Faces of Evil
4/13/03
Rev. Mary Sue Evers
Scripture references:
Judas: Matthew 26:47-50
Pilate: Matthew 27:15-23, 24-26
Peter: Matthew 26:31-35, 69-75
Trial: Matthew 26: 57-68

I know it may feel like this should be an upbeat, celebrative sermon.
We started the service with a parade;
we received our One Great Hour of Sharing offerings;
we even welcomed new members.

But Palm Sunday is, after all, a day of contrasts.
The crowds we read of who joyously welcomed Jesus
will turn on him and insist on his execution within the week.

Now I know that we have the Maundy Thursday service examine the dark side of this coming week, and a Good Friday healing service to boot.

But let’s face it - attendance is often small at those services;
and if we were merely to focus on the celebrative aspect of Palm Sunday
and then go straight to Easter Sunday, we’d be missing a great deal in between.

To me, of late, one of the most interesting aspects of that week in between is how quickly the crowds turned against Jesus;
just what forces of government, religion, popular opinion,
failure of his own followers, merged to culminate in Jesus’ death
within five days of this glorious parade.

I think it’s a good time to take a fresh look at the faces of evil.

It has troubled me, all of this talk the past year and a half about evil;
talk of ”evil-doers,” and especially, “the axis of evil.”

The axis of evil particularly bothers me, as it seems to convey the idea that all of the evil is on that side of the axis, and all of the good is this side.

It’s a popular notion, this dualism of us and them, good and evil. Just look at the popularity of movies like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Indian Jones, and Star Wars. They’re fun movies, telling simple stories with a clear-cut line between good and evil. And of course, we are always on the good side fighting the evil-doers, yes?

Maybe we like the escapism of these movies, because we know that the world of good and evil is not so simple. I know where the axis of evil runs. It runs right through me, and, I would guess, through each one of us. As Paul said in his letter to the Romans, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate….I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.”

Now, I’m not saying that each of us contains within our souls a Stalin or a Saddam Hussein.

But the Bible does speak of a kind of gradualism of evil:

the Greek word for evil doesn’t mean stark raving unutterably horrific; but rather something that brings sorrow, distress, calamity;
that arises from bad character or conduct.

I looked at uses of the word evil in the Bible, esp. in Matthew,
where it shows up eighteen different times,
and found that evil is normally described as a direction one goes,
an inclination of the heart,
a thing one does and a set of choices one makes,
rather than an absolute way of being in the world.

The NT describes evil not so much as an absolute state
but as a process and a direction - what evil does.

And, most importantly, the New Testament describes evil not so much as something out there, involving other people,
as it does something infecting all of us, to some degree.

Jesus called his listeners evil, on occasion:
” If you then being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your father in heaven give good things to them that ask?”
Mt 7:11

Evil is so much easier to think about in black and white, us v. them terms.
* They are evil, we are good.
* For that matter, you are evil, I am good.

When in fact evil infects all of us to some degree.
One of our own historical documents, the Heidelburg Catechism, says: “ We are altogether unable to do good and prone to do evil, unless we are born anew through the Spirit of God.”

It’s why we ask in the Lord’s Prayer:
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil
(not them, but us)

And yes, a person can eventually be taken over by evil and become
mostly or even entirely evil.
As can a group;
a corporation;
a people, a nation.

All of which is amply represented by characters in the story of Jesus’ last week . . . . .

Let’s look first at the obvious character - Judas.

We don’t know a lot about Judas,
except that Jesus and the other disciples trusted him a lot.
He was their treasurer, after all.
At the last supper he was sitting next to Jesus when Jesus said that he would be betrayed by the one “who dips his hand into the bowl with me.” To share a bowl with Jesus meant that he was sitting at a position of honor - and trust.

Why did Judas betray Jesus?
Was he overtaken by the devil for no particular reason on his own part?
Did he sell out for the money?
Was he disappointed in Jesus?

We do have some clues:
He is referred to as Judas Iscariot, and scholars have speculated that the word Iscariot came from the word Sicarii.
The Sicariis were bands of revolutionary zealots who employed assassination as a tool in their attempts to overthrow the Romans.
The Sicarii’s agenda for a messiah to overthrow the occupying powers
would not be met by Jesus’ agenda.

The face of evil that Judas represents might well be the one
that puts abstractions and ideologies above all else, even God.

A short list would include the isms of
communism, zionism, materialism . . .
radical fundamentalism of all stripes,
and we should add absolute liberalism & conservatism of all stripes,
and I suppose you could even throw in environmentalism;
socialism, national security, free enterprise, religion;
any of which when taken to an absolute
and put before and above God can turn evil.

Idealism, for instance.

The belief that we can build a perfect world if we just destroy those evil people who block our noble efforts -
that’s the belief that undergirded the work of Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and now, apparently, Osama Bin Laden.

I’m confident that the terrorists who flew the planes into the WTC
and the Pentagon believed they were on a mission for God
so vital that they were willing to die for it,
in order to defeat their enemies and help bring about
their version of a perfect world --

and horribly, ironically,
they participated in unspeakable evil.

Judas may have thought he was forcing Jesus’ hand,
bringing on a desperately-needed revolution to overthrow the Romans.

Only to come to awareness that he had committed
an act so evil he couldn’t continue to live with himself.

That’s one face of evil.

Here’s another, represented by Pilate.
Let’s call it
”pragmatic evil”
”don’t blame me”
”Bloods not on my hands”
“I’m just a cog in the machine/I’m just following orders”

In our world, nearly impossible to avoid participating in
pragmatic evil.

As carefully as our armed forces focus on military targets,
we know our missiles have a 90% accuracy level, at best.
Civilians will be maimed for life, innocent people will die.
And our tax dollars fund that.

We participate in pragmatic evil.

When we go shopping, we make choices that participate in pragmatic evil. Have you purchased clothing lately? Where was it made? Here? Canada? In a sweatshop? How do you know?

I enter into a moral equation every time I buy coffee, or gasoline, or eggs.
I like to buy eggs from chickens that aren’t being raised in small cages –
but then, I’m not buying eggs for a large family and I have the luxury to make that choice.

It seems such a small example (unless you’re the chicken) - but I know that by living and moving in the world, I participate in a certain level of pragmatic evil.

Let’s take a look at a third kind of evil, one I call Pre-emptive evil; the evil that arises from fear.

Let’s look at Peter. Peter, the devoted disciple, who swore he would never forsake Jesus, who by the time the night had passed had betrayed him three times out of fear for his own skin.

”He who does evil is typically convinced that evil is about to
happen to him.”
Some would say that the Nazi actions in WWII sprung from a fear that others were out to destroy their economy and control their homeland;

Think back to our own actions in interning US citizens of Japanese descent
during the same war; out of fear that they would turn on us;

I think about the killings at Kent State, spring from the National Guardsmen’s fear that the students were going to harm them;

all of them evils committed to forestall other people’s evil intentions.

Two more faces of evil remain -
Let’s look at those crowds, praising Jesus one day, and by the end of the week calling for his execution.

Had everyone read the trial proceedings, or were people going along with the popular emotion?

Adolf Eichman famously said that he was just doing his
job while exterminating human beings during WWII.
Eichmann was a bright man, a man possessing judgment, reason, and will;
but he gave them all up,
deferring that judgment, reason and will to other people.

There’s an old cabaret joke that comes out of early 1930’s Germany:
”Show me one Nazi.”
”What do you mean? Here is a room full of Nazis.”
”Yes, but show me ONE Nazi.”

How well I know this. How well I remember my own participation in the great Main Street egg throwing incident from Halloween of 1972;
not because I wanted to throw rotten eggs at passing cars but because I wanted to fit in and to fit in it seemed necessary to go along with the crowd.

I hope I would have comported myself better in Jerusalem of AD 30, but who knows how one will stand when the popular culture begins moving?

Finally, maybe most importantly,
let’s look at the evil that doesn’t recognize itself.

The hidden evil of the Pharisees, the Saducees, and the Sanhedrin.

Are you familiar with the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his theory of the shadow side of our souls? The best explanation of it that I’ve heard is by the poet Robert Bly, who says that the shadow is “the long bag that we drag behind us’ containing all the dark parts of ourselves that we would like to keep secret.”

“The shadow may include our anger, selfishness, jealousy, pride, insecurity, wildness, or destructiveness.

“Although these qualities are an integral part of us, we want to hide them or deny them. Eventually, they get out of the bag when we project them onto others - husband, wife, child, friend, neighbor, coworker, or another race or culture.”

This “long bag that we drag behind us” is what we often call evil. Instead of becoming aware of those demons we carry around in our bag and laying claim to them, our tendency is to sling the bag at others, demonizing our enemies and blaming our problems on something outside of ourselves. Individuals drag their own bags behind us, as do religions, and nations.

Nations drag their own bags behind them as do religions and individuals

Those who claim they have no shadow, no bag, no evil – watch out.
In hiding from their own evil, esp. hiding it from themselves, and
pretending to be completely good, they become, inadvertently,
some of the most destructive people you will encounter.

And where will you encounter them?
In his book People of the Lie Scott Peck says you will find them in all the logical places where people might pretend to be something better and other than they are: churches and holy places;
in professions where people are deemed to be good –
police officers, judges, ministers.

The solution?

Face the shadow - allows transformation of evil to good
acknowledge that we are all in some way complicit in evil,

resist the temptation to combat evil with further evil,
but overcome evil with love;

especially within ourselves.

As the Russian novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Our spiritual task is to confront the evil that lives within us. “The only devils in the world,” said Mahatma Gandhi, “are those running around in our hearts.”

I believe that once we have recognized that truth, once we have faced the evil within ourselves, then we can take on the task of wrestling with the evil in our world, whether it is the evil of poverty, injustice, war or terrorism.

And I believe our task is to overcome evil both within ourselves and out in the world, but to resist it not out of hated but out of love -- love for ourselves, for each other and for God.

There’s more than one face of evil in this world.
That’s one of the lessons of Palm Sunday and Holy Week.

and there’s more than one axis of evil in this world.
It’s not only out there, but it runs through the center of each and every one of us to some degree.

John begins his gospel pointing out that the light has come into the world, but people have loved the darkness rather than the light.

The truth is,the more self-aware we become about our dark tendencies within, the more we can search for and find the point of freedom within us, and empowered by the spirit of God, we can summon up the power of light and love within us and move our lives & our world, more fully in the direction of good rather than evil.

That is our calling and our challenge.

Amen.

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