Why Are We Intrigued by Evil?

Hilton Head Island, SC – October 9, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 53; Romans 3:5-18
A Sermon by John M. Miller

 

Text – As it is written” None is righteous, no. not one; no one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have done wrong; no one does good, not even one.” – Romans 3:10-12 (RSV)

 

Halloween is coming. There are a host of horrible Halloween movies, all of them depicting evil in the grizzliest forms imaginable. I have never seen any of them, but every year I see commercials on television for them. From the commercials, it is evident these movies are not about toddlers and other little children going trick-or-treating, while their mothers stand out on the sidewalk, waiting for their cherubs to collect their candy from amused householders. Instead, they apparently are about crazed killers seeking to snuff out the life of unsuspecting maidens or innocent youngsters.

 

Why is there such a market for such movies, that it becomes sufficiently lucrative to produce new ones every year? Why were Dostoevsky or Agatha Christie or Earl Stanley Gardner such successful writers? Why were Boris Karloff or Peter Lorre or George Raft such popular actors? It was because they elevated evil to an art form. They appealed to a dark chamber in every human heart, a place where, as the introduction of every episode on the radio show of seventy-five years ago, The Shadow, asked, “What evil lurks in the hearts of men?” In case we ever doubted that it did, we were always reminded that, “The Shadow knows,” and that was always followed by maniacal laughter.

 

Well, the Bible also has more than its share of evil. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, Cain kills his brother Abel, the citizens of Babel build their confounded and confounding tower, David has an affair with Bathsheba and then orders her husband Uriah the Hittite to be murdered, and Judas betrays Jesus, selling him out to the Romans for thirty pieces of sordid silver.

 

Then there was Paul. Paul was a fanatical enemy of the first Christians, doing everything he could to nip their nascent religious movement in the bud. On the road to Damascus he met the risen Christ, and suddenly the evil of his actions swallowed him up in a tornadic deluge of guilt. He who had been the Super-Hater of Christianity almost overnight turned into its most powerful salesman. When one’s own evil is personally recognized in all its horrendous chaos, it can transform ordinary people into bastions of probity and propriety.

 

That’s what happened to Paul. He became the spokesman for what evolved into the most time-tested orthodox theology of the Christian religion. His letter to the Romans is the clearest and most compelling exposition of that theology. He began his letter by describing how sin and evil had gripped the hearts of many people, so much so that they seemed incapable of breaking the bonds that made them captives to evil. In his first chapter, he wrote, “They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful” (1:28-30). And so on, and so on. They, whoever specifically Paul thought they were, were like the characters in the Halloween movies or in Dostoevsky or Agatha Christie or like the parts played by Karloff, Lorre, and Raft.

 

In Stockton and Oakland, California, somebody has been on a serial-murder spree. He reminds us of Jack the Ripper, Richard Speck, Ted Bundy, and the Son of Sam. Are all such killers insane? Almost certainly not. Are their acts evil? Absolutely. Does that mean they are evil? You have your answer to that question, and I have mine. But that is not the issue addressed by this sermon. Our question is this: Why are we intrigued by evil?

 

Here are the names of two small groups of historical figures. First we have St. Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, Marie and Peter Curie, Clara Barton, Albert Schweitzer, and Mother Theresa. Next we have Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Muammar Khadafi, and Saddam Hussein. The first group are known for having done good, and the second for engaging in indescribable evil. About whom do we remember more: the first group or the second?

 

The answer, of course, is the second. History recalls terrible misdeeds more than wonderful deeds. But the question, still, is this: Why? Who do we remember evil much more completely than we remember good?

 

The superscriptions at the beginning of each of the Psalms suggests that David wrote nearly half of them. He probably didn’t, but if he didn’t, no one knows who did. Anyway, it is interesting that Psalm 14 says almost exactly what Psalm 53 says, and both Psalms are claimed to have been composed by David. If so, I find comfort in that. The longer I preach, the more I think I have said many things I have said before in almost exactly the same words. When I finished writing and editing this sermon, certain thoughts seemed repetitious to other sermons, but I can’t remember for sure, and I didn’t want to take the necessary time to check it out.

 

Whoever wrote Psalms 14 and 53, he was in a foul mood concerning people in general. “They have all fallen away; they are all alike depraved; there is none that does good, no, not one” (53:3). That’s a pretty bleak view of the human race. “They are all alike depraved” --- All? Depraved? John Calvin said that humanity is totally depraved. It seems to me it is almost totally depraved to say that everybody is totally depraved. Calvin was a brilliant man, and an outstanding theologian, but both he and the writer of Psalms 14 and 53 went too far in saying what they said about the purportedly fallen nature of people. And then Paul had the gall to repeat it.

 

In Rudyard Kipling’s poem called Tommy, the protagonist is a common soldier in the British army who gets tossed out of a pub precisely because he is a common soldier, and he feels diminished by his rough treatment. He says, “We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,/ But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you.” Or, as three nuns sing about their novice sister, Maria, in The Sound of Music, “’She’s a devil,’ ‘She’s an angel,’ ‘She’s a girl.’” A small percentage of people do terribly evil things, and continuously do those things, but most folks behave themselves moderately well, including Tommy and Maria. I might be a bit depraved, but you aren’t. I know you, and you are not a Hitler or a Bundy. No one is perfect, but few if any are totally evil, and it may be an example of evil to say that anyone is totally depraved or evil.

 

This sermon was prompted by re-reading an ancient book called The Jewish War. It was written by a man named Flavius Josephus. Josephus was a Jewish general at the time the Roman army came and fought a four-year war against the Jews, from 68 to 72 CE. In the midst of the war the Romans besieged Jerusalem, surrounding it until the Jewish inhabitants finally surrendered. Before that happened, however, Josephus defected to the Romans.

 

His history of the war is therefore suspect at numerous points. It would be like Benedict Arnold writing a history of the American Revolution after he had gone over to the British side. Traitors never give an accurate description of wars. Josephus first magnified truth on behalf of the Jews, and later he did it for the Romans. He is obviously self-serving in what he writes, both about events occurring around him and what words he publicly spoke during those events. His descriptions of what the Romans did to the Jews and what the Jews did to themselves during the siege are horrendous. Romans killed Jews with impunity, and Jewish parents snatched food from their children in their own unrelenting hunger. If what Josephus wrote was even close to accurate, the evil committed by both sides against the other side was cruel to the greatest possible degree. No one seemed to show compassion to anyone as the devastation dug itself deeper into a hopeless situation.

 

When human beings lose every shred of civility and morality, their capacity to engage in evil is without bounds. When that depravity is acknowledged, those who observe it from afar, such as ourselves, are nonetheless fascinated by the breadth and depth of the evil that is enacted.

 

Again, why? Why are we so intrigued by monstrous behavior? There are at least four explanations for this phenomenon, and perhaps more.

 

First, evil titillates us. The dictionary defines that word as meaning “to excite pleasurably, to arouse by stimulation.” We are not titillated by watching or studying ordinary events, nor by attempting to read books that are as dull as dishwater, or by trying to converse with people who seem as mentally slow as sloths or snails. But present us with instances of evil, and we perk up as though by electric shock. We try never to engage in evil ourselves, but if others do, we are drawn to their exploits like flies to honey. We might admit we occasionally or often fail to do the good, and we might admit what we do is moderately sinful, but we tell ourselves we are not evil, nor do we act with evil intent.

 

The National Enquirer is found in check-out counters in grocery stores or in Walmart or Target. In places like Hilton Head Island, where there are not enough employees in any local businesses, you might be waiting to be checked out for fifteen or twenty minutes. Therefore you pick up a copy to see what naughtiness is currently being stoked by which celebrities. If you get to a juicy story of which you have read only three paragraphs, and you conclude you must buy The Enquirer to find out what happens, you buy it, which is why The Enquirer is strategically located in those racks in the check-out lines.

 

Second, in our best moments we want to see that good triumphs over evil. As much as evidence of evil may excite us, we want to be assured that in the end the evil are punished and the good are rewarded. Hitler committed suicide, Khadafi was captured and killed by soldiers who were trying to overthrow him, and Saddam was hanged. Stalin and Mao died as relatively old men in bed, but we like to think they died in misery, so as to receive their just deserts.

 

Good does not always succeed in every instance, and evil does not always fail. There used to be an aphorism that was often repeated: “Every day in every way we’re getting better and better.” You don’t hear that much anymore, perhaps because it doesn’t ring so true anymore. Over the long haul, though, through the passage of time, good usually prevails, and evil usually is defeated. Part of our fascination with evil is that we want to see it crushed. If we wait long enough, and if we live long enough, it may happen, and that gives us hope.

 

Third, people of faith want to believe that by the providence of God, evil will not be allowed ultimately to triumph. We believe that God will prevent it, or at least some of us believe that. God will defeat evil, but He will do it only through us. He won’t do it Himself directly, because that isn’t how God works. We are the evidence of God in the world. If there is evil, it is up to us to defeat it.

 

World War II was a terrible war. More people were killed in it, by far, than in any other war in history. Nonetheless, tragically, it was a war that had to be fought. The Axis powers were founded on evil, and they engaged in unprecedented evil. They had to be stopped, and they were stopped, but at a huge cost in lives lost and in nations and property destroyed. God’s “terrible swift sword” was not swung by God, but rather by Allied troops. Sometimes there is no option in overcoming evil without resorting to horrendous violence. Soldiers and police become society’s arbiters of justice when injustice is rampant. That is an illustration both of fallen humanity and of brave, resourceful, resilient humanity.     

 

Fourth, we long for a means to thwart evil whenever and wherever it enters the world. The twelfth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians describes what he called “spiritual gifts.” They also are called charismatic gifts. Among them, said Paul, are utterances of wisdom, knowledge, and faith. In addition, certain people have the gifts of healing, or working miracles, or prophecy, or speaking in or interpreting what Paul called “tongues.” Paul goes on to explain in more detail what all of these terms mean. He says that all charismatic gifts are given to us by God.

 

At the end of this long explanation, and in the last verse of Chapter 12, Paul wrote, “And I will show you a more excellent way” (12:21). Then he launches into the most remembered words he ever wrote. It is I Corinthians 13, and it is often called “The Hymn to Love,” or in Greek, “The Hymn to Agape,” love of all humanity, the angelic and the fallen, the good and the evil, the noble and the ignoble. “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal…. So faith, hope, and love abide, these three: but the greatest of these is love” (I Cor. 1 & 3). Keep in mind that this is the same man who quoted Psalms 14 and 53, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside, together they have gone wrong” (Romans 3:10-12).

 

Evil intrigues us, but evil needs to be defeated. The best way to do that, God’s way, is to love those who engage in evil. That is extremely difficult, but it is far better to thwart evil by love than by force. “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,” said Jesus (Mt. 5:44).  Too often force may be the only solution, but if it is at all possible, love is the more excellent way.

 

Being a Christian is no bed of roses. But then, God never promised us a rose garden, did He?