5th Sunday after Epiphany 6.2.11 Being good
Good versus evil. Why does God allow evil or suffering? Why do the good suffer?
Evil is a fallout from good. God is good; He creates things good, even the devil to start with.
At the highest level of good are those things that resemble God most closely. These are the creatures which are endowed with free will; which have the ability to obey God and to love Him (humans and angels).
Those creatures without free will obey God and reflect His glory but they do not know they are doing it. They cannot express love for God as a free act.
Whereas we and the angels have the ability either to go with or against Him.
If we decide to go with Him it can be at the level of obedience, doing what we have to do; or we can go further and give Him our full allegiance and trust, surrendering our wills to Him.
So we can marvel at a sunset but we could marvel even more at a person who has submitted graciously to God’s will. This is a higher thing.
We say Cyclone Yasi (recent cyclone in Australia) was destructive but we do not say it was ‘evil’. We know a cyclone has no will, no personality.
But if a person causes harm we do say he is evil (unless mentally impaired) because he is exercising his free will against the will of God.
Why does God permit evil then? Evil has to be possible if there is to be a freedom of choice. God wants some part of His creation to know what it is to be able to love. If we had no choice we would be unable to love. He must think it is worth it to risk our wrong choices for the sake of at least some of His creatures getting it right.
Thus evil is tolerated - for a time – until the Last Day, when the wheat and the tares will be separated.
What about brutal murders, rapes, tortures, famine, disasters? Is it worth having freedom if we are to have these things? But would you want to surrender your free will for the sake of removing wars etc?
There is a way that we could remove evil and yet retain our precious freedom, and that is simply that we decide to do good instead of evil; that we use our freedom for good.
This is what God wants us to discover, and why He has been patient with us all these years.
What if others do not decide to come with us? We may be good but others will persist in their evil choices.
Then we have the chance to be more good still, to go to the level of self-sacrifice for the sake of loving God, enduring the evil that others do and letting His mercy work through us to bring others to conversion.
This is what the saints did; what Our Lord Himself did in His humanity; giving His free will to the Father, the ultimate expression of love.
So we see a deeper level of God’s creative goodness – that He uses some of His creatures who exercise freedom in the right way, to call back those who have been using it wrongly.
At least some evildoers will be converted - which is better than destroying them.
We are inclined to dwell on how much we have to suffer in this life; to dwell on the negatives.
Yet we are very fortunate to have been created human. We could have been tadpoles, mosquitoes, or not created at all. Being human we have the chance to exercise free will for the glory of God and the improving of the state of the world.
This is a radically new way of looking at life. But if we take this path we will know great happiness even in this life.
So let us be good. Not just good in not obviously breaking laws but in this surrender of our wills to God, thus exercising our full humanity.
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