5th Sunday of Lent
“Lord,
if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Twice in the gospel we hear this, once on the
lips of Martha and once from her sister, Mary.
“Lord, if you had [only] been here!”
This is a very relatable statement, I think. We can look back at the various challenges,
difficulties or tragedies in our lives and ask, “Where were you, Jesus? If you only you had been there, then this
[whatever that is] would not have happened.”
We could look at the car accident this past Friday that left four of our
students returning from spring break injured, one of them critically, and say,
“Where was God when they needed him?” We
could look at the tragic deaths of two of our students last semester, Ethan
Flaherty and Kayla Decker, and ask, “Why, God?
Why weren’t you there to prevent this?”
Or we could ask, “Where was God on February 14th when at
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida seventeen people had
their lives prematurely snuffed out?”
If you are looking to me for an
“end-all, be-all” definitive answer to the problem of evil or why God seems to
allow bad things to happen, I’m afraid I going to have to disappoint you. I don’t
know. And if I pretended to know and
offered some cleverly concocted explanation to this question, it would surely
ring hollow and trite. In fact, it would
likely do more harm than good. And if
you come across anybody in this life that does claim to have an “easy” answer to
this great question of suffering and evil, my advice would be to run the other
way. So, where does this leave us? Is there nothing we can say in the face of
tragedy? Are we left simply to despair? No.
Thanks be to God, no. I may not
have a “final answer” to the question of evil – no one this side of heaven may
have that answer, but I believe there are certain things we can say.
First, I think it helps us to define
“evil” and then differentiate between the kinds of evil. Evil is not really a thing. Rather, it is the absence of something; an
absence of the good. It is a
privation. Moral evil is that which is
committed by human beings, who alone among all creatures have a rational will,
and so can know and choose the good. If
you think of it, there is no such thing as a “bad dog,” at least not a morally “bad dog.” Dogs do as dogs do. There may be poorly trained dogs, in
which case they may do…well, you know what on the dining room carpet. But a dog isn’t doing this out of revenge or
spite or just to be mischievous. A dog
doesn’t have the luxury of that choice because it doesn’t possess a rational
will. Dogs simply do as they do as their
needs dictate or as they have they have been trained to do.
Humans are another matter. We can choose to do evil, or to reject the
good. And so, we can look at those
human-made tragedies, like the shooting in Parkland, Florida, and say, God did
not perpetrate this. A human being did this. Now there may be many other contributing
factors for us to consider, like the shooter’s own broken upbringing, or the
availability of weapons that can wreak such carnage, or the lack of adequate
mental health care in our country, etc.
But at some level, a human being chose to do this awful thing. That’s not on God.
Of
course, this begs the question, “Why would God even allow someone to do
this?” I suppose God could have created
us to be basically “moral robots,” programmed always to choose the good. But then, we’re no longer really talking
about morality, right or wrong. Morality
presumes a real choice. And here’s the
thing: if we remove this element of choice, then there is also no possibility
for love, at least not in its highest form.
Love, in its highest form, is not simply an emotion that crashes over us
like a wave, but a choice, sometimes a very hard choice, for the good of the
other. God knew that even though giving
us free will might “come back to bite Him,” as it has time and time again (and
as it has our fellow human beings time and time again), it was nonetheless the
indispensable prerequisite for authentic love.
Our daily challenge in this life is to choose this love (even when our emotions don’t always correspond). And when we see moral evil in ourselves or in
our society, then we need to work vigorously to put an end to it. In fact, we have a moral obligation to do just
that. So, let’s not lay the blame for moral
evil, freely chosen by human beings endowed with rational wills, on God.
But
then, there is natural evil. This is
evil we can’t “pin” on anyone, things like truly natural disasters or illness. Of
course, we can examine the question of whether or not human behavior has
contributed to such disasters or to illness, in which case, yes, then we are
talking about moral evil, at least partially.
Then, once again, we have a moral obligation to change our behaviors to
prevent, as far as possible, our own contribution to these evils. But suppose for a moment that we removed the
“human contribution” to these things – there would still be natural disasters;
there would still be illness, which again begs the question, “Why?” This is a much trickier question. With moral evil, it’s easy to find someone (a
human being or group of human beings) to blame.
But with natural evil, there seems to be no one but God to blame. Again, I don’t pretend to have a perfect or
definitive answer to this, but I would offer this: maybe this kind of stuff just
happens. Perhaps it’s simply a part of
life on planet Earth, a part of human existence. Perhaps this is a part of the “fall,” that
great cosmic repercussion of original sin, in which not only humanity, but in
some sense all of creation was affected by this fundamental choosing against God
at the dawn of humanity. This is the
great mystery to which I am convinced, this side of heaven, we will never have a perfect answer.
But
what can we do in the face of such inexplicable evil? This is where the Gospel and the example of
Jesus comes in. Notice that when Jesus
is told by both Martha and Mary, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would
not have died,” He doesn’t’ blithely say, “Oh, stop crying. I got this!”
No, Jesus’ response is to cry with them.
“When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with here weeping,
he became perturbed and deeply troubled…And Jesus wept.”
So,
I think our first response to evil, whether moral or natural, is simply empathy,
to allow ourselves to the degree that we are able to feel with and for those
who are hurting. This is also the
natural response of love. Notice that
when the others saw Jesus weeping at the death of his friend Lazarus they
remarked, “See how he loved him.”
Our
second response to evil, in whatever form, is hope. From the time that Jesus first knew that His
friend Lazarus was ill, his response was to reassure His disciples that “this
illness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God, that the Son of
God may be glorified through it.” And
when He first encountered Martha upon entering the village, he reassured her by
saying, “Your brother will rise.” And He
went on to say, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even
if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never
die.” Then, finally, as they prepared to
take away the stone, He again reassured them: “Did I not tell you that if you
believe in me you will see the glory of God?”
And with confidence he called Lazarus forth, “Lazarus come out!”
Empathy and hope
– empathy, rooted in authentic love, for those who are hurting and hope, rooted
in faith, that God who is the source of all life may bring life even out of
death. As we continue our Lenten journey
and prepare very soon to walk with Jesus in His Passion, let us pray for an
increase in these virtues. Then, even
when we don’t have all the answers, the God of life and love will be revealed
in us.