The Impotence of Evil

 

Propers: The Fifth Sunday After Epiphany, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

“Great is our Lord,” sings the Psalmist, “and abundant in power.” He determines the number of the stars; He gives to all of them their names. His understanding is beyond measure—eternal, infinite, utterly transcendent, beyond anything that we could ever possibly imagine. And yet!

What does He do with this power, this wisdom, this glory? He feeds the young ravens when they cry, and makes grass to grow soft upon the hills. Here we have that classic biblical paradox, present from the earliest chapters of Genesis, of a God who is at once almighty, omniscient, everywhere and nowhere present, infinite in the heavens—yet who is at the very same time immanent, compassionate, and closer to you than the jugular in your own throat.

The Christian God soars beyond all limitations or categories of thought, beyond space, beyond time, beyond human understanding and yet—with no diminution to Himself whatsoever—He is more human than we are. He is more us than we are ourselves. For indeed, He has placed the Image of God within us, and has revealed that Image for all to see in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is God on earth, and the only truly human being whom we have ever known.

No matter what we think of God, He is always greater, always better, always truer and more beautiful than we could possibly conceive. And He expresses that glory—He expresses the Goodness, Truth, and Beauty which are who He is—in His mercy, His compassion, His healing liberation, and His love poured out for the world from the Cross into everything and everyone whom He has ever made. In Christ, humanity and infinity are perfected as one and the same.

I once heard an atheist admit that he could believe in a God of infinite power, but not a God of infinite love. He said that such an idea was too parochial, that no God worthy of the name would ever deign to bother noticing naked little apes like us. He simply could not imagine wasting infinite power and knowledge on anything so paltry as forgiveness or love.

But I say to hell with power and knowledge and glory. Love and compassion are the only things worth spit in this world. And any god who cannot love is far too parochial to be worthy of worship one way or another. Such a god would just be one more giant to be slain.

You can see this in our Gospel reading this morning. Jesus and His disciples, after attending synagogue on the sabbath, enter into the house of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, who is sick in bed with fever. And as soon as Jesus learns of her disease, He reaches out, takes her by the hand, and raises her up. Instantly the fever evaporates, and she begins to serve her guests.

Note the sequence. She’s laid flat, too weak, it seems, even to ask for help; her son-in-law must do it for her. And Jesus, before He says anything, requires anything, clasps her hand, lifts her up, and she is filled with vitality and healing and life. The very presence of God in the flesh makes her whole and hale.

And she begins to serve her guests, not because of traditional gender roles, not because this is the reason Jesus healed her in the first place—“Hey, somebody’s got to make dinner, right?”—but because this is our natural, joyful response to grace. The love and grace and breath of God raises us from nothing, raises us from death, by no merit of our own, by nothing we could do or be or offer back to Him, but purely out of grace, purely out of love, purely by dint of who God is and what God does.

And the only natural, healthy, human response to this is love. Love of God poured into us begets love of neighbor poured out for others. This is what it means to be a disciple. This is what it means to evangelize, to live and proclaim the Good News of Jesus’ victory over sin and death and hell. It is inseparable, inextricable, from loving the people in front of you. Not in theory—not loving the idea of people far away—but loving your neighbor now in her need.

What else does it tell us? It tells us that suffering and evil and brokenness are not the will of God. God didn’t make this woman sick. At His touch the fever broke, the sickness fled. The very presence of God drives out the evils of this world. It is not His will that we should suffer. It is not His will that we should die. It is not His will that even one of His little ones be lost—Jesus says that explicitly.

God is with us, God is for us, and God is alive and powerful to save! In Jesus Christ He broke death’s back. And someday—when the Resurrection which began on that first Easter morn has spread like wildfire into every crack and crevice of Creation—then shall there be no more death, no more sin, no more hell. Then shall every tear be dried, every wrong set right, all the dead raised up to life, and God at the last shall be All in All.

That’s the promise of Christianity. That’s the promise of Jesus Christ. And God does not break promises.

Now, some have pointed out that this leaves us with theodicy, the so-called “problem of evil.” To wit: if evil is real, and God is good, then why doesn’t He do something about it? Why doesn’t He just get rid of evil? Why is there even evil in the first place? And these are legitimate questions—because if there’s one sure conviction held by the entire human race, it’s that the way the world is, is not the way it ought to be. There is suffering, evil, injustice, and we know that it’s wrong.

Christians call this the Fall: the obvious disjunction between life as we know it, and life as we know that it should be in a world where all would be right.

Various philosophies and religions have tried to get around the problem of evil by convincing us that evil isn’t real, or that evil isn’t evil. They tell us it’s karma, justice. Or that it’s a necessary balance of light and dark. Or that everything is random, and has no meaning anyway, so what are you complaining about? But that’s hogwash. And everybody knows it. Babies shouldn’t die. Wars shouldn’t rage. Hunger and penury and ignorance and cruelty are wrong, period. So, what are we going to do about it?

Evil, in Christian understanding, has no substance. It’s not a thing in and of itself, like the Light Side and the Dark Side of the Force. No. Evil originates from the abuse of freedom, from things created good falling short of their intended mark. That’s what sin in Greek actually means: hamartia, falling short, the missing of the mark. And so evil is not a creature to be slain but a fault within ourselves: a chasm, a hole, which cannot be cured by violence or force but can only be filled with grace and love and mercy and life. That’s the cure for sin, for evil in our world.

And so it must be done hand to hand, man to man, neighbor to neighbor. It must be cured in ways large and small, with consistent forgiveness and justice and mercy and love, and truth poured forth in a river from God into us and from us into all. The world has been saved, is being saved, and ultimately will be saved in Jesus Christ, in God made Man, in infinite love gushing forth from the Cross so that it fills up hell to bursting, floods the world we know, and rises up to sanctify heaven itself.

Our faith promises us that evil is not the will of God, but a disease to be healed, a serpent to be trampled, a great gash of a wound to be sealed up and cauterized with fire. The problem of evil is the price we pay for having the better story. It is not a bug in Christian faith but a feature. I would rather wrestle with the question of how evil got into our broken world in the first place than sit around and pretend that all this awful mess is somehow okay—part of a divine plan, or the result of faceless forces ignorant of our plight. To hell with that.

What is God doing about the problem of evil? He is pouring out everything He has, everything He is, His own life and blood and Spirit and Son, all for you, into you, forgiving you, healing you, suffering beside you, walking with you throughout life, going before you even into the grave, and rising to heaven with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train—all to take you home in Him. Evil cannot stop Him; it could barely slow Him down. Love wins and takes no prisoners.

This, dear Christians, is the Gospel, the Good News of God’s victory, of a love that cannot die, a love that conquers even death, a love that sets all peoples free. And the only response we can have to such love is to learn to love others—especially our enemies—as Jesus Christ has first loved us.

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