Tag Archives: Evil

Reckoning with Evil: A Sermon for 3LentC, 2025

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3 Lent

March 23, 2025

We all do it. We see someone’s suffering, perhaps even our own, and wonder, “What did I do to deserve that?” We might ask, “Why is God punishing me?” when diagnosed with cancer, or some other random misfortune befalls us. We might ask ourselves when we see someone in poverty, or unhoused, what decisions they made earlier in life that brought them to this point. It’s human; it’s natural. We want misfortune, suffering to have meaning, and so we look for reasons, or assign blame. Since the first humans began to think reflectively, we have wondered about the origin of evil or suffering, and we have developed intricate explanatory systems—religion not the least of them, to help us negotiate, make sense of, and respond to them.

Such questions bring us to the heart of today’s gospel reading, several enigmatic and perhaps unrelated sayings attributed to Jesus and brought together in this place by Luke. Jesus references two apparently somewhat contemporary events. In the first, Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea who had executed some Galileans while they were making sacrifices; or to put in imagery we might understand, people killed while seeking refuge from bombing in a church. The second example might be even stranger. The tower of Siloam falls and kills 18 people who were unlucky enough to be in the vicinity when the tower came down.

Jesus uses these two stories to make a point. He asks his listeners if these people deserved to die, if they were any more sinful than anyone else in Jerusalem. And then he lays down a warning, “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

Philosophers distinguish between natural evil and moral evil. Natural evil is the evil or suffering that comes about through natural disaster—tsunamis, earthquakes, and the like. Moral evil is evil that is a result of human action—the holocaust. These two examples of Jesus encompass both types of evil—a random accident, and a crime perpetrated by someone. In either case, our very human tendency is to assign blame. We want to place suffering in a context that makes sense of it, and that makes it conform to our view of the world.

 Jesus here reminds his listeners that there is plenty of blame to go around. The fact that some people were killed when the tower of Siloam collapsed didn’t mean that they were any more sinful than anyone else in Jerusalem.

But the reading doesn’t end there. After this word of warning, Jesus tells a parable about a fig tree. This story seems to be another version of a story in Mark and Matthew. There Jesus comes to a fig tree, looking for fruit but finds none. In fact, Mark observes, it wasn’t fig season. But Jesus curses the tree, and the next day, as they walk by it again, the disciples notice that it has shriveled up. In Luke’s version, it is a parable in which a landowner comes looking for figs, as he has in the two preceding years. But the fig tree is barren, so the landowner tells the gardener to pull it out. But the gardener objects, suggesting instead that they fertilize it and wait to see what happens the next year.

What are we to make of that? Well, if Luke is really reworking the story from Mark, then we see him turning a message of doom into a message of hope. The message from the death of the Galileans and the victims of the Tower of Siloam was loud and clear: “Repent or perish.” But with the fig tree, another message comes forward: “Let’s nurture the tree and see what happens next year. Perhaps we’ll get a crop of figs then.”

Waiting may be an option when it’s a fig tree, but waiting seems irresponsible when the lives of thousands are at stake. The reading from Exodus offers a different perspective on this dynamic. 

Moses, a Hebrew child  was spared genocide when his mother put him in a reed basket in the Nile.  He was found and raised by Pharaoh’s daughter. As a young adult, he came across an Egyptian whipping a Hebrew slave. Moses killed him and fled Egypt, ending up in the land of Midian, where we encounter him in our story.

And he encounters God. Tending sheep on God’s mountain, Mt. Horeb, also known as Mt. Sinai, Moses sees a bush that is on fire but is not consumed by the fire. When he goes to investigate, he hears the voice of God speaking to him, revealing Godself to him, calling him to be a messenger and prophet of God. There is much to contemplate here; the theophany itself, the revelation of God’s name, Moses’ call, but for our purposes, what matters is something God says to Moses:

“I have observed the misery of my people;

“I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters;

“Indeed, I know their sufferings and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians….”

The God who appears to Moses in a burning bush is a God who hears the cries of the oppressed and suffering, and delivers them from their distress. But, and this is the important thing, while sometimes that deliverance involves miracle or supernatural power; other times, most times, perhaps, that deliverance makes use of flawed and weak individuals and communities. 

In response to God’s statement that Moses will be the means of the Hebrews’ escape from bondage, Moses asks, “Why me? Who am I?” Later he will claim that he lacks a good speaking voice and so God will bring Moses’ brother Aaron alongside as an assistant and spokesperson.

The point is this. We see evil, suffering, oppression, all around us—in the racism of our society and especially our criminal justice system; in the plight of refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers on our borders and throughout the country. We see evil especially in the wars that continue to rage, not just in Ukraine.. We see this suffering. It may turn our stomachs, bring tears to our eyes. The images may open our wallets as we donate to the humanitarian efforts. We may even know people who dropped everything and are now involved directly in helping those who are suffering, people who have opened their hearts, and their homes.

In light of the magnitude of the suffering and oppression, such efforts may seem of little value, a drop in the bucket. But just as God sent Christ into the world, into the middle of humanity’s messy life, full of pain and suffering, God calls us into those places of suffering and oppression; to be present there as God is present; sometimes with selfless acts of heroism. Other times, we are called to fertilize and tend an unproductive fig tree, hoping and waiting that in seasons to come it will bear fruit.

My friends, in these challenging and heartbreaking times, our faith may falter; we may wonder whether God is still at work in the world. We may wonder whether the forces of justice and truth can overcome the hatred, lies, and oppression that surround us. But God hears the cries of the oppressed, just as we do, and God is working to deliver them, through our prayers and our actions. In these dark times, may we pray, and hope, and wait, and work for justice and for peace.

The Sikh Temple Shootings, Random Violence, and American Culture

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Robert Wright writes about a perceived gap between our attention to the Aurora shootings and to the Oak Creek Temple:

At the same time, one responsibility of journalists and pundits is to see things in terms of their larger social significance. And it seems to me that the Sikh temple shooting, viewed in that context, is at least as frightening as the Aurora massacre. This was violence across ethnic lines, and that kind of violence has a long history of eroding and even destroying social fabric.

Riddhi Shah is thinking along the same lines:

On Sunday night I turned on the TV to find that only CNN was covering the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin that killed six. Fox News had a program about a prison in Latin America, and MSNBC, something else that was equally irrelevant.

Compare this with the coverage of an incident that happened only two weeks ago, the shooting that killed 12 people in Aurora, Colo. Networks devoted themselves round-the-clock to the attack: Who was the shooter? Why did he do it? There were entire segments dedicated (rightly) to covering the vigils and a community in mourning.

By the way, my google reader feed had no new items about Oak Creek this morning.

Francine Prose has a thoughtful reflection on evil in the wake of the Aurora shootings:

But if we no longer believe in Satan, then what do we make of our sense that something is wrong with the world, that a random malevolent shooter lurks in the schoolyard or the cinema lobby? Our collective disquiet about the mass murders of our time is intensified by the sense that they select their victims at random; that they have come from different backgrounds and harbor dissimilar grudges, and that we have failed to come up with an “explanation” for their actions, or a reliable template to help predict or avert an attack. And yet we remain reluctant to accept the possibility that evil is not a problem that can be solved or a question that has a solution. How do we reconcile our wish to prevent further violence and to protect ourselves and our families with the suspicion that, as those who believed and believe in Satan would argue, evil is an element in the universal order, an aspect of nature and of human nature, a force and a constant threat that exists—and will continue to exist—despite our best efforts to understand and eradicate it?

 

And she too wonders whether it’s the randomness of the shootings (and the white victims) that grab our attention:

The media’s preference for stories about (preferably white) American victims—as opposed to reports of violence further from home—helps persuade us it’s fine to feel that way: a natural human instinct.

Innocent citizens in Mexico are regularly being sprayed with bullets in the course of their daily lives. But we can’t quite imagine ourselves waiting in line at a clinic in Veracruz, whereas we might think: Hey, I almost took the kids to the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in my town! The number of Syrian civilians killed daily during the last months surely outnumber the dead in Colorado. But I haven’t seen Assad’s mug shot on a tabloid headlined “Face of Evil.” Am I not supposed to worry about blameless Afghan citizens killed by mistake during a drone attack? Why should intentional violence perpetrated by narcos, soldiers, dictators, or machines—and resulting in the accidental deaths of the innocent—seem less evil to us than the methodical picking out of random strangers in a move theater? Aren’t all such incidents variations, in a sense, on a single theme—the theme being the evil things that crazy or “sane” people will do to one another given the opportunity, license, and a weapon?