THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Dear Friends in Christ:

The sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, as well as the news stories of violent deaths in Iraq and in our own country, led me to think again about the problem of evil. Christians have struggled for centuries with the question of why there is evil in a universe created by One who is both loving and powerful. The poet and playwright Archibald Macleish explored this question in his retelling of the story of Job in the play JB. One line from that play has remained with me ever since I saw it nearly fifty years ago, “If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God.”

Theologians call our struggles with this question theodicy, a word coined in the 18^th century from the Greek words for God and justice. But whatever we call it, the question is a persistent one for us. We believe the simple and straightforward statement in the First Letter of John, “God is love.”  And we also believe that God is all-powerful. We are left then with the troubling conclusion that God could eliminate evil and chooses not to.

Our ancestors in faith, the people of Israel, struggled with this same question and in a very old story, the story of Noah, the Hebrew Scriptures give us one clue in our search for an answer. God, the story tells us, decided to rid the world of evil by ridding the world of almost all of its people. At the end of the story, after the flood subsides, God makes a promise: “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Genesis 9:9-11) When we continue reading Genesis, we soon discover that there is still evil in the world after the flood and that ridding the world of evil people simply doesn’t solve the problem. A few chapters later i9n Genesis, we find another clue in another story, the calling of Abram and Sarai. In that call, God makes another promise: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:2-3)

To deal with evil, God calls a people to be a new community, a community in a covenant relationship with God, a community that will live, not by the standards of the world, but by God’s standards. And the community will live that way, not for its own sake alone, but in order that the world and all its people would be blessed.

In that community, as a member of that community, Jesus came to be with us, “to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to…the God and Father of all.” (Book of Common Prayer, page 362) To deal with evil, God came with love, with the love that took all the evil we humans could heap upon Jesus, with the love that wouldn’t give up on us. And that love empowers us to love, to love even “our enemies and those who wish us harm….” (BCP, page 391)

Because God wants a freely given response of love from us, God has chosen to allow there to be evil in the world, chosen to allow people to thumb their noses at God and to follow their own evil schemes. But God doesn’t stop loving those who turn away and the offer of love, the offer of abundant life, is still there even for the worst of sinners. It is our task, as members of the Body of Christ, to bear witness to God’s love as we love and forgive one another and as we love even those who are our enemies.  It is our calling to be God’s ambassadors, bringing the offer of God’s love to all.

Your brother and priest,
Daniel