What Is Evil
A sermons
delivered by Rev. Peter T. Atkinson
June 24, 2012
at Gordonsville
Presbyterian Church, Gordonsville Virginia
Romans 12: 9b
Luke 11: 14-23
Let
us pray,
Help us to see
despite our eyes
Help us to think
outside our minds
Help us to be
more than our lives
For your eyes show us the way
Your mind knows the truth
Your being is the life.
Amen.
So
this week we continue our journey through the "Marks of a Christian"
according to Paul's Letter to the Romans 12:9, and we've made it all the way
the verse 9b, which says simply "hate what is evil," a short but
surely loaded text. Last week I paired the verse with a passage from the
gospels that reflected a scene from the life of Jesus that paralleled the text.
I tried to do the same this week, so here is Jesus casting out a demon from
Luke 11: 14-23.
4
Now he was casting out a demon that
was mute; when the demon had gone out, the one who had been mute spoke, and the
crowds were amazed. 15 But some of them said, “He casts out demons
by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons.” 16 Others, to test him, kept
demanding from him a sign from heaven. 17 But he knew what they were
thinking and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself becomes a
desert, and house falls on house. 18 If Satan also is divided
against himself, how will his kingdom stand? —for you say that I cast out the
demons by Beelzebul. 19 Now if I cast out the demons by Beelzebul,
by whom do your exorcists cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. 20
But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the
kingdom of God has come to you. 21 When a strong man, fully armed,
guards his castle, his property is safe. 22 But when one stronger
than he attacks him and overpowers him, he takes away his armor in which he
trusted and divides his plunder. 23 Whoever is not with me is
against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. [1]
"Whoever
is not with me is against me," those are difficult words in today's world,
aren't they? They are the kind of words that separate people rather than
bringing them together, and here we see Jesus saying them, and in our text for
this Sunday we have, "Hate what is evil." Hate, there are many people
in this world today who would say that hate itself is evil. So here we are in
week 2 of our marks of a Christian series and we've already stumbled on some
challenging stuff. If last week's cry for us to live, love, and be genuine
wasn't hard enough, here we are this week having to hate evil. The Luke passage
seems to paint a simple picture of it all. Have you ever thought that if you
were a character in the Bible, faith, the walk, being a Christian, all of it
would be so much simpler? When you have demons self identifying, and you have
Beelzebub and Satan rearing their ugly heads in the light of day and in public,
it is so much easier to spot evil. Or if we could be in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, there would be a ring
that is evil and we could destroy it, or maybe even be Batman in Gotham City,
there'd be tons of villains to defeat, or in some western where we know that
evil is the guy on the black horse. Or if we could be Luke Skywalker in Star
Wars, it is obvious who the enemy is, the empire and Darth Vader, easy enough
go fight them, hate them, destroy them. They are evil and we know it, but our
world is more like the world where all of a sudden Darth Vader turns to Luke
and says, "I'm Your Father" in those immortal words of The Empire Strikes Back. Now everything
that he thought he knew about evil has been turned upside down, and his new
mission is not just to defeat evil, but to redeem the man who was his father,
hating evil, but looking for the possibility of goodness behind the evil mask.
Such
is our post modern world. It is hard for us to know what evil is. It seems
harsh to us to label anything or anybody as evil, but here in this passage we
are called, that one of the marks of a Christian is to "Hate what is
evil," but what is evil?
On
my final exam for my World Literature students I posed a question to them about
the nature of evil. I chose four quotes to frame the question, then the
question. I want to share the question with us as a way to start getting at
what evil is. I used the quotes to get them thinking. I'll do the same for us
this morning. Each Quote gets at a different idea of what evil is.
"Evil is a
point of view" -- Anne Rice
"Many evil things there are that your strong walls and bright swords do not stay." -- J.R.R. Tolkien
"What we call evil, it seems to me, is simply ignorance bumping its head in the dark." -- Henry Ford
"Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil." -- Anatole France
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke
"Many evil things there are that your strong walls and bright swords do not stay." -- J.R.R. Tolkien
"What we call evil, it seems to me, is simply ignorance bumping its head in the dark." -- Henry Ford
"Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil." -- Anatole France
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke
Does evil exist? If it does what
is its source? Does man have a responsibility to do anything in relation to
evil? If evil does not exist, why is there suffering in the world?
The
first one says:
"Evil is the opposite of love. To
give yourself completely is love. Taking in completely, on the other hand, is
evil. When one spreads love by giving to all rather than taking from all, then
joy can be found in the world."
I liked that one. It
seemed like a definition of evil that could be positive and beneficial. He
really gets at some of the main ideas of what I had hoped to teach them, but
isn't hate truly the opposite of love, and if so, how can you hate evil, as we
are called to do without become evil yourself. . . Problematic, but let's keep
that idea on the back burner as we proceed.
The
next two seem to reflect two popular secular ideas about what evil is if it
exists at all. The student writes:
"There are opinions of evil and
what evil things are, but there is nothing in the world everyone can agree is
evil. There are too many different aspects of life to say one thing is good or
evil because one thing that may be helping one person could be destroying
another person and vice versa."
He is basically holding
up the relativists point of view, very popular today. Evil is a mere matter of
opinion, and since there are so many different opinions, then there must be no
such thing as something that is absolutely evil, and by the way there is
nothing absolutely good either, and no absolute truth. Very prevalent among my
students.
Leaving
us with the third student, which is very similar to the second, just more
informed, from a anthropology standpoint, more educated, erudite, and intellectually
honest, yet arrogant, if you didn't think so just ask him, writing. . .
"Evil exists only because we have
made a "moral scale" or "system" to measure how good or bad
something is on a level of the society's standards."
Basically he is saying,
like student number 2, just going one step further, stating that we as a
society determine evil, based on our society's standards, but you can see from
his use of quotation marks, that he sees moral scale and system as a bogus
artificial made up kind of thing that those in power use over those who lack
power, but there is no truth behind it. They are merely arbitrary standards
that have seemed to work for us, maybe, or at least until we evolve and don't need
them anymore.
Again
I'll pose the question to you all. What is evil? Does it exist? Is it real? Is
it one thing or many? Is it easily definable? Is it embodied in a devil type
character, you know a little red dude who lives beneath the ground, but comes
up to haunt and scare, or to sit on our shoulders and debate with the little
cartoon angel we have on the other shoulder? Or is evil within human beings? Is
it merely a manifestation of human sin? Do you know evil when you see it? Can
you look at an event or a person or an idea and say, that's evil? Was Adolf
Hitler evil? Is driving an airplane into skyscrapers in the middle of a normal
workday morning evil? Is molesting a number of young innocent boys evil? Is the
systematic slaughter of a race evil? Is slavery evil? Yes, Yes, Yes. It seems
to me that the relative argument only exists in the vacuum of a philosophical
academic discussion because when you start looking at examples of evil, it is
not hard to find and distinguish them. It may be uncomfortable; it may be
easier to avoid the topic of evil altogether.
In
our Sunday School class we looked at a Native American creation myth. One of
the things we noticed was they did not seem to have a concept of evil, at least
according to that story. And it was brought up that some Native American
cultures don't even have a word for evil. Wouldn't that be nice, to look out at
the world and not see evil because you have no word to describe it, would that
mean it doesn't exist then? Of course it would still exist. . . a cosmic idea
like evil is not dependant, as much as I, and other English Teachers would
hope, is not dependant on vocabulary. Even without the word evil exists. What
if you had a society who did not have a word for evil, but they were involved
in human sacrifice. . . would that not make it evil? I mean they don't have a
word for evil, how could it be?
The
Greeks actually have two words for evil, and both are used within the confines
of our passage The first is this week's "hate what is evil." Later on
in the "Marks of a Christian" passage, the English word "evil"
is found again: v. 17, "do not repay evil for evil." These words for
evil from the original Greek language are actually two completely different
words. In "hate what is evil" you have "poneros" used for
evil, and in "do not repay evil for evil" you have a completely
different word entirely, "kakos." Getting at the difference between
these two words gives us a deeper insight into what is going on in this text. I
looked at a lot of different sources to get to the bottom of the difference
between these words. According to Strong's Greek Lexicon, the difference is Kakos describes the quality
according to its nature, poneros, according to its effects. In other
words Kakos is describing evil in a
person, and in that being a person who is less than what they were created to
be, something missing, and Poneros refers
with the hazardous effects of wicked or evil deeds.
When we read this passage like this we seem to be more in line
with the overall Gospel message of loving our neighbor, and/or our enemies,
rather than hating them . This passage is not asking us to hate people, but to
hate evil, and its effects, but now what are evil effects? How can we get at
what exactly signifies something as evil? "Poneros" gets at things
that cause toil, burdens, struggles, pain. We can look at all of those things
and see evil right, maybe, but sometimes those struggles, burdens, and pain are
the things that make us grow, so that is hardly evil, right? People who suffer
no struggle never grow, people who suffer no pain, don't get stronger, people
who are unburden seem to shrink and become weaker, mere shades of their former
selves, so I have trouble with this narrow idea of the essence of evil. Evil
can't just be the things that make us uncomfortable or work harder. To me that
is too much like heading into the realm of relativity, you know, I don't like
it if it makes me struggle. Evil seems to be bigger, more devastating.
It seems to me that the best way of looking at what is evil, is
not just what is burdensome, but what destroys life, both physically and
spiritually. If God is good, and created life for living, then destroying life
would be the opposite of good, evil. Now let's look at our list of things that
I posed as being evil earlier. Hitler--putting the world at war, systematic
killing of Jews, repression of human freedom, Hitler's got it all.
Driving an airplane into skyscrapers in the middle of a normal workday morning,
yes destroying of life, so many lives on that day, but also the after effects,
fear, reduction of freedom, invasion of privacy, going to war. All over the
news this week: molesting a number of young innocent boys, lives destroyed, so
many victims, and so many people hurt. It's evil. And finally slavery, yes the ultimate evil.
It destroys the human will and the human spirit because it reduces a human to
being a tool. I called slavery the ultimate evil, because though it does not
physically kill in most cases, rather it kills everything about what it means
to be human. And slavery takes on many forms, chained slavery, slavery to the
state, slavery to an idea, slavery of the mind, slavery to fear, and of course
slavery to sin.
These
are all things that we are called to hate. There is always the danger though,
and that is the power of hate to become an evil. . . I started this morning by
looking at a few movie versions the struggle between good and evil. Most of
them try to show this danger. In The Lord
of the Rings there is a constant threat that the ring that Frodo is called
to destroy will come to possess him, turning him toward the evil. In Star Wars,
Return of the Jedi, when Luke finally
faces Vader, his father, and the emperor, the emperor tries to use Luke's
hatred of evil to turn him to the Darkside of the force. In both the heroes are
faced not only with the evil that they are fighting against but also the
capacity for evil that is within them. Frodo and Luke both persevere and
resist, but for us there is always that danger. It is just as true for us. As
we work hard to try to keep 911 from happening again, we are constantly in
threat to become the evil we are fighting. It is not that we aren't supposed to
fight evil, we are, but we have to be constantly vigilant that we don't lose
ourselves in the fight allowing the hatred of evil to overwhelm us. When we
found and killed Osama Bin Laden I wrote the following poem:
Although
on this day the free world rejoices,
Part
of me stops because being the hand of justice
Is
dangerous. It is too much power, and I pray
It
will not corrupt as it tends to do. Especially
When
justice is wrapped in the flag of vengeance
And
the proud man stands above, satisfied,
Taking
credit for the triumph of Good over Evil,
But
by what means? May we seek a world
Where
Evil is overcome with Good, where
Vengeance
and Justice are in God’s hands,
For
it is only finite justice that we can do,
Temporary,
incomplete, and only partial good,
With
the shadow of Evil rising again behind us
In
the eclipse of our increasing, ever escalating
Misguided,
but well intentioned action.
I'm
not saying that he shouldn't have been killed, I'm saying that it was evil to
kill him, and we have to hate what is evil, even when it is within ourselves,
even when it is a "necessary" evil. It is really easy to let our need
for revenge, or our hatred of an evil act transform us, and we can't do that.
This
idea leads us straight into our text for next week, which states, "hold
fast to what is good." We must because hating evil is a slippery slope,
and though we are called to hate what is evil, we know that hatred us leaves us
hanging over a pit, and our only chance is to hold fast to what is good. God
give us the strength. May it ever be so.
[1]The
Holy Bible : New Revised Standard Version. 1989 (Lk 11:14-23). Nashville:
Thomas Nelson Publishers.