The Problem of Evil

Scriptures: The Third Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In today’s Gospel reading we encounter the classic moral conundrum, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” It isn’t right. It isn’t fair.

This question delves into the very core of what it means to be human. We alone, of all the creatures of the earth, fret about right and wrong, because we alone can make the distinction between the way things are and the way things ought to be. We know, don’t we, that the world is not as it should be, not as it was meant to be? And this troubles us so deeply that we must seek out explanations, or else go mad.

This, of course, is a problem for religion. Indeed, it may be the root of all religion. The academic term for “the problem of evil” is theodicy, and it boils down to a paradox of three truths: God is all good; God is all powerful; and evil is real. You can see that it’s easy to assert any two out of the three, but all three are a problem. If God is all good and all powerful, why does He let evil exist? If evil is real and God is good, then perhaps God is not powerful. Or worse yet, if evil is real and God is powerful, perhaps God is not good. There’s a scary thought.

Most people try to solve the problem of evil by removing one of its three sides, but this soon falls into self-contradiction. For example, a lot of people reject God because if He is all powerful yet allows evil to occur, then He must not be good, and who would want to worship that? The contradiction, however, is that these folks are judging God by the very standards of good and evil laid out by God. If God is bad, who is to say that He’s bad? Who sets the absolute moral standards to judge God? Wouldn’t that standard setter, who would need to be above God, then be the real God, the Most High? Or, to put it another way: if God is evil then He’s not really God. Back to square one.

The much more common approach, and one that is indeed much more dangerous, is to deny evil. God is good and God is powerful, we say, so evil must not really be all that bad. I mean, if it were, He wouldn’t allow it, right? What you think is evil must really be a blessing in disguise! Yeah, that’s the ticket. Your hardship is really a gift, so turn that frown upside-down. Or perhaps, just perhaps, if you experience something really bad, well—it must be because you deserved it.

Here’s where things really get nasty. If bad things happen because you deserve bad things, then poor people deserve to be poor, sick people deserve to be sick, grieving people deserve their grief. They got what was coming to them. You know what they say about karma, after all. She’s a witch.

This is holier-than-thou mentality is precisely what Jesus denounces in the Gospel this morning. Folks around him are blaming the victims. A tower collapsed and crushed a bunch of bystanders; I wonder what they did to deserve that. The government came down hard and killed some troublemakers; I bet they had it coming. Indeed, Jesus’ own disciples get in on the act. At one point they see a blind man and ask, “Hey, Jesus, whose fault is it that this guy is blind? Was it his own sin that caused it, or his father’s?” Blame the victim. It’s easy to do. And really rather satisfying.

Nonsense, Jesus scoffs. Do you think that these things happened—disease, disaster, government executions—because those people were worse sinners than any of you? Balderdash. I tell you, disaster can befall any one of us at any time. Indeed, something terrible is coming to this land, an awful reckoning, and unless you repent, unless you turn and listen to My warning, you’ll find yourself suffering just as they did.

And of course He’s right. Within a generation of Jesus’ death, Rome would bring the hammer down on Jerusalem and all Judea, annihilating the capital city and scattering the inhabitants to the wind. Only the Christians escaped, because they remembered Jesus’ warning and fled. But that’s a story for another day.

Jesus makes it clear. God did not invent death. It is not the will of God that even one of His little ones be lost. Indeed, God has sent His Son into the world not to condemn the world but that the whole world might be saved through Him. God does not want terrible things to happen. That’s on us. We were the ones who broke the world. We were the ones who tasted the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and so shattered the initial harmony once shared between God, Man, and Nature. That’s why we alone can perceive the problem of evil in the world.

But if God is all good and all powerful, and He doesn’t intend for us to suffer and die, why then does He allow it? Why doesn’t He get off His holy throne and come down here to do something about it? Couldn’t He just snap His fingers and make everything right? After all, that’s what we would do, if we were God, isn’t it? We would force the world back into the way that it was supposed to be, force it to be good, force it to be right! If we were God, ours would be a tyranny of justice, a despotism for righteousness. All would love us and despair.

Yeah. You can see why God doesn’t do it that way. The will to power is Satan’s gig. God’s way is that of love. And the thing about love, is that love cannot force, cannot tyrannize. Love must be accepted, reciprocated, welcomed. But neither can love ever give up on the beloved. That is its weakness and its strength.

Let us not think that because God does not tear open the heavens and come down to burn up unjust regimes, or cow the wicked into subservient virtue, that He is inactive. Quite the contrary. God is doing everything in His power to forgive us, to gather us, to save us from ourselves. If only we would let Him. But His ways are not our ways. He doesn’t come with benevolent brute force. No: He pours out Himself humbly to be born in a manger, to live a hard and quiet life alongside us, to proclaim an unmerited forgiveness of our sins, a radically inclusive Kingdom of God for all eternity, and to preach to us His love even as we are in the midst of murdering Him on a cross.

This, brothers and sisters, is how God solves the problem of evil: not by hitting it with a hammer or snapping His fingers to make it all go away. But by joining us in our sufferings. By loving us even as we reject the goodness that He offers. By letting us consume Him, body and soul, and then using that self-sacrifice to break down forever the gates of death and hell. You can’t blink evil out of existence. You can only love it back to being good.

It may be true that there are types of suffering that lead to our own betterment. And it may be true that there are types of suffering that we deserve, that we fully bring upon ourselves. But there is also senseless suffering. Needless suffering. Suffering that nobody deserves, at least not any more or less than anybody else. And that is where God chooses to meet us: in our brokenness, in our hopelessness. That is where God begins His work of redemption and salvation.

Why do bad things happen? Because it’s a broken world.

What is God doing about it? Absolutely everything He can.

Jesus never promised us that bad things wouldn’t happen. In fact, He warned us that some pretty horrible stuff would come on down the pike. But He did promise that He is with us always, even unto the end of the age, in our poverty, in our suffering, in our blindness. And someday—someday—every wound shall be healed, every tear wiped away, and every mother’s son raised back up from the loamy depths of the grave. On that day, all things will be set right. On that day, evil will be no more, and God will be all in all.

And it won’t be because He forced us. It’ll be because He loves us.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.