Hilton Head Island, SC – July 19, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 4:1-9; Matthew 4:1-11
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. – Matthew 4:1 (RSV)
History is strewn with countless illustrations of evil. The ownership and mistreatment of slaves by American Christian citizens was evil. The Nazi Holocaust was evil. There have been many instances of evil in the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis. There are many instances of evil in the retaliation of the Palestinians against the Israelis. The mistreatment of the Muslim Uighur people in western China by Xi Jinping and the Chinese government is evil. The new law inflicted on the citizens of Hong Kong by the Chinese is evil. It was evil for Islamist Iraqis to drive Christians out of the country during the Iraq War.
Individuals also commit evil acts against other individuals. I know a woman who had a trusted attorney and financial adviser for years. Over time he embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from her. Every now and then we read in the newspaper or see on television the story of parents who imprisoned their children in the basement for years. A heretofore little-known niece has just published a book about her famous uncle and how her grandfather and grandmother raised the niece’s father and her uncle and aunt. To read the news articles about the book describing this family, and to hear the niece on television, it sounds as though that family was the epitome of dysfunction. It is reported there were many instances of demonic evil behavior displayed by the grandfather and father toward their progeny.
For most of Christian history, most Christians thought that the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis were an accurate historical account of a man named Adam and a woman named Eve living in a garden named Eden. Many Christians still believe that. Others say these stories are a mythological way of explaining the early origins of humanity, but are not to be understood as being literally true.
The story of Cain and his brother Abel is one of the earliest episodes in Genesis. It is, if you will, the unexplained explanation of a cultural tension which existed among the Hebrews from their earliest times as a people. Originally they were shepherds, and only later did they become farmers. That was the same progression for most ancient peoples. In the musical Oklahoma, there is a song called “The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends.” Well, for the Hebrews, the song would be “The Farmer and the Shepherd Should Be Friends.” But they weren’t.
In the story of Cain and Abel, we are told that the two brothers brought offerings to God. Cain brought the first produce from his crops, and Abel brought the first-born lambs from his flock. For reasons that are unexplained, God liked Abel’s offering, but He didn’t approve of Cain’s. When Cain realized this, apparently out of an evil burst of jealousy or remorse or rage, Cain killed his brother Abel. What are we to deduce from this story? Jealousy is inappropriate, but murder is always evil. The origin of evil is hypothetically if not actually within each of us. From this biblical passage we might logically deduce that human beings are the source of evil.
Over time that idea became psychologically and perhaps theologically unacceptable to many of the Israelites. If ever they did anything that was clearly evil, they wanted to blame their behavior on an external source. They found a handy example in the religion of the Babylonians and Persians, or as we know them now, the Iraqis and the Iranians. The demonic origin of evil is the Prince of Demons, they said. His name is Satan, which means “The Adversary.” Satan puts in far more appearances in the New Testament than in the Old Testament, however, and ever since Christians have paid more attention to him than do the Jews. But make no mistake about it; the devil is a very convenient fallen angel to blame for the fallen behavior of every miscreant sinner. Furthermore, we have been lead to believe that Satan is delighted with his position as the seducer of lost souls.
When I was a very young boy, my brothers and I used to listen to a radio show called The Shadow. If I recall correctly, it was at four o’clock on Sunday afternoons. The Shadow was a man named Lamar Cranston. He was like a ghost, I guess. He could watch people doing nasty deeds, but they couldn’t see him. At the end of each weekly program, after Lamar Cranston had nailed the bad guys for their misdeeds, the announcer would always end the show by asking, “What evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”
It was very encouraging to a six-year-old boy to realize that there was somebody out there who could overcome evil within half an hour. There was an older boy who lived at the end of our block, and he was a Really Mean Kid. I always waited for Lamont Cranston to come and give him a bloody nose or a black eye to straighten him out --- but he never did. Bummer.
Here we need to make an important observation about evil. By its very nature, evil implies intent. For evil truly to be evil, people need to intend evil to occur by means of something they deliberately do. When someone runs into your car, the collision is not evil, unless they intended to run into you, which almost never happens. If somebody gives you COVID-19, it was not intentional, and besides, you can’t know for certain who the unintentional infector was. When a hurricane comes, it is not evil, because hurricanes don’t have the capacity to possess intent. But when evil does occur, intent is always its initiating factor.
But what about Satan? Is there a devil? And if there is, is it he who causes people to do evil?
According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke (but not John), Jesus was tempted by the devil just before he began his public ministry. In Matthew and Luke, the long stories are almost verbatim the same, but in Mark it just says this: “The Sprit immediately drove (Jesus) out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him” (Mark 1:12-13).
What are we to make of this? In John there is no temptation, in Mark it only lasts for two verses, and in Matthew and Luke there are three specific ways by which Satan tempted Jesus. When Satan urged Jesus to turn stones into bread, he was asking him to use divine powers for a purely human purpose, namely, to satisfy his hunger. When Satan tempted Jesus to throw himself off the pinnacle of the temple, which was the southeast corner of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, it is about a hundred-foot drop into the valley below. Satan was presumably trying to lure Jesus into forcing God miraculously to save him. Incidentally, Satan quoted two verses from Psalm 91 to authenticate why it would be safe for Jesus to turn stones into bread or to jump off the temple wall. From that episode comes the old aphorism, “The devil can quote scripture for his own purposes.” But can he? Or does he? Does Satan even exist?
Without discussing this further, we note that the last temptation was to show Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, and to say that Jesus could rule over all of them, if only he would bow down and worship Satan. Each time Jesus answered the devil’s temptations by quoting a biblical verse in opposition to what Satan was urging him to do.
Does this mean that Satan is not really a malevolent entity at all, that there is no such being? Is our behavioral adversary nothing more than our own self-temptations to do things we know are evil, but we do them anyway?
Matthew’s introduction to the temptation episode is curious. It says, “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” (Mt. 4:1). Because the word “Spirit” is capitalized, we are to infer that Jesus’ temptation was part of a divine plan. God wanted Jesus to be tempted. Does that mean God tempts all of us in a similar manner? Surely not! Nor did He want Jesus tempted! We are tempted, and sometimes that means we actually do evil, but it isn’t God who tempts us. So then, what is the origin of evil?
St. Augustine of Hippo in North Africa lived at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth centuries CE. He was one of the most influential Christians who ever lived. His thinking has always had a profound effect on Christian theology.
James K.A. Smith teaches philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He wrote a book called On the Road with St. Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts. Prof. Smith adapted part of his book as an article called Evil we can’t explain: Augustine’s response to an abiding problem (The Christian Century, Oct. 23, 2019). In Augustine’s autobiography, called simply Confessions, the Early Church Father described several of the evil things he did in his wild and thoughtless youth. James Smith wrote, “For Augustine, the question turns inward. Not only are the atrocities that others commit inexplicable; there is a dark mystery to the evil that drives his own behavior. Evil is out there, other, and it is in here, all too close and yet unfathomable.” In the Confessions, Augustine wrote, “I became evil for no reason.” Or, we might note as Paul did in his letter to the Romans, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (7:19).
Thousands of German soldiers participated in sending millions of Jews and others to the extermination camps. Many white policemen through the years have mercilessly killed Black men they arrested. So-called “God-fearing Christians” cheat the poor out of their meager income; every day somewhere young bullies are beating up on smaller, weaker children; money managers knowingly bilk their clients out of money it took them years to acquire. How can this happen? Why does it happen? Who, if anyone, causes it to happen? Is it self-induced, induced by others, or is the devil the cause?
Whatever is the origin of evil (and there shall never be universal agreement on that), it is important to note that there is a difference between doing evil and being evil. Probably all of us have done evil things in our lives, as hard as it may be to admit that. Nevertheless, I am convinced that theologically we should never say that anyone, anyone, IS evil. The Bible is correct when it says that all human beings are created in the image of God. If that is true, no one is essentially or even tangentially evil. The Creator does not create anyone who in his birth is fundamentally skewed. It doesn’t happen. It can’t happen. It won’t happen. God won’t allow it.
And yet we all do bad things, some of which may even be classified as evil things. When we treat any fellow human as though that person is less than human, (a Black, an immigrant, a low-IQ child, an irritating female, a malevolent male), we do evil. When we see someone in desperate need, and like the priest and the Levite in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan we pass by, we do evil. It is not just sinful; it is evil. When we take advantage of a disabled person because she is disabled, it is evil. And we do these kinds of things more frequently than we would ever admit, or even want to think about.
Evil is a problem, a huge problem. But, as James Smith says, “God doesn’t abstractly solve [the] problem [of evil]; God condescends to inhabit and absorb the mess we’ve made of the world.” Then, quoting St. Augustine, Smith says God “‘has not abandoned humanity in its mortal condition.’”
Wherever or however it is that evil originates, it never entirely disappears. As Paul said, again in Romans, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” That is our mortal condition! We shall all die as imperfect beings. We cannot always measure up to the best we can be. Jesus may have done it, but we can’t do it. We are born good, and we are good, usually, but we do evil occasionally, infrequently, yet more than we think, because we are incapable of not doing it. It doesn’t make us evil, but it keeps us from being 100% good.
God alone is the answer to the problem of evil. He alone can absorb it into Himself, and the cross of Jesus of Nazareth is the best possible illustration of that truth. Humans obviously cannot solve the problem of evil, or long since we would have done it. We are the only creatures capable of doing evil, and we all engage in it. Fortunately, for most of us, it is on a fairly rare basis.
Therefore, because we cannot overcome evil by ourselves, God overcomes it on our behalf. The man Jesus is the human mirror image of the God Yahweh. The origin of evil is here to stay, but the power of God has already defeated it. We don’t deserve it, but whoever said that life is fair? Thank God it isn’t!