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Evil
Is Not God's Will
March
14, 2004
Fr.
George Smiga
Luke
13:1-9
We
do not know everything, and it is dangerous to pretend that
we do. God has not revealed all things to us, and it is blasphemous
for us to speak as if God did. One of the things that we as
Christians know very little about is why bad things happen
in our world. We cannot answer the question, “Why do bad things
happen to good people?” We cannot even answer the question,
“Why do bad things happen to bad people?” When it comes to
the origin and source of evil, God has told us very little.
We remain largely in the dark.
About six years ago some friends of mine on the west
side experienced a terrible tragedy. Their young son of four
years old contracted cancer and died. I went to the funeral
home and as I was waiting in line to pay my respects, I overheard
the woman standing in front of me saying to the grieving parents,
“You must be strong. Because it was God's will for your son
to die.” Her words took my breath away! I wanted to scream
at her, “How do you know God's will? And what would make you
think that God would ever want the death of this young, innocent
child!”
The truth is, we do not know why bad things happen.
Saying, “God is responsible,” is an attempt at an explanation,
but it is an unfortunate one. It makes God to be a cruel and
heartless god who would wish the death of the innocent. Yet,
the desire to find an explanation for evil is very strong.
Therefore, when evil happens you will always find people seeking
to explain why a bad thing is somehow a good thing or why
the people who suffer somehow deserve it.
This is what happens in today's Gospel. Some of the
people in the crowd tell Jesus that Pilate murdered some Galileans
and their implication is that the Galileans were killed because
they were sinners. Jesus rejects this explanation out of hand.
He says, “Do you think those Galileans were greater sinners
than all the other Galileans?” Jesus adds another example
of evil, an accidental one. He talks about a tower that fell
on eighteen people and killed them. Then he asks, “Do you
think that those people who died in that way were greater
sinners than all the other people in Jerusalem?” Jesus' answer
is clearly “No.” Trying to explain the origins of evil is
senseless. We simply do not know.
Now this leads to another very important but subtle
distinction. So listen carefully. We do believe that good
can come out of evil. We do not believe that God sends evil
to us . Let me say that in another way. Even in our darkest
moments, Christians believe that God will find a way to bring
something good out of the evil that we suffer. That, however,
is different from saying that God sends evil to us so that
goodness can emerge.
This puts us as Christians in an unbalanced situation.
We know that when good things happen to us, they come from
God. When we meet our future spouse, when we deliver a healthy
baby, when we are fighting cancer and the cancer is defeated,
we quickly and correctly say, “This is a blessing that comes
from a God who loves us.” The scriptures tell us that all
good things come from our Father in heaven. But when bad things
happen to us, we do not have a similar explanation. It is
wrong to say that my marriage failed because God wanted it,
that my child was born with a birth defect because that was
God's will, that the treatment for my cancer did not work
because it was a part of God's plan. If we undergo a divorce
and grow personally from the experience, it is appropriate
to thank God for the growth. It is not appropriate to say
that God ended my marriage so that I could grow. When a loved
one dies of cancer, it is sometimes the case that the family
pulls together and is able to express their love for each
other in ways that was never possible before. It is right
for that family to thank God for the honesty and intimacy
which the death occasioned. It is not right to believe that
God wanted our mother's death so that we might pull together
as a family. In every situation, when it comes to the reason
for evil in our lives, the simple answer is we do not know.
We must insist God is not the source of evil.
This truth applies even to the Paschal
Mystery, the life, the death the resurrection of Jesus. One
of the great services that Mel Gibson has done in making his
movie, The Passion of the Christ , is that he has
generated a conversation among ordinary Christians as to what
is the saving power of Jesus' death. We do believe that all
of Jesus' life; his life, his death, his resurrection, was
the means of our salvation. So it is true to say that we are
saved through Jesus' suffering and death. But even as we say
that, we must remember that Jesus' suffering and death was
something evil. It was wrong. It was unjust. It was cruel.
Even though we call the day on which Jesus died Good Friday,
we must not forget that it was primarily Bad Friday. For on
that day an innocent man was cruelly, brutally and unjustly
crucified. In that sense we must assert that God was not responsible
for Jesus' death. It was not God's desire that Jesus die.
Yet out of that evil death, we do believe that God drew our
salvation.
So why is it so important that we consistently protect
God from being the cause of evil? Two reasons. The first is
that if we believe that evil is the result of God's will,
we can grow to become complacent about it. If we believe that
evil is a part of God's plan, we may grow lax in opposing
it. Yet we as Christians must oppose evil at every turn. We
must use our energies to attack sickness, to oppose injustice,
to reject violence. We must oppose the death of the innocent
with the same strenuous commitment that we would have opposed
Jesus' own death.
The second reason that we must insist that God is not
the cause of evil is that such a belief distorts our picture
of God and of ourselves. If God is somehow responsible for
evil, then God becomes a cruel and heartless god, which is
untrue. If God sends us evil, then we must be guilty or bad
people which is not necessarily the case.
We do not know everything. When good things happen
to us we rightly claim that they are blessings from a God
who loves us. When evil things happen to us, we must admit
in all humility we do not understand why. Therefore, when
evil touches our lives, we should not try to explain it or
pretend that we understand it. What we must do instead is
entrust ourselves to God and to others for support, believing
that the same God who brought our salvation out of the evil
of Jesus' death, will not allow our own sufferings to be wasted.
Even as we believe that God does not send bad things to us,
we continue to trust that God will walk with us and somehow
bring blessings from the evil we endure.
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