Love and evil

People are perplexed by evil. The old, old question, "If God is good, why is there evil in the world?" is still asked every day, whether in these very general terms, or in very particular, anguished terms, as in, "Why did God let these terrible things happen to me, or to those I love?"

Religious people often say odd things about evil: either they then to dismiss it as a misunderstanding on the part of the theologically unsophisticated, or they personify it beyond anything in the Bible, representing the world as populated with countless demons, each one far more powerful and dangerous than any Christian.

What if evil is in fact the absence of love? Perhaps, love being so strong and particular a thing, its very absence is palpable, having an identity and dimensions, capable - if you must - of being named; and yet an absence nonetheless, and no entity? God did not create an absence. God is love: where he has been wilfully rejected, love is not.

If there is even the slightest sense in what I am saying, then certain interesting things follow. Firstly, evil can never be defeated by evil. The philosophy of ends justifying any means is shown for the false thing it is. No war can ever end war; no torture can be justified in the name of preventing torture. Secondly, only love can defeat evil. Thirdly, the defeat of evil will look utterly unlike anything you would normally think of as victory.

Faced with evil - with its own palpable absence, a kind of existential negative - what can love do? It cannot fight, it cannot take up arms, for in doing so it must lay aside love, and doing so, itself become the evil it has set out to defeat. All love can do is love. All love can want for another is mercy.

Jesus shows us what this unthinkable thing might look like. Faced with evil he did nothing but love. In love he healed. In love he released women and men from what bound them, and set them free to love. He cast out the blackness of no-love with the light of his own limitless love. Confronted with an evil which would destroy him, he did not seek to destroy his destroyers, but reasoned with them, prayed for them, forgave them, loved them. That love was so absolute that not even death, the ultimate evil, the utter lack of living love, could resist it. Jesus' resurrection was as inevitable as the way the dawn follows the night, just as his crucifixion was the inevitable result of taking love to its logical conclusion. That's why the Cross is the place of victory; the empty tomb is merely the result. On the Cross Jesus refused to come down, and, calling upon legions of angels, to lay waste to his enemies. On the Cross he insisted upon loving, right up to and through death itself. That is how death was defeated; that is how he came to rise again on the third day.

If we are to enter into Christ's victory, it can only be through the Cross.

I confess that all the above is rather an example of my getting carried away, thinking things through to what seems to me to be the only supportable conclusion. But when it comes down to our own lives as crucified with Christ (Galatians 2.19) then it starts to become experience. I do know in my own life that the only "victorious living" I have been able to do has been by way of the Cross; by loving, and going on loving, whatever happens.

Jesus said,

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5.44 ff)

I don't think all those discussions about what he could have meant by "perfect" are much use. Surely all he was trying to say was, just love. Love whatever. Love no matter what happens, no matter what they do to you. Love wholly. Let your love be such a concentrated, unconditional thing that it cannot be deflected, cannot be defeated. If that is how we love, then victory is certain. Then we can "Ask, and it will be given [us]; search, and [we] will find; knock, and the door will be opened for [us]. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened." (Matthew 6.7,8)

But it won't be the kind of victory an emperor or a president would acknowledge; and the answers to our prayers won't be the kind of answers people usually imagine - health, wealth and happiness. If we love, in the face of evil, those won't be our prayers. The only prayer, finally, is the prayer for mercy. Nothing less will do.