The problem of evil

The first and almost the last time I watched a horror movie was at a summer camp on Mobile Bay in Alabama. I think I was eleven years old. This was back in the days when responsible adults thought that just a little bit of trauma helped children build character. A bit screen was set up outdoors. It was dark out and we were surrounded by woods. I’m not sure which movie they played because I closed my eyes during the opening credits and didn’t open them again until it was over. The sound effects were bad enough.

I’m still not a fan of horror movies, but I do love adventure movies that pit good against evil, even if they also include scary bits. Yesterday afternoon I went to see a theater re-broadcast of the first Lord of the Rings movie (the extended edition, of course). Flawed heroes who persevere against terrible odds and somehow hold on to hope through it all. That’s my kind of story.

And I’m hardly alone. Stories of good versus evil make for some of the most popular films, books, and TV shows. Whether the main character is a superhero, or a sheriff in the Old West, or a Jedi knight, the basic formula is the same. The stakes are high, threats loom on all sides, and the good guys win in the end.

Stories like this focus on the heroes, but of course you can’t have a hero without a villain. And that fact raises one of the great questions of life and of theology: Why do bad things happen? Why is there evil in the world? Why do people hurt one another?

Of course, in the real world, it’s not so easy to tell the good guys and the bad guys apart. Or, more accurately, we’re all capable of filling both roles. Aside from a few psychopaths, most people try to do the right thing. The evil we do, the pain that we cause, usually stems from fear or blindness or jealousy, or sometimes from an ideology that prevents us from seeing the people we hurt as fully human.

But still we see evil as a force in the world, hurting, corrupting, dividing. Still we ask, why does life have to be so hard?

We heard a bit this morning of the story of the Garden of Eden.

A quick aside about genres in the Bible: We publish the Bible as a single book, but it’s more accurate to call it a library, a library with many genres: history, law, poetry, parable, metaphor, and myth, just to name a few. People get tied up in knots about whether the book of Genesis is historical or not, but that’s a question its writer would never have asked, and we can take it seriously without asking or answering that question ourselves.

The story of Eden takes the form of a parable or a fable. There’s a man and a woman and a talking snake and a mysterious tree and a walled garden in which God walks. We call the man Adam, but that word just means “man” (or, more precisely, “earthling” – the one made from the earth). And Eve is merely “the woman” until a few verses after the ones we read today. We’ve come to think of the tree as an apple tree, but the Bible calls it the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

God tells the two first humans not to eat the tree’s fruit. But the serpent promises the woman that if she eats the forbidden fruit she will “be like God, knowing good and evil.” “The woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise.” And so she ate.

The woman often gets the blame for all the evil in the world, but that’s not quite fair. The man was there too, heard all the warnings, and he also chose to eat.

When those first humans ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they did gain wisdom, just as the serpent promised. Wisdom and shame. They knew that they were naked. And they learned that their world would now be a place of suffering, of hard work, of pain, and of death. A world much like the world we all know—barred from paradise by an angel with a flaming sword.

The question of why evil persists has always been one of the hardest questions to answer. I can’t give you a better answer than the book of Genesis does.

Here’s the good news. I do know that the horror movies get it wrong and the adventure movies get it right. Life is hard, evil exists, but good wins out in the end.

If you watch too many horror movies, you could easily come to see the universe as one giant battle of good versus evil, God versus Satan, evenly matched adversaries fighting for control of territory and of human souls.

But that’s never been the teaching of the Church. Most theologians in history have taught that while demons might be real, evil isn’t, really. God made all that is and God’s creation is good. Evil isn’t a thing in itself. It’s simply the absence of good, a lack. We experience it as real because it’s somehow entangled with free will and human sin, but it can’t win in the end. God’s love for us is greater still.

That’s the message of Jesus. That’s the message of the cross.

As St. Paul puts it, “do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”

Christ is still risen. Death is still defeated. And there is always and always will be hope.