Archbishop Desmond Tutu considers the human predicament from God’s point of view. Interview by Jessica Roemischer, Senior Editor of What Is Enlightenment?
What Is Enlightenment?: In your acceptance address to the Nobel Prize Committee in 1984, you began by speaking about the “deepening crisis in South Africa”—the discrimination, evictions, brutality, and daily murder faced by blacks in your country—which you called “apartheid’s final solution.” As a religious leader in that time of widespread violence, how were you able to sustain your people’s faith in the possibility of freedom and justice?
Archbishop Desmond Tutu: You probably need a modicum of suffering to help you realize what it means to belong to the Church. I’m not certain that Christianity flourishes properly where people are comfortable. It is a faith ultimately for sufferers. For example, the story of the fiery furnace in Daniel, Chapter 3, is a nice story. But for people who are having a rough time, it’s more than that. You preach to them, “Now look, this injustice and oppression are like being thrown into the fiery furnace. The king threw three guys into the furnace and then went to find out what had happened to them. And he counted, ‘One, two, three … and there was a fourth!’” We used to say to our people, “God is not over there; God is here. The God we worship is not a God who gives you good advice from a safe distance. God knows your suffering, and God is in this fiery furnace with us.” So a lot of the Scripture came alive at that time. God said to Moses, “I have heard. I have seen. I know. I will come down.” And I would say, “Don’t think that our God is deaf. God has heard our cry in this awful country. God is not blind. God knows what’s happening to us, and just as it occurred then, God will come down and one day lead us out of this bondage.”
Reprint from WIEnlightenment? Magazine, When God Smiles: Interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu By Jessica Roemischer
