The Tower

Tarot Card: The Tower, by MorkarDFC

Propers: The Third Sunday in Lent, AD 2025 C

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.

Evil is a problem. What’s remarkable is that we know it.

The world is full of terrible things. Beautiful, yes, but also terrible. Some evils we bring upon ourselves. Some are thrust upon us by other people. Yet much of the suffering in our world appears utterly inexplicable. It descends upon us unjustly, unfairly. We all know, or darn well ought to know, that bad things happen to good people; while the worst of us often flourish at the expense of all the rest.

This we call theodicy, the problem of evil. And the popular formulation goes like this: if God is all-good; and God is all-powerful; then there ought not to be evil. But the world is full of evil; we encounter it all the time. Ergo, God is either not good or God is not powerful. And if God isn’t omnipotent, if God is not omnibenevolent, then He simply isn’t God. Thus this becomes a lazy person’s way to dismiss religion: world bad, no God.

But it doesn’t solve the problem, does it? Because the problem, as stated, is predicated upon the reality of evil. And if there is no God, if there is no absolute transcendent Good as the horizon to which all goodness must aspire, then evil can’t exist. It wouldn’t be evil; it would just be how things are. There is no wrong without right, no crooked without straight. In affirming the existence of evil, we affirm the existence of God.

We look to the world around us, and we know that things are not the way they ought to be, not the way they were meant to be. And so we strive for truth and justice and mercy and love, because these are things we can’t not know. We endeavor to right what is wrong, to fix what is broken. And we didn’t learn that from looking to this fallen, damaged world; we learned that by looking beyond.

Our Gospel reading this morning speaks of disasters: of a tower that fell on innocent bystanders; of government violence mixing murder with sacrilege. And Jesus asks His disciples, “Do you imagine that this all happened because the victims were worse than you?” The Apostles, it seems, have been playing the blame game. We all do, to one extent or another. Something awful happens and reflexively we look for reasons why the same couldn’t happen to us.

“Oh, they were a bad driver. Oh, they didn’t take care of their health. Oh, they should’ve seen it coming.” And this is, in a sense, very natural. It’s how we reassure ourselves. But it’s also wrong. We want to imagine that bad things happen for a reason, that we get what we deserve. Do good, get good; do bad, get bad, right? That’s how a just world ought to work. But honestly, if that were the case, then the symbol of our faith wouldn’t be a Man upon a Cross.

We imagine our God like Zeus atop Olympus, hurling thunderbolts at sinners, raining blessings on the faithful. So if a tower falls, well, they deserved it. And if a child dies, well, it’s a blessing in disguise. “God must’ve needed another angel,” says the card. But that isn’t Christianity. That isn’t the faith of Jesus. In modern parlance, it’s the religion of the “Abusive Sky Daddy,” of God doing evil. But God can’t do evil; if He could, then He wouldn’t be God. He would just be the biggest angel with the nastiest sword.

So if evil doesn’t come from God, whence then does it come? From us, of course, from creatures. Not just humans, mind you, who manage to sin pretty marvelously on our own, but from powers far older and far greater than we. Angels, demons, lesser gods, call them what we will. Those forces tasked with upholding the cosmos have failed, have fallen short of the goodness intended for us all. Ours is a fractured world, a world which does not function as it ought.

The corruption runs systemic, not only on earth and below it, but up to the angels above. St Paul speaks of powers and principalities, of holy angels who nonetheless imperfectly govern Creation. And if all this seems a bit mystical, mythical, metaphysical, just keep in mind that it’s restating what we’ve said before: the problem of evil; the problem of knowing what good ought to be in a world that’s all gone wrong.

The Christian understanding is that, in Christ Jesus, the Light of God has descended into darkness, from the empyrean of God’s eternity into our world of death and decay. On the Cross, Christ has descended into hell—so that now even death, even that abyss of nothingness, has been joined to the infinite Being, the infinite Is-ness, of God. And so we are saved! We are rescued from this evil world and turned again to God. Christ has conquered earth with love, hell with life, and heaven with His glory.

He reorders the cosmos, resurrects the whole of Creation, gathers all His children home in Him. Jesus encounters poverty, violence, death, disease, and never once does He treat them as the work of God. Never once does He say, “This is how it ought to be.” No! He only ever treats the horrors of our world as enemies to be conquered, as forces opposed to God, which have no dominion over His grace, His love, His Spirit, His Son. This world is dead, Jesus said, and I am the Resurrection.

Thank God for that. Thank God that when we look at war, at pandemic, at prejudice, at slavery, at the death of an innocent child, we can say, “This is not the will of God, and He shall not let it stand.” Every wrong will be righted, every wound healed, every child raised. It’s already done in eternity. Our end is already assured. Our job now, as His people, is simply to witness His truth, to reflect His light amidst the darkness, to serve as His hands and His feet, made one in His Body by His Spirit—to be Christ for a world in need of Him.

This is what St Paul means in his Epistle to the Corinthians, where he writes about God not letting us be tested beyond our strength. Note he never says that God sends us our temptations, but that God is the one who provides our way out, the Way of Jesus Christ. And again, that doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen to us if we only keep the faith. Jesus promised each of us a cross. But God will bring us out of our suffering, out of our weakness, out of our illness and death, up into eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.

You think He doesn’t know what it is to suffer unjustly, to be abandoned, to be broken in body and die? Look at that Cross! There hangs the world’s only truly sinless Man.

One question yet remains in our problem of evil. Why have this whole process? If God has saved us in eternity, if He has gathered us all in Jesus as His heavenly holy saints, such that we will only ever freely choose the love of God forever—then why not start it out that way? Why create a world in which sin is even a possibility? Why let us choose good or evil for ourselves? And the answer, it would seem, is that the very idea of creating an already-perfect creature capable of choice is just not ontologically possible.

It’s like asking whether God could square a circle, or make a rock so heavy that even He couldn’t lift it. Every one of us is created from nothing, called out from non-being into the infinite Being of God. And we have to will our existence at every step of the way. We have to grow into the goodness of God by our own volition, or else we would cease to be exactly what we are: rational, spiritual beings. This world in which we live is yet becoming; it is moving, it is growing, from nothing into all.

We presume that if God were all-good, and God were all-powerful, then He would simply snap almighty His fingers to wipe out every evil. After all, that’s what we imagine we would do, if only we were God. But love doesn’t work that way. Love doesn’t force. Love can only sacrifice, and give, and guide, and seduce. If God coerced us into goodness, then we wouldn’t be free, and He wouldn’t be good. And God can’t not be good.

This then is our comfort in an unjust, wicked world: that evil is not the will of God. Injustice, suffering, anguish, grief, these are all His enemies, wounds which He has come to heal. And He does so by joining us in them, joining us even in death. For there is nowhere we can go He hasn’t gone before. Jesus Christ will lead us through and raise us up to life.

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

Credit where credit is due: the latter bit of this homily draws heavily from an article found On Ancient Paths.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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