countries like the former Yugoslavia that exploded into Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo consequent to the rise of ethno-nationalism built on religious and cultural divisions, and memories of atrocities committed against some of the groups at different periods in the history of that country.

Offence is a double-edged sword, wounding both the offended and the offender. This applies not only to individuals but also to nations, people groups and social classes. Unhealed wounds are transmitted from parents to children and from one generation to the next. The further you go from the epicenter of the offence, the more emotional and irrational the woundedness and its subsequent fallouts become. Collective woundedness must be taken seriously to prevent it from festering into bitterness that translates into anger and violence (active bitterness) or self-destructive hopelessness, alcoholism and drug abuse (passive bitterness). Stan Grant describes in vivid terms this dangerous state of bitterness born of past hurts:

I return again and again to this poisoned chalice of history. Because I have drunk from it and vengeance is in my bloodstream too. It becomes the source of identity. The man of ‘ressentiment’, Nietzsche said, has an unquenchable thirst for vengeance. He is caught in a time warp. A prisoner of his past. Always returning to the wounds of history. Always returning to the source of injustice, which he cannot fix and does not want to fix.[3]

Resentment, anger and violence imprison the wounded in a vicious cycle of rejection. Who would like to live next to an individual with negative, unnecessarily aggressive and destructive behaviours? This creates a self-imposed social distance that solidifies people into an ‘Us-versus-Them’ position—a prison that the offended victim often protects like a fortified castle. The resultant social isolation breeds poverty out of lack of integration into the mainstream of social life. This comment I received from a Canadian Mohawk Chief illustrates well the point:

We have been given more than we need to propel ourselves higher than most in the nation, but we are stuck on the ground. When you spoke about spirits that react like broken springs that cannot bounce back, about people who prefer to stay in wounded victimhood that leads them into inactivity and despondency, I could easily feel and identify with that. I could see all the younger generation in my community who are killing themselves with drugs instead of using the resources we have to push ahead in life.[4]

Offence equally affects the offender, and like bitterness, guilt is also transmitted from generation to generation. David, in his psalms, paints the misery of a heart burdened by guilt in these eloquent terms:

When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through the groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. (Psalm 32:3-5)

In Born Guilty, Peter Sichrovsky interviewed children and grandchildren of committed Nazis and gives a good account of the impact of unresolved corporate guilt on successive generations. One interviewee expressed the feeling of being haunted by the guilt of their parents' actions, despite their parents being deceased:

I must tell you that I am haunted by guilt. Guilt now rests upon my shoulders. My parents, they are already roasting in hell. They died a long time ago; it’s over for them, this life. But they left me behind. Born in guilt, left behind in guilt… just look at me. Innocent. I am living the life of a guilty person.[5]

Similarly, in his book, Sin to Them, Shame on Me, Edouard Bamporiki describes the vicarious shame felt by the younger generation of Hutu of Rwanda consequent to the genocide committed against the Tutsi in 1994. The prophet Jeremiah in his Lamentations expressed the same feeling: ‘Our fathers sinned and are no more, and we bear their punishment.’ (Lamentations 5:7)

This feeling of guilt often translates into different self-defense mechanisms. Some adopt a cover up approach, hiding or negating the offence and carrying on with life as if nothing had ever happened. In other situations, the offenders will belittle, demonise and criminalise their victims, oftentimes blaming them for being the cause of their own misfortunes. In scientific environments the victims are turned into objects of curiosity, subject to all types of social and psychological research that lead to conclusions that confirm the biases the oppressing group has already established against their victims.

Leaving collective woundedness unaddressed brings profound consequences, leading to an ongoing erosion of trust and social cohesion. Collective trauma shatters trust between groups, leading to suspicion, fear of each other, division, social instability, and poverty which affects mainly the traumatised victims. Governments invest huge amounts of resources to build clinics for the rehabilitation of alcoholics and drug addicts; they build and equip prisons to hold in check the outburst of anger and violence; they establish social centres and train counsellors to cater for those who suffer from depression and post traumatic disorders. However, experience has proved again and again that this bandaid approach will tackle only the symptoms of the problems and does not restore communities. Healing collective woundedness requires a multifaceted approach that addresses the deep-rooted causes of conflict and fosters reconciliation at both individual and societal levels. The question remains: how do we develop such a plan?

A holistic model for building reconciliation

A deep analysis of conflicts and their origins reveals that conflict is the violent expression of an unfulfilled need, thus the road to true reconciliation starts with recognizing the needs of the people involved and developing policies that go beyond political rhetoric to provide lasting solutions. The Maslow scale of human needs has proved to be a useful instrument in identifying all the different issues that would need intervention in that process. When our Rwanda Unity and Reconciliation Commission was drafting the policy for unity and reconciliation, the Maslow scale of human needs helped bring together all the ideas that had been collected through our grassroot consultations and national summits. A strategy that takes into consideration all the levels of need and brings in all the stakeholders is guaranteed to bring genuine healing and lasting reconciliation. Unfortunately, most of the initiatives aimed at building peace and reconciliation take a programmatic, fragmented approach that tackles one need at a time without touching the other levels, and this will not bring lasting results.

The Maslow scale of human needs is often visualised as a pyramid of five levels, with the most fundamental needs like food, clothing and shelter forming the base and the higher-level needs like self-actualisation at the top. In a reconciliation exercise, each level of needs must be thoroughly analysed and coupled with the different stakeholders who have the issue as part of their direct responsibility.  

Level 1 on the scale is physiological needs such as food, shelter, water, health, clothing and so on. The stakeholders at this level will be government institutions in charge of social welfare, non-government organisations also operating in that domain, faith-based institutions, and even individual good Samaritans.

Level 2 comprises issues of safety and security for all and for their properties. This is the domain of the government and its institutions of law, justice and order, but also institutions that deal with advocacy, neighbourhood watches, and councils.

Level 3 is about love and belonging, which is where healing, reconciliation and social cohesion are handled. In our intensive discussions on stakeholders in our national policy for reconciliation we came to the conclusion that the best stakeholders at this level are churches and other faith-based institutions, as well as individuals and organisations involved in counseling and the healing of trauma. This tends to be the most neglected level of need, yet it is instrumental and central in the process of healing and reconciliation.

Level 4 deals with self-esteem, building confidence and respect. This is the domain of churches and faith-based organisations as well as schools and universities.

Level 5 is about self-actualisation, dealing with purpose, meaning and inner potential. This again is the domain of churches, schools, universities and other institutions of humanitarian interest.

Looking at the different levels and the related stakeholders reveals why leaving the healing and reconciliation of a nation to politicians is a huge mistake. Ultimately, healing a nation is a collective effort requiring individuals, communities, and institutions to work together, embracing forgiveness, love, and grace to create a society where different groups of people can coexist peacefully and thrive.

Another key issue that comes from this observation is that most interventions focus on physiological needs, a few others on security and safety, but rarely do we see consistent initiatives that tackle issues of inner life. Political, economic and justice solutions bring some relief to the situation but do not heal wounded hearts or relieve guilt. How do you heal and convince wounded people to let go of their anger and bitterness? How do you convince the offenders to recognise their offence, repent of it and ask for forgiveness? How do you bring together two groups that hated each other yesterday and ask them to build a harmonious, cooperative and loving community today?

In the aftermath of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, we battled with these issues and eventually found an answer in the message of the cross of Jesus Christ. This is a message that speaks to both the offender and to the offended. It is a message that gives the model of a community of grace where the former enemies meet and share the common brotherhood. However, this is a message that calls for a new type of church and a new type of leadership. A new messenger for a new message. 

The Cross and the Healing of a Nation

I was only one year old when the Hutu-Tutsi troubles started in Rwanda. When I was 5 years old, my father was killed. When I was 15, we (the Tutsi) were kicked out of school. When I was 25, the Hutu Government took from me my lecturing job at the University and sent me to teach in lower-level high school. When I was 35, we were deep into the genocide that took many of my relatives and friends. Those are just the big tragedies, not to mention the perpetual harassment and negative insinuations against the Tutsi. How do you change from being a bitter, angry young man to a reconciler?

It was through reading the Bible that I became a born-again Christian. Then I became a preacher, but I was still full of anger, bitterness and hatred against the Hutu. One day I was reading the story of Jesus Christ going to the cross, and suddenly I felt the anger I had been harbouring since childhood resurfacing in my mind and I started asking questions.  How can they do such a thing to an innocent person? Then came Jesus’ prayer—‘Father, forgive them!’ I could not take it anymore. How do you pray for people who crucify you? How do you pray for people who repay you with evil for the good you did for them? That prayer challenged me to change. How could Jesus pray such a prayer while hanging on the cross with nails in his hands and feet, his body bleeding all over! I started asking myself, ‘Could I ever pray such a prayer for the Hutu?’ I can still hear the voices of many survivors of the genocide asking the same question. And Stan Grant echoes the same sentiment, ‘Can I forgive? Can I put aside resentment? Can I keep speaking to people who cannot or will not hear?’[6]

The final answer to the questions was, ‘Yes, we can forgive.’ And followers of the crucified Christ are not only called to forgive, but they are also commissioned to be messengers of that message.

A deep meditation on many passages of the Bible, especially Isaiah 53, led me to a deeper understanding of the reconciling power of the message of the cross and inspired a Bible-based message and ministry that transformed many lives. Here are five reconciling truths that we distill from that message.

At the foot of the cross, we understand redemption from pain and sorrow: Christ's suffering on the cross provides healing for our wounds and a path to overcome bitterness.

 At the foot of the cross, we understand redemption from guilt and condemnation: His sacrifice atones for our sins and breaks the chains of guilt, offering forgiveness and a new beginning.

 At the foot of the cross we understand better our humanity: The cross reveals the depths of human depravity and God's infinite grace and forgiveness, enabling us to forgive even the unforgivable.

At the foot of the cross we rediscover human value: Through Christ's sacrifice, we are reminded of our inherent worth and the profound love that God has for each person.

At the foot of the cross we are called to build a community of grace: The cross becomes the foundation for a new community, the Kingdom of God, built on love, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

This meditation on the cross has probably been my greatest school in the art of forgiveness and reconciliation. This understanding became the source of a ministry of healing for the survivors and for the perpetrators.

We preached this message in our prisons, where thousands of perpetrators of the genocide came to conviction of their murders, repented and openly asked for forgiveness.

We taught the message to the survivors of the genocide, leading to healing from their woundedness, and we have seen them opening their arms to embrace their offenders who came to them in repentance.

It is only a healed heart that can forgive, and it is only a convicted heart that will confess their wrong and ask for forgiveness. And at the foot of the cross, we came together forming one family, one Holy Nation unto God.

Preaching the message of the cross for the healing of collective wounds and offences is a challenge for the church. The genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and its fallouts have challenged the church to move off the beaten track to rediscover its Kingdom identity with a message relevant to the crisis of the moment. Here again, our search for an answer led us to rediscover some of the characteristics of that church of the Kingdom of God, a church that will bring healing and reconciliation to the nation.

This is a church that creates a culture of healing and becomes a place where wounded individuals and communities can find healing and support, and where guilty consciences find relief in repentance, confession and forgiveness.

It is a church that develops transformational leaders who model the values of the Kingdom and preach the message of the cross with the intent of healing and reconciling their communities.

It is a church that teaches counter-cultural values, a church that dares to challenge the prevailing culture of violence, greed, and selfishness, and promote forgiveness, love, and service.

It is a church that empowers people for productive lives and enables even the wounded to heal and acquire the skills and resources they need to contribute to society.

 Dream On

These people are looking beyond Whiteness. They are looking at a nation of possibility. They see a human pinwheel of colours and cultures and languages and faiths. A new people tossed together, finding each other, loving each other. Out of this we are creating a nation. A nation that is still to come. (Stan Grant, The Queen is Dead, p254.)

Total reconciliation will remain a dream, but it is a dream worth pursuing.  The dream of a reconciled nation transcends racial and cultural boundaries and points people towards a future where individuals from diverse backgrounds can find unity and love. It remains imperfect now because of our human selfish ambitions and sins, but the Bible gives us the promise of a Kingdom to come when ‘the wolf and the lamb will feed together, the lion will eat grass like the ox... they will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain’ (Isaiah 65:25).

 

Leave a comment

Comments will be approved before showing up.

Name *

Email *

Comment *

---

Also in CASE Online Library