There is, on YouTube, a
series of about forty episodes called People who Changed the World. What
is interesting, is the people that have been chosen. All seem to be amongst the
darkest and most evil in the world: Mass murderers like Pol Pot of Cambodia,
Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia or Kim Jong Il of North Korea. They are people who
have created darkness and misery and death for millions of people. They have
certainly changed people’s lives through hardship and suffering. But the
strangeness is that they have made no real contribution to the world. People
have been wounded, physically, emotionally and spiritually by them, but as time
passes, the world always seems to recover from them. They are here today, gone
tomorrow, and eventually ordinary people just forget them as generations pass.
Soon, like Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem, little remains of the might they have
conferred about themselves but mouldering ruins.
Nowhere in this series
does one find the great and good; scientists like Louis Pasteur, for example,
whose work still benefits billions of people worldwide. Nowhere does one find
the great reformers of labour laws, prisons, medicine and nursing. Nowhere do
the great abolitionists of slavery feature. Great humanitarians like St Theresa
of Calcutta are conspicuous by their absence. There is an unbridgeable gap
between the monsters presented in the series, who changed times and places,
albeit drastically, for a while, and those who brought the light of God to bear
upon the world.
For this is the great
difference. The murderous and violent figures in the series all started with a
vision for a godless heaven on earth. When they began to fail, as such visions
always do, their proponents attempted to shore them up and force their
continuance with ever increasing control and violence, until the systems became
more oppressive and brutal than the ones they were supposed to be replacing.
They replaced love and justice with oppression and fear. They failed to deal
with the one thing that could have made the difference; human sin, both within
and around them. And they lacked the one thing that could have made the
difference: God’s redeeming love, as He communicates it to us through the death
of Jesus on the cross, and his resurrection from the dead.
Without God to heal,
us, we carry around with us, sin and its consequences, and no matter what we
attempt, sin stains and pollutes it. We need to be redeemed, to be made
“whiter than snow.” (Psalm 51) It is those who were close to God, who loved him
above all things, who have really changed the world. The horrors inflicted on
Romania by the Ceauçescus lasted for 25 odd years, and the country is recovering
from them. What they did has passed into history. But the efforts of William
Wilberforce in the emancipation of slaves is with us still, and the world has
been transformed forever by the work that God achieved through his
faithfulness.
It would be wonderful
were we to be able to make a counter-series about “People who REALLY Changed
the World, and to tell the stories of people such as William Wilberforce,
Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, St Peter Claver, St Theresa of Calcutta,
Archbishop Romero and a host of others. But perhaps it is not necessary. God
has seen their work, and the world has benefited by it. What will the
contribution of each one of us be? Great or small, each one of us has a very
definite task to do for God, and even the smallest can change the world without
even knowing it. May each one of us respond to his call, and carry out that
task to the very best of our will.
Fr
Phillip
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