16th Sunday A 19 July 2026 Sermon

16 Sunday  A      19 July 2026      God and evil

One of the greatest difficulties people have believing in God is that there is so much evil in the world.

 The argument runs: If God is all-loving then He should not allow His children to undergo such suffering as they do.

And if He is all-powerful He should have no trouble eliminating all the evil.

The fact that evil remains must mean that God lacks either love or power, and therefore is not worthy of our trust or belief.

Since we do believe in a loving, all-powerful God how can we understand that He allows evil to remain in the world.

Today’s parable sheds much light on this. The darnel is allowed to remain in the crop until the final harvest. This translates as: Evildoers are allowed to remain in the world until finally removed at the last judgment.

Why does God do this? a) to give evildoers time to repent, so that they become doers of good instead. To bring people to repentance and new life is always one of God’s major concerns. As He tells us through the prophet Ezekiel: I take no pleasure in the death of a wicked man…. He wants the wicked to become good, to discover the goodness for which God created him.

 b) The process needs time. We all commit sins, so if God eliminated sinners, when would He do it? If at the first sin, we would all be finished. If not at the first fall, then when? Only God can answer how much time is enough, but we should be grateful we had enough time to get where we are now, and maybe we need still more to get ourselves right.

God gives a certain ‘tolerance’ to His creation. He offers mercy so that anything which is presently out of order can be set right.

He does not tolerate evil as such. He is not (as some think) easygoing, as though He could not care less what we do. He cares very much what we do, but is also merciful, giving us time to learn from our mistakes and get things right.

So we have the world as it is, with lots of things going wrong, lots of evil being committed, and apparent inaction from God. Is He asleep? Has He gone somewhere? No, He is just giving us time.

 And we have a part to play in all this. Firstly, to make sure we have our lives in order with God.

 Secondly, to believe in the possibility of conversion for evildoers. Some people seem so hard, so far gone that they could never change. But grace works miracles and miracles happen every day. We must believe in the power of God to change hearts. This will inspire us to work as apostles of His mercy.

Thirdly, we must take this as far as being willing to suffer in union with Christ on the Cross, for the continued conversion of others. Jesus went through His agony just so that undeserving, unlikely types would find life, and so they did.

This process is still going on. Once we know the benefits of salvation we are willing to go further to help others know the same thing. The joy of forgiveness, of having life restored moves us to heroic levels.

We take the same attitude to evildoers as God does; we love them; we want them to ‘get better’, like recovering from an illness.

Also like God, we do not tolerate evil per se; in fact we hate it. We are all for the destruction of evil, but not destruction of evildoers.

We want them to stay alive, and discover the new life of grace.

It is likely that many of us here have had a significant conversion. We cannot begrudge the same privilege to others.