There’s no quick answer to the question of evil

Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year B
First Reading: 2 Chr 36:14-17a, 19-23
Second Reading: Eph 2:4-10
Gospel Reading: Jn 3:14-21 

This Sunday’s First Reading relates how the Israelites despised God’s words. Accordingly, he “brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans,” who sacked Jerusalem and “took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped from the sword.”

In contrast, the Second Reading says that God, “out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.” Similarly, the Gospel Reading says that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,” not “to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

Which is the true picture of God: retribution and punishment, or mercy and forgiveness? Does evil represent a defeat of God’s goodness, even if only temporary?

Satan, the author of evil in the world, is in no sense the equal of God, the author of good. That is the heresy of dualism. The truth is that God, who is all-good, created everything – including Satan.

However, a question remains: If God is all-powerful and all-loving, why does any evil exist in his creation?

There is no quick answer, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but only the “Christian faith as a whole.”

God created angels and humans good, but he allowed them to choose whether to co-operate with him or to reject him. As we know, Satan and other angels chose to rebel. Now they “roam the world, seeking the ruin of souls.”

However, our rejection of God’s plan never defeats it, even in the slightest. God remains “the sovereign master of his plan,” says the Catechism. He “disposes his works according to his will,” for nothing is impossible for him: he is “the Lord of the universe, whose order he established” and which is “wholly subject to him and at his disposal.” He is “master of history, governing hearts and events in keeping with his will;” the whole of the Bible affirms his “absolute sovereignty over the course of events.”

Moreover, God the Creator “is at work in all the actions” of those he has created, the Catechism says. The language of the First Reading—that it was God who brought up the king of the Chaldeans against the Israelites – is not just a “primitive mode of speech,” but rather “a profound way of recalling God’s primacy and absolute lordship over history and the world.”

God is not only all-powerful but also all-loving, so he “protects and governs” everything he has made, the Catechism says. He can see all things, even “those things which” – from our point of view – “are yet to come into existence” through the free action of angels or humans.

“God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil,” the Catechism asserts. However, he permits it because “he respects the freedom” he has given us, and because, “mysteriously,” he “knows how to derive good from it.” In fact, he would “never allow any evil whatsoever to exist” in his creation “if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself.”

It is simplistic, therefore, to expect that God, in his love, will permit only what seems good to us. No; he will also permit what seems bad to us, drawing from it even greater good. In fact, “from the greatest moral evil ever committed” –  the rejection and murder of his Son – he drew “the greatest of goods: the glorification of Christ and our redemption.”

Nevertheless, the Catechism admits, the ways of God’s providence are often unknown to us. Only at the end, when our partial knowledge ceases, when we see God face to face, will we fully know “the ways by which – even through the dramas of evil and sin – God has guided his creation to that definitive sabbath rest” for which he created it.

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course 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 Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. The title of the presentation next week is Sin and Forgiveness. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.

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