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Evil David Gerrard 10th October 2010 |
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| Matthew 6.13 - Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. | ||
| Three months ago I preached about goodness - in particular about the Good Samaritan. I want to follow up my earlier address by talking today about evil. | ||
| We often tend to see good and evil as two equal and opposing forces used by God on the one hand and the devil, Satan on the other. Milton’s great poem Paradise Lost is all about this conflict between God and Satan, Light and Darkness, and it was the teaching of a very powerful early Christian group called the Manicheans who followed the teaching of the Persian Manes who lived in the third century. | ||
| But there is scant support for these views in the Hebrew Scriptures. Satan is only mentioned rarely and only in a late book and in the story of Job, where Satan was used to try to explain Job’s sufferings. It is more common in the New Testament, but Satan is used by Jesus as the personification of his temptations to turn away from his Father God. And in the teaching of Our Lord there is never any indication that Satan is remotely as powerful as God, nor that he was a fallen angel. | ||
| In just the same way as there are nothing like so many Biblical references to Satan as to God, so there are not so many references to evil as to good. The Bible begins in the Book of Genesis with the creation of light, ‘God saw that the light was good.’ We have no mention of evil until we are in the Garden of Eden where there were two trees, one the tree of life and the other the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. | ||
| Over the centuries in the Christian Church there developed a much more dualistic attitude. God was opposed by the devil, good by evil. It was a battle. Those on the winning side, the goodly, the godly, went to heaven, and their opponents, the evil, wicked followers of Satan were destined to go to hell. There are great works of literature like Milton and Dante’s poem, and many great works of art, paintings, sculptures, stained glass with vivid representations about the extreme differences between heaven and hell, beauty and hideousness, salvation and damnation. | ||
| But this has never been the only view. St Augustine saw the Manicheans condemned as a heretical sect who denied the majesty of God. Bishop Jeremy Taylor that great Anglican divine of the seventeenth century wrote memorably about the fate of all men, sinners as well as saints. ‘We have but a small opinion of the divine mercy if we do not believe that He is able and desirous and willing to save all men from eternal damnation.’ | ||
| In the Scriptures the power of good is far greater than the power of evil. The first is a force of its own. The second a mere perversion unable to exist on its own. We all know about the Good Shepherd and the Good Samaritan. Try to think of an evil character in the Scriptures. I could only find a character in a parable, The Evil Steward. The death of Jesus on the cross is the ultimate vindication of the truth that good defeated is greater than evil triumphant. | ||
| And this truth has permeated throughout our world. It is not just Christians who believe that good is greater than evil. The allies defeated the Nazis. Harry Potter triumphed over Lord Voldemort. | ||
| I am not for one moment arguing that evil is a delusion, that it does not exist. Quite the contrary. Those of us of a certain age have lived through the most terrible of evil times and evil deeds. Slavery. The Holocaust. Atomic bombs. Mass starvations. Ethnic cleansing. Tortures. Rapes. Murders by the million. Endless cruelties. | ||
| The Christian religion takes the realities of both good and evil with the utmost seriousness. But personally I find the language about Satan or the demonisation of individual human beings neither true nor helpful. I believe there are few, if any, examples of truly evil people, people who are beyond the redemptive power of God’s grace. | ||
| I have come across in my life quite a few habitual criminals, have taken the funerals of people who have been murdered, and visited and taken services in several prisons. Almost without exception such offenders are inadequate, sad, pathetic individuals whose actions reflect what a Jewish philosopher called the ‘Banality of evil’. The paedophile I knew best was a tragic shell of a man whose loving nature had been perverted by his distorted sexual needs. Prison had done nothing to help him. Some of the most malevolent people I have met have not been criminals but upright suburban citizens. | ||
| Nor should we think of evil as purely individual. It exists in a context, an environment that supports and encourages it, whether that culture is anti-semitism in Hitler’s Germany, or teenage, drug-fuelled gangs in south London. An American friend of mine was a missionary in Nicaragua. She has had a difficult life. An abusive first husband. Five children, one of whom committed suicide, another died of Aids. Her beloved second husband died of Parkinson’s. She is a wonderful person, tough and tender, a psychotherapist who helps to select clergy for the Episcopal Church in the United States. One candidate she saw had served in Iraq. He could not tell his wife what he had done; he just woke up screaming in the night. He was one of the Americans who tortured Iraqis. After my strong friend had seen him for a session she had to take a shower, so powerful was the sense of evil. He, like Nazi Concentration Camp Guards, acted as a small cog in a pervasive culture of systematic human denigration and degradation. | ||
| I have no doubt that he, and many, many, many other people have committed terrible, evil actions that cause terrible harm to others and to themselves. But I do not believe that they are beyond God’s love, nor should they be beyond our care and prayer. I also have no doubt that all of us are a mixture of good and evil, of love and hatred of generous and selfish impulses. To stigmatise others as evil monsters, prevents us from examining our own lives and repenting of our behaviour. Motes and beams. Motes and beams. | ||
| I believe that the overwhelming majority of human beings, made in the image of God, long to do good not harm, to be loved not hated. But it is not easy for any of us to achieve these good desires, however fortunate we may have been in our families and upbringing. For others coming from obscenely fractured and loveless childhoods it is close to impossible. All of us are influenced by our histories and background and all of us respond to our environment, so in our personal lives we need to try to provide a Christian community in this place of love and care and acceptance, and in our families and communities we need to provide love and care and hope for all with whom we come in contact. I end with two quotations; one from the atheist Philosopher Nietzsche who eventually went mad from seeing so much cruelty in the world. ‘They will need to look more redeemed before I believe in their redeemer.’ | ||
| The other comes from a wonderful French Catholic layman called Jean Vanier who began living in a small household with severely disadvantaged adults with both psychical and mental disabilities, and went on to found such establishments, called L’Arche, all over the world. The Pope visited one in Lambeth on his recent visit to England. Jean Vanier wrote. ‘When a child is loved, seen as precious, listened to, touched with reverence, knows it belongs, is held protected and safe, it opens without fear.’ | ||
| Such children will grow to be adults who do not do many evil acts but who are the face of Christ in the places where they live. |
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