God’s encounters and defeats evil

The news is full of evil. If you have any doubt about the reality of evil in the world turn on the news.  Here you’ll hear about suffering among the poor, the drought-stricken and famine-stricken.  Agony among people on whom is inflicted excruciating death.  The airwaves, webpages and newspapers are filled with betrayals on personal, social and global scales. Gratuitous cruelty in families and neighborhoods.  Outrageous grabs by the powerful who disenfranchise, oppress and impoverish the less powerful.

We see all this around us – locally, regionally, globally.  The headlines need no recitation. There you have it – evil.

In this world-scape, human-scape, suffering-scape people often ask – in puzzlement, despair, or rage – ‘Where is God in all this?!  Where are you, God – that is, if you even exist?!’  And when they’re calmer and more analytical, many conclude, ‘Look at all this!  Obviously  God can’t exist, or if God exists God doesn’t care!’

On this Sunday of the Passion of Jesus, at the start of Holy Week, a very different conclusion emerges.  Where is God in the suffering?  The Gospel answers, right here!

The story of Holy Week is a disgraceful story of jealousy, rage, conspiracy, manipulation, violence, slander – and then condemnation, cruelty, mockery, torture, abandonment and, finally, excruciating death.  The story is dark and shameful.

At the center of that story is Jesus – Jesus to whom all that happens, Jesus on whom all that is heaped, Jesus who feels it all so keenly that he cries out in desperation from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!’  That cry resonates with the cry of so many who ask, ‘Where is God in the suffering?’  The Jesus who asks that question with us was a human being like all of us, yet at the same time the very being of God become flesh and living among us as one of us.  He lived among us, yet he set aside all of the of the prerogatives of God and so Jesus was genuinely alone, authentically vulnerable as he gaped into the darkness.

We often see ourselves on pilgrimage into God.  The Incarnation was God’s pilgrimage into humanity.  The primary mode of that pilgrimage was sharing – God sharing our life, God sharing our weakness, God sharing our anxiety, God sharing our unknowingness, God sharing our vulnerability to contingency and catastrophe.  Solidarity is a fancier name for it, properly popular in mission discussions, but ‘sharing’ says it more simply.  As Eucharistic Prayer A has it, Jesus was sent ‘to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all.’

Jesus was sent first to share our life – that was his mission, his sent-ness.  Yes, there were the mighty words and the mighty acts, the preaching and the healing, yet Jesus could not preach to everyone, nor could he heal everyone.  The words and deeds were harbingers of a cosmic healing yet to come.  Underlying his ministry was sheer presence – Immanuel, God simply with us, the sharing.

And that turned out to be costly, as sharing always is.  Where is God in the suffering? – Well, right here in the midst of it.  A task in Holy Week is simply to contemplate God’s sharing the human journey.

I recall how Scott Simon, the host of National Public Radio’s ‘Weekend Edition,’ talk about a Canadian general who once encountered evil face to face.

“[I] interviewed Romeo Dallaire, the former Canadian general who commanded U.N. peacekeeping forces in Rwanda in 1993 and 1994. General Dallaire discovered Hutu soldiers were getting ready to massacre Tutsi civilians. But he was prevented by U.N. leadership from using his troops to try to stop the murders before they could take place. More than 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans were then slaughtered over three months.

“[General] Dallaire said that what happened made him believe in evil, and even a force he called the devil. “I’ve negotiated with him,” he told us, “shaken his hand. Yes. There is no doubt in my mind …. and the expression of evil to me is through the devil and the devil at work and possessing human beings and turning them into machines of destruction. … And one of the evenings in my office, I was looking out the window and my senses felt that something was there with me that shifted me. I think that evil and good are playing themselves out and God is monitoring and looking at how we respond to it.”

God monitoring and looking at how we respond.  Yes. 

And what we are about to walk into this Holy Week is nothing short that the ultimate batter between good and evil. But God does more than monitor, God gets involved. God comes to us as a fully human person, born in poverty, raised in a backwater town under military and economic occupation. And Jesus goes out among the people, living and eating, making a living and staying with them as he travels and teaches, and people will come to him to experiencing healing, transformed lives, and even new life out of death. But eventually those very people who proclaimed him king will turn around and crucify him. And when that happens, He will take every sin, every shame, every betrayal, every evasion, every abuse, every hypocrisy that humanity has to offer to that cross and he will die. 

Again, this week, We will walk this week to that cross and to that death. Even death cannot contain him.  We will discover that a week from now, but now we see only his betrayal, arrest, torture, and death.

This week we will discover again and experience anew how God has immersed Godself into all of human living, all of human suffering, and all of human dying. Christ will also immerse himself into the glory of our love and creativity, as well as the darkness of our fear and our capacity for evil. He will die and go among the dead so that we may live and share in his life.

But first comes God’s encounter with evil, and its’ defeat.

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Bulletin for Worship for Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Scripture Lessons for the Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on April 2, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on April 2, 2023.