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St Peter’s Church Bredhurst Sermons: Evil |
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Notices and |
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Good Friday – |
Not a sermon but a
discussion document Divorce and our policy |
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This was rewritten from the lecture on prayer and suffering for
the morning we discovered that the bodies of two ten year old girls, missing
for two weeks, had been found. Where
does evil come from, why does it happen? The reading was a series of extracts from the first three
chapters of Genesis and I suggest you read these before continuing. On Holly & Jessica 18 August 2002
My God, my God, why have
you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of
my groaning? O my God, I cry out by
day, but you do not answer, by night, and am not silent. Suffering, for a
Christian, is the biggest problem of all.
For, if God is all loving, all knowing and all-powerful, why do we
suffer? Why do those we love suffer? Why does God not fix it? Why, in the midst of suffering does God
seem so powerless, so lacking in knowledge, so lacking in love? Throughout the bible,
the writers struggle with this subject of suffering: Why suffering? Whose fault is it? How do we get out of it? The answers, when they are given, are often
contradictory or found wanting. The
first attempt is right back in Genesis.
Probably a compilation of very ancient stories written down when the
Jews were enslaved in exile, these stories attempt to answer the
unanswerable. How did we get
here? Whose fault is it? How do we get out of it? And in their ancient stories they find
their own story, their own experience. Read Genesis quickly and
it appears certain that the broken relationship, sin, is the cause of
suffering. That theme is repeated in
the accounts of the Exodus and in the stories of an Israel that continuously
walks away from God and suffers for it.
It’s obvious: We sin; we suffer.
We do good; we prosper. There
is truth in this, and God calls on us to repent of our sins, to change our
ways, for as we rebel against him and his laws we invite trouble into our
lives. The story of Cain and
Abel that follows uncovers an uncomfortable truth that the exiles lived with
– the good die young, while the wicked prosper. Ah, say some of the writers, they get their
comeuppance in the end. But they
don’t, and that still doesn’t explain the fate of the righteous. So the writer introduces another character
– the serpent, or Satan, the embodiment of evil, an evil force that we know
and feel on days like this. But dig deeper into the
Genesis story and be amazed. For on
page 3 of my bible, the Word of God, the writer poses the ultimate question –
is God to blame for suffering? God starts by making us
in his own image, but two things appear to be lacking – God’s eternity, which
he sustains in us but may withdraw at his choosing, and the knowledge of good
and evil. The knowledge of what? Surely God, who is good, does not encompass
evil? But it is the beings, made by
God in the image of God who sin, the serpent made by God who tempts them, the
fruit made by God which enslaves them in evil. The Genesis writer offers no explanation,
just a book-full of stories about the utter mystery of God as we experience
Him. Genesis would never have got
shelf-room in a Christian bookshop if it did not come packaged with Paul’s
helpful letters. Read Genesis and the
Psalms and you may come away with the idea that God is mixed up in this mess
of a world far more than we’ve been led to believe. And the writers don’t seem to care – for
this is their reality, their experience.
It is only those of us who have grown up with this idea of God as a
remote sugar daddy who find it difficult.
But read the rest of the bible and you discover that God is indeed
mixed up in it all far more than we may think. The words I began with
are the words used by Jesus on the cross.
God himself undergoes every form of suffering, especially that of
losing his faith, his knowledge of God’s presence. Not just body, mind and spirit but also
personal integrity, his very being, utterly broken. Darkness the only clothing for his
nakedness; darkness, his only friend.
The thorns of the ground crown him; the sweat of his brow waters the
ground. Dust swirls around him as he
is planted like a tree back in the dust from which he came. Wine, the fruit of good and evil, is thrust
into his parched throat. A flashing
sword cuts off his last hope of access to the tree of life and a stone is
rolled across the exit from the garden tomb. The bible offers no glib
answer to the “Why?” that we want to scream today. But its stories lead us to a God who enters
into the story, our story, and bears in himself, who shares the pain of all
the evil and suffering of the world. The
God who cursed us has become the cursed for us. The cross, the tree of knowledge of good
and evil, has become the tree of life, and we who have known good and evil
are invited to reach out and eat its fruit and to share that fruit with those
who have tasted only the bitterness of evil. |
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