Made for Goodness

Currently I’m reading a book R gave me on the occasion of our 35th wedding anniversary: Made for Goodness, and Why This Makes All the Difference by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu (his daughter). Archbishop Tutu has been one of my heroes for many years. In 1987 he came to Davenport to receive the Pacem in Terris Award, and at a Eucharist at Trinity Cathedral I managed to have our two-year-old son blessed by him. Only recently has Tutu announced that he is retiring from public life.

The basic idea of the book is in its title – God made us for goodness. It’s a fundamental part of who we are. God loves us with a love that requires nothing of us to earn it. Archbishop Tutu wrote the book because so many people ask him, “Why are you so joyful?” Why, indeed, after all of the heartbreaking apartheid-era stories he heard as chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Some of those stories are described in the text, and Tutu does not minimize their horror. Yet he emphasizes again and again that this is not what God wants. Instead it happens because God gave us the freedom to choose evil rather than the good for which we were made. Listen to God’s invitation to goodness, he says, and be whole again.

The prophet Jeremiah speaks the same message in a different way. He rejects the idea that children suffer because of the sins of their parents; each is responsible for her or his own actions. And the new covenant that God is about to create will be an internal one, written on the heart instead of on tablets of stone. “I will be their God, and they shall be my people…for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord.” Made for goodness, each will seek the good within.

The unjust judge in Luke’s Gospel seems far from goodness. He isn’t described as taking bribes, but he doesn’t appear to care about anyone except himself. He certainly doesn’t care the least about God. Nevertheless, he finally gives in to the pleas of a poor widow so that she will stop pestering him. If this unjust judge will respond to a request, Jesus says, don’t you think that God will hear your prayers? Won’t he be right there with you?

And yet, Jesus adds, will you be just as persistent in prayer as that widow was? Will you give up too easily? Will your faith be as strong as hers? The widow had no doubts about the rightness of her cause, and she probably had little to lose. Desmond Tutu gives numerous examples of people who persisted in protesting the injustice of what they experienced, with little hope for recompense. They believed that goodness would prevail, and amazingly, in some cases it did. Apartheid did end in South Africa without a bloodbath. The Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo focused light on those who “disappeared” and hastened an end to military rule in Argentina.

Goodness does not always prevail, of course. Evil still abounds in the world. Yet that does not disprove the Tutus’ position. Given the freedom to choose evil, humans continue to turn away from God, to be less than whole. We live in a broken world. But that does not change the fact that God loves us unconditionally and waits patiently for us to return to the covenant written on our hearts. Like the widow, we should cry day and night to God, so that justice will prevail.


Pentecost 21: Jeremiah 31:27-34; Luke 18:1-8.