#RevThread # 150
On Evil
1/This is a moment when, in St. Paul’s great phrase,
“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against a spiritual wickedness in high places.” (Eph. 6:12)
On Evil
1/This is a moment when, in St. Paul’s great phrase,
“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against a spiritual wickedness in high places.” (Eph. 6:12)
2/The struggle against evil is both subtle and daunting. We’re up against a bold onslaught of wickedness in high places at the moment. The world-wide resurgence of autocracies, the heedless plunging into ecocide, ...
3/..the cruel disdain for the poor as our government shovels wealth into the hands of the 1/10th of 1% -- all this is a wanton defiance of God’s word, God’s love, God’s creation.
4/ Before I went to seminary, I was working on a doctorate in literature, especially Shakespeare. In this hour I find myself drawing upon all my education to contend against the ghastly evil gripping our country.
5/Let’s consult four great depictions of evil, in the hope of increasing our understanding of it. We’ll look briefly at the poet Baudelaire, an early chapter of Luke, and two of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
6/A. Evil Excites. In his collection entitled “The Flowers of Evil,” the poet Charles Baudelaire takes us on his journey into evil and helps us to see how attractive evil can be,...
7/.. how thrilling and how ruinous. In one of his darkest verses, he looks out at the reader and calls each of us, “My double, my brother.” None of us is purely good.
8/ Evil, especially when we think we can get away with it, has, for a time, an escalating charm...
9/..The secrecy, the veneer of honesty, the complex plots, the rush of superiority that the plotter feels over the lowly plodders – it’s all titillating. These are Les Fleurs de Mal -- “The Flowers of Evil.”
10/ B. Evil inflates. The Evil One, Luke’s Gospel teaches us, tempts Jesus to throw himself down from a high pinnacle so that God will have to rescue him. It’s the temptation to grandiosity. Jesus responds, “It is written, you shall not tempt the Lord your God.”
11/ These megachurch pastors who are adamantly proceeding to hold large, packed church services during this epidemic are doing precisely what Jesus refused to do. They are testing the Lord, to see if they can force God to exempt us from natural law...
12/.. When their parishioners get the virus at the service and die, the pastors, and the governor who empowered them, could be tried for depraved indifference.
13/ When our president softly intones that “Some are saying, this is the greatest administration of all”, I suspect that the ‘someone’ he hears is Satan. We’ve never had such a self-inflator-in-chief in the White House.
14/ C. Evil Dominates. Once you’re on an evil errand, something you need to keep hidden from view, the pull of the evil seizes you. You’ll get discovered, so you can’t stop...
15/.. More deeply, you cannot attend to your conscience, you can’t acknowledge the pain you’re causing others, you can’t relinquish the superiority over goody-two-shoes.
16/In Macbeth, as the time for the murder of the king draws near, Macbeth himself starts getting cold feet, worrying that the attack might fail...
17/.. Lady Macbeth, further in her surrender to reckless ambition than her husband, says, “Fail? Screw your courage to the sticking post and we’ll not fail.” And the first of their murders begins.
18/ D. So Evil excites, Evil inflates, Evil dominates. And Evil consumes. That’s how it ends. It’s also the quality of evil that we see in great tragedies and not in melodramas, which are designed to flatter the viewer. ..
19/.. In a melodrama, we’re invited to root for the one who expresses our idealized self, the person who does what we vainly imagine we would do. The villain is always the other, the opposite of myself. Not much growth happens watching melodramas.
20/ Hmm... Shakespeare’s tragedies often end with eight bodies strewn about. His comedies often end with four couples going off to dance at their weddings, for 8 was thought to be the number of regeneration, based on the 8 passengers in Noah’s Ark.
21/ Think for a moment of Shakespeare’s companion piece to "Hamlet", the comedy "Measure for Measure". Both pieces were written at roughly the same time. “Measure for Measure” could have been a fine title for Hamlet.
22/ Both plays explore “Counter-punching.” In Measure for Measure, the wise ruler finds a way to respond to evil that sets people free. By Hamlet’s end there are eight violent killings and the state falls into another’s hands.
23/ Most of us are enormously and rightly attracted to Hamlet. He is in an impossible situation. His uncle has murdered Hamlet’s father. And then the uncle marries Hamlet’s mother.
24/ Though Hamlet himself is gracious and witty and brilliant, and though he has been deeply wronged, there’s something wrong within. He does not attend to his conscience’s awareness that an eye-for-an-eye justice will leave the land blind.
25/ Hamlet does not seek for a way of transformation, but only a reset of the order in which he is the future king.
26/ Aristotle understood that Tragedy’s essential gift is a kind of purging. We fall in love with a hero who winds up plunging into destruction – of himself and others...
27/.. And that becomes an occasion for us to deal with what’s up within ourselves. What in me got transported by this engine of destruction? Good to know lest we too become consumed.
28/ So far, the Trump Administration has veered from melodrama to farce. But now, with our ruinous response to the Coronavirus pandemic and the impending depression, we are moving into a massive tragedy, with corpses all over the place,
29/...amid reports that our shrewd, grifter princess seeks patents from China in order to profit from handsome coffins.
30/ The time has come to wonder, “What is it about this Trump family that is so American? What is it that so many of our citizens find so attractive? Is there any of that in me? How is this evil penetrating me?”
31/ The responses that come to me from my faith and my education are: to battle greed and set my heart on generosity; to reject the grandiose and embrace sobriety;...
32/... to resist the pull of domination and turn back to the grace of equality; to emphasize gratitude for what I have rather than yearn for what I don’t.
33/ We now can see where greed and incompetence take us. Of life in Trumplandia we can accurately say, with the preacher of long ago, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” I can hear the voice of my Lord calling, “Awake!”
