Nelson Mandela's Greatness: Rare Combination of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Nelson Mandela was a great man. If there were to be an international Mount Rushmore of twentieth century world leaders, his countenance would certainly be among the first to be carved into the rock surface. Why is this so?
The reasons are many and not difficult to define. To his own nation of South Africa, he was, to use American analogies, a rare combination of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr.
He was, like Washington, the "father" of His country in that he led the long, difficult struggle to free his people from the bitter oppression of apartheid. Then, like Washington, having served as his nation's first president, he helped cement democracy in his country by voluntarily leaving the highest office in the land when he would have been elected to office as long as he desired to serve. Voluntarily walking away from such power is rare, and few men have done it.
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Further, Mandela, like President Lincoln, was "The Great Emancipator," freeing the vast majority of his countrymen from a racial oppression by a white minority that was vicious, cruel and dehumanizing.
Ultimately, however, Mandela's lasting greatness will rest in the fact that like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his life illustrated the power of forgiveness and redemptive love to transform hearts and minds. When Mandela was released from over two decades in prison, his message of forgiveness and reconciliation toward his former captors and the oppressors of his people was so rare on the world stage it approached uniqueness.
For Americans who lived in the last half of the twentieth century, however, it inspired cherished memories of another great reconciler, Dr. King. How would we have traveled the difficult journey from Jim Crow segregation to the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement without Dr. King's transformative leadership?
I clearly remember hearing Dr. King say in the mid-1960s, when I was a teenager, "Those you would change, you must first love." I thought that if Dr. King can love "Bull" Connor, Birmingham's brutal, racist chief of police, Sheriff Jim Clark of Selma, and Governor George Wallace, then all of us can indeed follow Jesus' admonition to "love our enemies" and to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" even when they have been spiteful, hateful, and worse.
I thank God that He gave us a Nelson Mandela and a Martin Luther King Jr. Both men became world-renowned icons because of their remarkable ability to love their enemies and bring about real, lasting reconciliation where anger, hatred, and significant violence and bloodshed would have erupted without their transformative presence.
I pray that God will raise up more people like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. They have been too few among us, and how desperately we need them in today's world.
