This week saw the announcement that Desmond Tutu, the first black South African Anglican Archbishop of Capetown, is going to complete the task of "retiring" that he first began in 1996, and will be withdrawing from his public life.
My first experience of this man, came a few years ago. I was working for a missions organisation with a focus on the art of reconciliation and had come across his name particularly during a week of lectures looking at forgiveness.
I was walking on the street and saw his book "No Future Without Forgiveness" in the window of a charity shop. Intrigued by the title, and the fact I was working in forgiveness initiatives at the time, I took it up to the till to take it home. A South African accent, in the shape of a middle aged woman greeted me there, with a story of how happy she was to see this book go, after watching it sitting in the shop window for weeks. Further discussion uncovered that this woman's mother was a childhood friend of Tutu, who, until her death a few years before, had received a bouquet of flowers from the Archbishop every year on her birthday. Armed now with a book, but also a personal insight into the man behind the legend of Desmond Tutu, I delved in to see what more I could discover of this man.
I inhaled the book, newly convinced (if I wasn't before) and inspired by the importance of forgiveness. But also intrigued by a man who, among a career filled with incredible achievement, crowned it off in his appointment by Nelson Mandela to be co-chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of SA. Tutu brought a humility and selflessness to the role that another man may have struggled to acheive. Only one such as Tutu could take the helm of such an enormous undertaking leading it, not just to its conclusion, but to the healing of countless individuals lives, and a nation as a whole.
The job of the TRC was to hear stories. To get to the truth of what happened. People would tell the stories of what they had done or what had been done to them, in exchange for amnesty from prosecution. Inevitably, this brought families face to face with murderers and anger could flare up. But thankfully, so did forgiveness.
Many onlookers from the international community may have expected retribution by the oppressed South Africans after the fall of the apartheid regime. After all, they had suffered for decades, in what was considered a modern part of the globe under archaic rules, segregation and division. So, the world stood back in awe of the example of a few men, leaders, who chose instead another way.
Instead of retribution, forgiveness. Instead of the cycle of anger, the choice for peace.
How was it that a few men were able to lead a nation to this forgiveness? For Desmond Tutu at least, he makes it clear that his sole motivation for choosing this path comes only from the one who first forgave us.
Forgiveness was at the heart of Christ's message of Earth, and is at the very core of the Gospel that we preach and live our lives by.
Following the giving of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6, it is the verse about forgiveness that Jesus gives extra time to. Explaining exactly what he means by it, and emphasising its importance.
And at the moment of the first appearance of the risen Christ in John 20, when the disciples were locked up tight for fear of reprisals over their connections to Him, it is of nothing less than forgiveness and peace that Jesus chooses to call them to. Of all of the key points and theological arguments Jesus spoke in his 3 year ministry. Forgiveness is the one he chooses to return to at this moment.
I am the first in need of hearing this message of forgiveness. We live in a world where things can be done against us on any given day. I find forgiveness particularly difficult on the road. When I'm cut off, or given attitude in the car by other drivers, that anger, or sense of the need for some sort of justice, can follow me for the rest of the journey, if not the day! It can stew within me, and take control of my feelings. What might have been a good day can quickly become a bad one.
But often the wounds that linger the longest are the ones that come from friends, family, those we trust. We can utter the words "I forgive you" and really mean them in the moment, but the bitterness is not always gone for good. Our work is not complete. Tomorrow, if it flares up again, we have to remember to forgive all over again. It takes remembering every day to really mean those words. Every time hurt feelings and bitterness rise up within us, it's a new choice. Forgiveness is a journey. It is not a single event.
May each of us be on this journey. May we begin to learn how to let go of our bitterness and anger and replace them instead with forgiveness, and love. And may we thank the Lord for examples that we have to guide and to inspire us. Examples such as Desmond Tutu. And may his retirement from the public life be long, leisure filled, and full of the love that he has inspired those around him to.
