Measuring God against Goodness

We all have our different ways of tackling the challenges people present to the idea of faith in God. The most usual challenge is surely the problem of evil. I imagine that more than a few of us have encountered this type of criticism from colleagues at work.

The usual form the challenge takes goes something like: “I can’t believe in a God – or a good God – Who would allow such things to happen.”

I think I must leave aside the question of the widely varying phenomena that are generally gathered together under the umbrella word of evil. These deserve a separate discussion. But even considered in its most simple and general terms, I don’t think there can be an all-encompassing and satisfying answer to this kind of question.

Sometimes, however, a little light can be shed on the subject, from an angle.

What is a person actually doing when he asks the “God and evil” question? He may not realise he’s doing it; but he is in fact saying that he believes in goodness. Not simply goodness, but Goodness as an absolute, as a yardstick against which he measures “God” – or his idea of God – and finds Him wanting. In his eyes, “God” falls short when compared with Goodness.

It is not a very great step from this realisation to a further insight: that the critic’s “God” is not the real God. It is a collection of ideas; it is not God at all. In fact, he is not looking high enough, towards what he instinctively knows is there, and acknowledges as the highest thing, and appeals to. The real God is that perfect Goodness in which he himself already believes.

Naturally this does not answer the great conundrum of why God Who is Goodness allows evil to happen. It leaves that hanging in the air, as a distressing mystery; a mystery, however, which is capable of examination in its various manifestations, and thus of a degree of understanding, however imperfect.

A Different Kind of Perishing

Yesterday we heard in the Gospel one of those cryptic sayings of our Lord. You will of course have heard it too: it was in the passage referring to two recent calamities: the lethal collapse of the tower, and the victims of the Romans, whose blood was mingled with that of their sacrifices. Two horror stories. In our day they would attract the response: How could a good God allow such things to happen? But at the time of Christ the standard response was to wonder: Was this a punishment for their sins? Jesus denies this; but adds: “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they perished”. This seems at first sight to contradict His denial.

A great opportunity to explain this confusing passage to the congregation. But we had a Holy Ghost father visiting the parish: a lovely man, who gave an interesting talk about the Spiritans’ work, and appealed for donations and prayer. His address replaced the homily.

Fortunately, there is a very good article on the subject in the Catholic Herald, written by Mgr William Shomali, the chancellor of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem: The Lord is there in our suffering.

I used to puzzle over this text, until it occurred to me that it might be one of those examples of a slippage or blending of things, such as one finds in, for example, the Eschatological Discourse, where it is hard to unravel references to the impending destruction of Jerusalem from those dealing with the Second Coming.

I am very happy to be corrected on this, but I think Christ is talking about two different kinds of death: the temporal and the eternal. The sudden fate of falling into the hands of the Living God may come upon any of us. They perished from the earth; but those who do not repent of their sins will perish eternally. A very sobering thought.

Forgiveness for the Unrepentant

A most moving post from Fr Blake on the experience of a Rwandan sister’s encounter with the killer of her family, and the power of goodness released by his repentance and her forgiveness.

There is a related question, which seems really intractable:  how to obey the Lord’s commandment to forgive, when faced, not with a plea for forgiveness, but with an apparent lack of repentance.

Many of us will remember Gordon Wilson, the wonderful man who, after holding hands with his dying daughter Marie as they lay beneath the rubble after the Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen in 1987, said that he bore no grudge against the Irish republicans who had killed his daughter together with ten others, on that appalling day.

It was an extraordinary thing that he should have forgiven them, at a time when the perpetrators – apart from some evidence that they realised they had made a tactical mistake – gave no indication at all that they repented of the evil they had committed, or even that they regarded it as a moral evil, or were conscious in any way of having committed a grave sin. 

Some have said that Mr Wilson’s words planted the seeds of what became, many years later, the cease-fire and the subsequent power-sharing agreement in Northern Ireland.  I don’t know about that; it seems to be stretching things rather too far.  But the fact is that he made this gratuitous gesture of goodness, and, as it were, into the void.

This is the nub of it, and the conundrum: we must forgive; but unless the wrongdoer repents, he cannot be forgiven.  We must forgive; but what if the sinner is perfectly content with what he has done?   Surely the forgiveness will not “take”?  It is as though he has coated his soul in wax; the forgiveness will slide off him; nothing will sink in.  What to do?

The victim - and the victim’s loved ones are victims too - will surely suffer, both spiritually and psychologically, if they cannot find an outlet, a way through.  Justice must be done, whether in this world or the next.  At the same time, forgiveness must be there, at the ready, to heal the sinner as soon as he repents.  And yet it may never be known in this life who was responsible for the evil, let alone what has become of him.  How to offer forgiveness, how to send it out into the darkness, while being tormented by the suspicion that the evildoer simply does not care?

May I suggest the following:  that we give our forgiveness into the hands of God, asking Him to bestow it for us, if and when the evildoer repents.  It will not be wasted; and it may help to soothe and heal the hearts of the victims.  Surely no harm can come from this; I think it is worth a try.