Conversations: Sharing Our Faith with a Skeptical World
Why is There Evil?
Rev. Richard H. Thompson, October 4, 2009

Genesis 3:1–7; Mark 7:14–23

We read in our papers or hear yet another story in the news of unthinkable, unspeakable brutality, of pure human meanness, and something inside cries out, "Why?" Why is there corruption? And greed? And atrocity? Why do fellow human beings slaughter, rape and steal?

Why is there evil? Something inside rails at what this is even doing here. It's like cancer - out of control, sucking off the God-given gift of life to grow sickness, dysfunction, fear, hatred and death.

I think it was Scott Peck's young son who pointed out to his father, while he was writing a book entitled People of the Lie on the nature of evil, that the word "evil" is the word "live" spelled backwards. Out of the mouths of babes...

It fits, doesn't it? Evil, most would probably agree, is "anti-life" in any and all its forms - from physical or biological life to how human beings treat one another, to how we treat the earth, to how we relate to the God who made us and all THIS.

The question, "Why is there evil?" is so pressing to some of our skeptical friends that it becomes a reason why they don't believe there is a God, or one that matters. The implication then could be drawn that maybe evil itself doesn't exist either. Then we're in interesting territory, aren't we?

Still, if what happens every day leads someone to ask, "Why is there evil?", I think they are expressing a right, basic human instinct that evil does not fit. It does not belong.

It's frustrating that, unlike the Greeks, the scriptural witness is not interested in evil "in the abstract". The Greeks debated this question from the earliest times. They came up with all sorts of explanations for where evil came from: it's result of conflict between the gods; it's the distinction between what we do to ourselves and what the gods send at us; evil is the logical necessary opposite of good; evil is the limitless confronted by limitation; it's punishment for a previous life badly lived; evil is the result of human ignorance (Socrates).

But our scriptures do not offer any of these types of explanations. Maybe there is a reason why. Maybe "evil" can never be talked about "philosophically", as if "evil" were some "idea" to be worked out logically. Could it be there is no explanation because it's in our human nature that if we can explain something, then we can accept it? And learn to live with it? But if something cannot be explained, it remains frustratingly unacceptable, a scandal, what does not belong, what has no business here. It's an aberration, an infection, a parasite. It's the 150 lb. mongrel grazing on the prime rib in the dining room while the guests celebrate in the living room. "Hey!" somebody says, "What's he doing here? How'd he get in here? Who let the door open?"

The biblical answer to that question is, "Well, we did." Or more accurately, "We do."

Our Bible's answer to the question, "Why is there evil?" gets uncomfortably personal. Consider the third chapter of Genesis.

Let me remind us that Genesis is not just for Jews, Christians and Muslims. What we read in Genesis chapter 3 does not only describe what happened. It also describes what happens everywhere, every day. Genesis is humankind's scriptural witness and wisdom on why there is evil.

We meet the serpent. The Hebrew name is "NACASH" which means "shiny" and "enchanting". Strangely, this serpent has the power of speech. It is another voice, besides God's voice and the voices of the humans. We don't know how or why this other voice is there. It just is. If we could explain this, then we'd be able to locate responsibility, wouldn't we? Maybe we could blame God...

I imagine the serpent speaks in a soft, calm voice in the midst of a Garden filled with goodness, joy, and grace. Adam and Eve are surrounded with gifts of life in earth, trees, animals, birds, fish, water, mountains and sky that together with the heavenly host sing, maybe they shout, "PRAISE GOD FROM WHOM ALL BLESSINGS FLOW, PRAISE HIM ALL CREATURES HERE BELOW, PRAISE HIM ABOVE THE HEAVENLY HOST, PRAISE FATHER, SON AND HOLY GHOST!" It's just everywhere. If you're listening you can still hear it!

With all this going on, the snake has to be very careful, quiet, low-key, close to the ground - below the radar - in its search to find an opening somewhere, just a crack, some vulnerability, some opportunity. Ah! Here it is! God has taken a huge risk. God has made one creature different than all the others -- this one is "like God" in that this one can think, and decide, and choose. This one uses words, and wonders, and asks questions. Here is the crack in the door.

This is the way in.

The biblical answer to the question, "Why is there evil?" comes by way of showing how evil works. And the witness of scripture is to a quiet, intimate, conversation.

The serpent asks a simple question, "Did God say...?" In the question there is a subtle hint, a suggestion of another way to look at things. Now the human wonders too, maybe there is another way to think about what God said. Maybe there's another "interpretation". Eve enters into conversation with the serpent, "Well, God said we could eat of any tree but not to touch the tree of knowledge of good and evil, or you will die..." But that's not exactly what God said, is it? God never said, "Don't touch it." God said, "Don't eat its fruit." (Go ahead and climb it, build a tree house in it, sit in its shade, just don't eat the fruit.) Now a little change has happened. Now Eve has God as more restrictive. Now God seems maybe a little...unreasonable. Now this tree has become something to fix the eyes on. Now its fruit has become more... mysterious, an object of desire.

We all know how this works. If I tell you, "Don't think about jack rabbits..." what are you going to do? I remember being slid into a machine where I had to lie completely still for 45 minutes. After they had me in place with this thing right in front of my face the guy says to me over the speaker, "Try not to swallow." Are you kidding me!??

Eve can't take her eyes off that tree. Now this has become a kind of battle of wills - God's will and human's will. Now the serpent can make a next suggestion about the consequences. Maybe it's not quite the way God says it is about life and death. "God knows when (not if, but when!) you eat of it, you'll know everything God knows. You'll be like as if you were God!!"    That certainly would take the ambiguity out of life, wouldn't it? It would solve lots of problems, to be able to deal with frailty, and disease, and suffering and pain, even death. Notice the subject of death hadn't even come up before. Now it has become something to worry about. Now it has power, of fear. Now the humans are thinking about their security. They wonder, can they trust God for their safety? Subtly, there is a reason to take matters into one's own hands...

To know what God knows, to be like God, would mean to take charge. It would be to make our own world. Or perhaps more accurately, it would be to make the world our own.

This is the evil dream: a world without God. A friend calls it "Ex-Theism", that is, kick God out of the Garden. Call it radical independence. Radical freedom. We'd no longer need to talk about "right" and "wrong" in any absolute sense called "morality". We could get down to the serious business of power; of who has it, how to get it and hold onto it. It would mean it's all up to us to use all THIS as we see fit. There would be no use for God. Nor for evil. There would only be fortunate and unfortunate consequences, depending on how much power you have. If we're in charge, and there is no God or evil, then we are accountable only to ourselves.

This is not crazy thinking. It has happened. Listen to this quote from theologian Ben Wiker, "... the real danger occurs precisely when we give up the notion of sin and accept full determinism, and then jettison God as well. The belief of the Marxists that one's thoughts and actions were entirely determined by the modes of production, that history was ineluctably moving forward according to the laws of dialectical materialism, and that there was neither God nor sin, allowed them to slaughter 100,000,000 human beings who could not be salvaged because they were entirely determined by capitalist modes of production. The enemies of the communist state were not sinners; they were automatons from an obsolete age that needed extermination." (Tothesource, Sept. 30, 2009)

Let me say again what is so disquieting about the biblical witness to the question, "Why is there evil?": that there is evil because you and I engage with it in quiet, intimate conversation. The possibility of choosing for oneself is always within reach. The serpent stills asks, "Did God say...?"

We are to understand from our scriptures, both Old and New Testament, that there is out there that which is intent on destroying the things and desires of God, what is "anti-life". I think of the image of the Joker in the film The Dark Knight, relishing fomenting suspicion, confusion, and chaos in order to undo what God as created good. But we are also to realize how we personally engage in dialog with this intentionality - which the Bible calls Satan, or the devil, or the "evil one".

C.S. Lewis tried to help us understand how this dialog goes in his classic, The Screwtape Letters. He imagines a head devil named Screwtape writing advice to his nephew Wormwood on how to influence his "client" (a human being) away from the Enemy (who is God). Lewis' examples are unnervingly familiar and mundane. For example, there's this one on the client's prayer life:

Screwtape writes to Wormwood, "The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient [or client] from the serious intention of praying altogether. When the patient is an adult recently reconverted to the Enemy's party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood. In reaction against that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part. One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray ‘with moving lips and bended knees' but merely ‘composed his spirit to love' and indulged ‘a sense of supplication'. That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practiced by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy's service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time. At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things in their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out." (pp. 15-16)

So the biblical witness on evil is that no one can stand on the side and point to "those others" as "the problem". We can't even say, "Well, the devil made me do it," or, "I had a tough upbringing, I can't help it."

Jesus says it is what comes out of a person that defiles. That it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions of all kinds come. The love of money is the root of all evil. The tongue can ignite a conflagration.

The man blames the woman, the woman blames the serpent, but God knows what's really happening.

It's as Solzenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil runs through every human heart."

God help us.

And God does.

How?

There's still a choir singing night and day, good and loud. But that's not enough, is it? God knows evil has to be dealt with. Directly. Decisively. Finally.

It has to be drawn out of hiding and exposed for all to see, held up high, like a mirror to all humankind. Here it is. It cannot be denied.

Its force, its power which is fear and death, and the fear of death, has to be broken. What it does to people, and in them, in you, in me, has to be taken on, somehow absorbed by Someone far stronger than you or me.

And after its power is broken, we still need more. We need a strong companion to walk closely with us, don't we? Someone to help us "choose", because every day there are so very many choices we must make.

God has been dealing with evil ever since the Garden. I picture God standing at the gate watching his children walking away out east, and God saying to Godself, "I will bring them home..."

And God has been dropping hints how, in history, in the story of a small group of people, in images on the lips of prophets, and finally in the life, teaching, and healings Jesus did, and what took place on the cross, and after, in his rising.

God intends to bring us home. Back to the Communion Table. This place that maybe explains it better than any words we can find, of God's grace, truth, love and power, deeper than the mystery of evil.

All we can do is let our hearts be filled, flooded, like a cup overflowing. Brothers and sisters, friends and skeptics,

It has been accomplished. Be of good courage.

He who has risen spells it L-I-V-E.

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Questions for Reflection and recommended reading.