More easily than we think, our failure to respect and fear, love and trust in God above all things, can eat away at our peace, our joy, our life itself.
Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann had organized and then supervised the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem” in Adolf Hitler’s “thousand-year empire” that lasted twelve years. His truly monstrous deeds resulted, Arendt discovered as he testified, not from raging malevolence, but from a character hell-bent on doing others harm. He could manage the dying of millions because he gradually desensitized himself to the fact that he was dealing with people much like himself. He lost respect for other human creatures of God. This led to an unthinking contempt for human life and the worth of our fellow human creatures.
It can happen to us as well. Little by little, small, banal, tawdry departures from God’s way of serving Him in respect and love for our fellow human creatures and the rest of creation can dull our sensitivities to evil. More easily than we think, our failure to respect and fear, love and trust in Him above all things, can eat away at our peace, our joy, our life itself. When our Lord is no longer really Lord, we construct walls of self-defense which disregard the fact that the people around us are also God’s creatures. We refuse to see them as invitations from our Creator to exercise His kind of love on their behalf. Evil’s heads may be small as they raise themselves in our lives, but they all too easily swell. The swelling blinds us to recognizing others, especially if they differ from us in one way or another, as creatures fashioned by our God and woven into the community of all human beings, of which He made us also a part. We slowly stop listening to our Lord’s estimate of our neighbor and try to purchase some protection or prosperity for ourselves at their expense, at the cost of their peace and joy.
Little by little, small, banal, tawdry departures from God’s way of serving Him in respect and love for our fellow human creatures and the rest of creation can dull our sensitivities to evil.Evil takes on many forms. The Devil has imagination which seems limitless. But God’s prophets, evangelists, and apostles point out clearly that evil is an intrusion into the life God created for His human creatures. Often, new forms of evil require some getting used to. A daring sneak at something that tempts me may help break the ice. Just stumbling into doing something wrong by mistake may break down the barriers. Sins can be born out of an attempt to be zealous for good or the desire to protect ourselves. We lay claim to some selfish trick to shield or shelter ourselves or our loved ones, and quickly the selfish trick lays claim to us. “I had to in order to feel safe,” becomes the preamble to a new system of living; apart from God, relying on self or some other creation of His for our security and safety. Evil creates its own system of rationality which provides justification for the little disruptions it brings to others’ lives, or even to our own. We find evils bring us benefits of various kinds, benefits that only hurt as we try them on, advantages purchased from others at their expense. We say, “It cannot happen here,” and slowly or suddenly, we find we have made peace with behavior we once knew offended God because it hurt one or more of His human creatures.
There is but one antidote for creeping evil, for possessing indifference, or consuming malice in our lives. The antidote, that cure for treating others as we would never want to be treated ourselves, is called Jesus. Jesus confronts evil with His own obedience to the Father’s commission to take our evils into Himself, suffer our punishment, and then lose our evils in His tomb. When He came out of that sin-hole that He made His tomb to be, He brought life with Him. That life offers the solution to the threats of this world in Him. Jesus is the solution. He has freed us from needing to exploit and destroy other people so we could find a false peace, a fake pleasure.
Luther described it in his Galatians commentary of 1535: God the Father tells His only begotten Son, “Go and be Peter the denier; Paul the persecutor, blasphemer, and assaulter; David the adulterer; the sinner who ate the apple in Paradise; the thief on the cross... the one who has committed the sins of all people... See to it that you pay and make satisfaction for these sins.” Jesus had to die because He was bearing the sins of the whole human race, “not in the sense that He has committed them, but in the sense that He took these sins, committed by us, upon His own body, in order to make satisfaction for them with His own blood” (Luther’s Works 26: 280, 277). Jesus was free from evil but bore it fully, until it had done its worst and killed Him. But He had the last laugh. He exhausted the power of the Evil One in the magnificent duel, as Luther called it, which took place over three days of suspense some two thousand years ago.
We are no Davids against the Goliath who is Satan himself. We sometimes are lured into the Devil’s concentration camp, trying to eek out an existence with one little compromise of our own integrity after another just to survive another day. But Jesus has come into the camp to provide an escape for us. When Satan points to the evils we have committed and tries to argue that such is our true nature, we simply tell him to go home. When the Deceiver tries to convince us that making other people small or causing them to suffer makes us great, we need to remind him that Christ has exposed his way of living in defiance to God and his commands as pure lies and falsehood. We can only do this when the Holy Spirit turns our voices from fearful rants to peace-giving, love-showing words of respect, gentleness, and love that grow out of our knowing Jesus as our Lord and Savior.
When Satan points to the evils we have committed and tries to argue that such is our true nature, we simply tell him to go home.The battle between God and the Evil One goes on, also on the battlefields of our lives, and will continue to the Last Day. But the decisive battle has been won. It took place in Jerusalem two millennia ago. Since then, Christ’s people have been His instruments in the mopping-up action which sees the front against evil moving back and forth. But victory is ensured, for Christ has buried our sin in His tomb and raised us as justified children of His heavenly Father. We are not the victors, but those liberated by the Victor.
Liberation from evil means the coming of a new kingdom, as we experience the joyous exchange of prison ID cards for passports to God’s Kingdom and to His world. Our Lord has liberated us to defy banality as it turns us into exploiters of others, incipient monsters who desire only to gain some small seeming advantage at their expense. He has freed us to risk self-sacrifice to meet the needs of others, for our self-sacrifice frees both them and us from what we thought might be the benefits of evil and shows them to be, at best, brief and brittle, broken by the stone that sealed them in His tomb.
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