16th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Wis 12:13, 16-19
Second Reading: Rom 8:26-27
Gospel Reading: Mt 13:24-43
If God is “sovereign in strength” and if his “care is for all people,” why does evil exist?
“No quick answer will suffice,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but “only Christian faith as a whole.”
There are two kinds of evil: physical evil, which is part of God’s loving plan, and moral evil, for which God is not responsible, even indirectly.
God made us for love, and love, by its nature, has to be free. Accordingly, he made us free to choose whether to love or not to love.
New Age teaches that we achieve unity and abolish opposition by “fusion with the whole,” the melting “of individuals into the cosmic self.” However, this “fusion” would abolish love.
Where there is love, there has to be another distinct person. A “Christian searches for unity in the capacity and freedom of the other to say yes or no to the gift of love.” Their unity is communion – “union with others” – not fusion.
Therefore, as a logical consequence, love involves suffering.
To see this, notice that for us to enter into communion, we must inhabit the same material world and each know how to manipulate it. For example, for me to talk to you, we must both know how to make sound waves in the air between us.
Therefore, the material world must have a fixed nature; it cannot vary with my every whim without destroying your free will. Accordingly, it cannot always conform equally to the wishes of us both. For example, if you sit where you want, I cannot necessarily sit where I want.
Small or great, such evils are unavoidable. If love is to exist, they must be suffered. In fact, suffering them is the only way to express love. “We must think of love as suffering,” Pope Benedict said frankly.
Not surprisingly, then, there is physical evil in the world God gives us to enter into communion with him and with one another. Creation “did not spring forth complete from the hands of the Creator,” the Catechism notes. “With infinite wisdom and goodness, God freely willed to create a world in a state of journeying toward its ultimate perfection.”
“In God’s plan, this process of becoming” involves “both constructive and destructive forces of nature.” Until creation reaches its perfection, “physical evil” will exist in it alongside “physical good.”
Through physical evil, God teaches us how to love. In love, “I cannot simply remain myself; I always have to lose myself,” to have “my rough edges taken off,” to let myself be “hurt,” Pope Benedict said.
In fact, the love to which God calls us – the love among the Persons of the Trinity –means more than just losing myself: it means giving myself, making “that total gift of self that the three divine Persons make to one another.”
Paradoxically, that is how we find ourselves. On earth, it entails a struggle, but in heaven, we will make it with a delight that is prefigured, even now, in lovers’ rapturous mutual self-surrender.
“Physical evil,” then, exists in the world by God’s “wisdom and goodness.” However, “moral evil, incommensurably more harmful,” is present by the “free choice” of “angels and men” who say no to love.
Nevertheless, God uses even moral evil to teach us how to love. In fact, he made “the greatest moral evil ever committed – the rejection and murder of his only Son” – the ultimate expression of his own love.
“We firmly believe that God is master of the world and of its history.” We know that he brings good from the consequences of evil, even moral evil, caused by his creatures.
However, his ways are often obscure. Only at the end, when our partial knowledge ceases and we see him face to face, will we know fully how He has guided creation to its sabbath rest, “even through the dramas of evil and sin.”
Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. However, the course will remain available, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course, until next September. At that time, he will teach it again, with new insights, both online and in person, on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre (4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and on Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver.
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